A while back, I wrote about a visit Chris Hoskins and I made to Pacto Sumaco. Pacto Sumaco is a small Covenant community of farmers whole have been struggling for some time financially. The community was named “Pacto” Sumaco because the Covenant Church (“Pacto” means “Covenant” in Spanish) has done so much for the community over the years. Recently, Covenant World Relief has gotten involved in helping the community develop new farming techniques which can better the health and prosperity of the families there. The main part of the project is implementing an edible mushroom that the farmers can grow to eat and sell, which has the potential to be a great cash crop for them. In turn, the mushroom production is much more sustainable and better for the environment because it is not as damaging to the soil as its predecessor crop, naranjilla. The naranjilla, a small citrus fruit, eats away at the nutrients in the soil in that after only three years, the plant makes the soil unable to be cultivated in the future and so more rain forest is cut down to make room for new land to be tilled. In addition, the naranjilla requires harsh pesticides which is harmful to the health of those in the community.
Finally, in addition to the mushroom production, the Covenant World Relief project is also helping teach the farmers how to do their own organic farming. Currently, those in the community do not have a very healthy diet, but with implementation of these greenhouses and organic gardens, this will hopefully change.
You can read more about the Covenant World Relief project here and feel free to provide some support for it:
http://www.covchurch.org/relief/projects/cd/ecuador-agriculture/
The Santiago Partnership