Organic Agriculture Is Alive & Well in Egypt

from the January 27, 2004 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0127/p01s03-wome.html

Egyptian firm is clean, green, and in the black
By Gretchen Peters | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

BELBEIS, EGYPT - Egypt, or even the Arab world, isn't noted as a hotbed of
social capitalism. In fact, the companies most famous for their do-gooder
business products - The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's, Starbucks - are best-known
for catering to first-world customers and tastes.

That's part of what makes the Sekem Group's desert experiment so remarkable.

Last year, this environmentally friendly agro-business defied gravity within
Egypt's sagging economy, and produced a 25 percent boost in profits. It made
$14 million and supplied quality schooling, healthcare, and vocational
training to its 2,000 employees, plus tens of thousands of members of the
local residents. Sekem also donates 15 to 20 percent of its profits to
social development.

In one of the world's poorest nations, where globalization and free trade
often mean shrinking margins for businesses, Sekem - a transliteration of a
hieroglyph meaning "vitality from the sun" - is proving that helping people
and making money are not mutually exclusive.

"We have seen that aid alone can not improve the lives of poor people.
Development has to be profitable to be sustainable," says Stephan Barg, the
senior corporate adviser at Canada's International Institute for Sustainable
Development. "This project is a signpost for how it should work."

Sekem started a quarter century ago on a 170-acre patch of hard-scrabble
desert 50 miles outside Cairo.

"I had a vision of a three-fold social project that would allow me to
contribute to community-building, humanity, and healing the earth," says
founder Ibrahim Abouleish, describing his light-bulb moment in 1977. The
desert, he added, "was like the canvas of a painting, but without a frame."

With a brush stroke here, an irrigational canal there, Mr. Abouleish's
masterpiece slowly came to life.

First came Sekem's herbal medicines. Then ISIS brand herbs and Libra organic
fruits and vegetables. Over the years, more products were added: organic
cotton clothing, natural pharmaceuticals, rice, tea, and honey, as well as a
packing company that bundles the goods, now sold in Egypt, Europe, and the
US.

Other landmarks included the formation of the Egyptian Biodynamic
Association - or the EBDA - which promotes chemical-free farming on 8,000
acres across the country (more than half of it reclaimed desert land) and
groups more than 400 small and medium-sized farms. In collaboration with the
Ministry of Agriculture, Sekem has deployed a new system of plant protection
in cotton, reducing total pesticide intake to less than 10 percent, leading
to a ban on crop dusting all over Egypt.

The EBDA is now self-sufficient at home, since Egyptian farmers pay $7 per
cultivated acre to use Sekem's trademark on their goods. These fees largely
cover the cost of running EBDA.

The EBDA is also making use of foreign donations to promote organic farming
methods in Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine, and Lebanon.

All the while, the Sekem community has grown alongside the organic plants:
first building an adult training center, then a kindergarten and a literacy
program.

The Sekem Group's Society for Cultural Development, which still relies in
part on grants and donations, now includes a hospital, a special education
program for disabled children, a vocational training center, and an arts and
science academy.

So how do you make money, and treat your workers to benefits - especially in
a country where most companies do neither? It's complicated, says Abouleish,
but not impossible. Sekem workers contribute a small portion of their
salaries to help maintain the schools, the health clinic, and other cultural
benefits.

Approximately 40 percent of Sekem's money comes from its own activities,
including sales and contributions from workers. A further 30-35 percent
comes from grants, with an additional 15-20 percent coming from aid, mostly
from the EU and US.

Some nonprofit projects inside Sekem, like the EBDA, have already become
almost self-sustained. A training project for seamstresses is heading in
that direction too. In a world where aid projects are increasingly
criticized for bleeding money and failing to make a difference, development
experts and funding agencies are roundly gushing in their praise for Sekem.

"To me this is one of the most exciting projects coming out of the Muslim
world," says Asad Azfar, portfolio manager at Acumen Fund, a New York
non-profit financier that helps support Abouleish's social programs.

In fact, the most common complaint about Sekem is that there aren't more
projects like it. There are precious few missions like Sekem, they say,
which operate from the developing world and take a holistic approach to
community building, and which place importance on learning, the arts, even
playtime.

The Sekem compound boasts a soccer field for its employees and an open air
theater, among other recreational centers.

"We have to build a healthy, knowledge-based society," insists Abouleish.
"Developing a cultural sense must be one of the highest priorities in
development."

It's that attitude that has won the Egyptian doctor newfound attention in
recent years. Last August, the Schwab Foundation, in association with the
World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, named Abouleish one of the
world's 25 outstanding social entrepreneurs. And the jury of the Right
Livelihood Foundation awarded Sekem its "Alternative Nobel Prize."

"It's the first time we have chosen an entrepreneur for the prize," says
Right Livelihood founder Jacob von Uexkull, a writer and former EU
parliamentarian. "Dr. Abouleish practices what he calls the economics of
love - and it works. He proves that you can do the right thing and make a
living out of it."

And living well, workers back home at the Belbeis farm say, is the best
revenge.

On the compound that's more commune than corporation, trees waft gently in
the afternoon breeze. A tractor rumbles down a green field. Children at the
primary school are putting on the weekly singing show for their classmates
and a beaming Abouleish.

The whitewashed factories and school, trimmed with bright-hued paint, are
humming with activity. It's an island of tranquility outside the chaotic,
smog-choked streets of nearby Cairo, a stark contrast to the gripping
poverty and desperation seen across this nation of 70 million.

"We are eating healthy and our children are learning," says Mohammed Tahoor,
a computer science teacher at the Sekem Group whose 2-year-old daughter
hopes to start soon in the kindergarten. "What more do we need?"