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Background:
For more than ten years of CEDAC's development activities, agricultural productivity has been improved dramatically, especially concerning rice and vegetable production, and animal raising. Therefore, in order to sustain local development programs, as well as to promote autonomy within the community, farmers need to be connected to the market. Since a pilot project in 2004 proved to be successful, particularly in organic rice selling, CEDAC has expanded its social business by creating an important unit called CEDAC Enterprise for Social Development (CESDE) in 2008.
CESDE's mission is to support local businesses and enterprises which help to improve the standard of living for farmers, local economic development, to protect the environment and to provide safe food for public consumers.
To successfully complete this mission, CESDE has set the following goals.
- To enable farmers to receive higher prices for their products which provide incentives for them to further invest in agricultural production
- To enable the community to generate income to be used for supporting community development
- To provide opportunities for CEDAC to generate income to sustain the services provided to farmers and to expand the level of support to more farmers
- To provide opportunities to farmers to learn about marketing and cooperative business
As a result, CESDE has created four main programs within its overall activities:
- Support community business: Support and cooperate with communities to create local businesses, mainly capacity building for community members, local institutional development, and to provide equity and loans for investment. Some models of community businesses have been created. They include organic rice community, community rice mills, animal feed enterprises, community shops, honey collecting communities, vegetable producer groups, etc.
- Development of market for farmers' produce: Providing services for selling farmers' products on the market. CEDAC has developed a whole distribution unit known as Natural Agri- Products and opened retail shops namely CEDAC Shops. These shops sell organic food and other local products to consumers in the urban areas.
- Supporting local enterprises: In quality improvement, packaging, marketing and providing investment loans. These local products are being sold in the above mentioned CEDAC Shops. So far, CESDE has supported numerous products such as sausages, dried fish, fruit juice, rice wine and banana chips...etc.
- Raising consumers' awareness: Especially concerning healthy and local products. Seminars and field visits have been organized to enable customers to meet with the producers. Customer networks have also been created in each CEDAC Shop in order to ensure that all involved are well informed with all the latest marketing and production news.
Up to March 2009, CESDE has supported 5,000 farmers in 8 provinces of Cambodia in connecting their products to the market, in particular, to the CEDAC Shops. The approximate estimate of direct and indirect beneficiaries is 10,000 families. Seven community shops have been created in the provinces of Kampong Cham, Svay Rieng, Prey Veng and Kampong Chhnang. Two community rice mills were also created in the provinces of Takeo and Kampot. Moreover, CESDE also helped to create a community animal feed enterprise, a chicken slaughter house and a pig slaughter house in the province of Kampong Cham. Five CEDAC Shops were created; 3 in Phnom Penh City, one in Prey Veng province and another in Preah Sihaknouk province.
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