Shownotes

He is a pioneer championing the honey hunters from the Kurumba and other tribes in the Nilgiri Biosphere in the Western ghats for the last decade. Mathew John, Managing Director of Last Forest Enterprise is helping protect indigenous communities who have been sustainably harvesting honey for thousands of years from honey cliffs and bee nesting trees. As a social enterprise its success is embedded in its ability to bring together the triad of good development: conservation, livelihoods and enterprise. When I read about the honey hunters and Last Forest in @30Stades I was fascinated with their thousand year living traditions and practices. So when Mathew agreed to be a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast, I was beyond thrilled. 

In this episode Mathew talks about backpacking for a year in his quest towards finding the perfect honey👇🏾

👉🏾 About COVID-19 and its impact on the business and local communities

👉🏾 The problems with global organic certification processes, and the peer review ‘Participatory guarantee systems'

👉🏾 The honey hunters in the Nilgiri biosphere, their living culture 

👉🏾 Indigenous communities as stewards of the environment, The Indian Forest Rights Act, and the recent supreme court ruling in India

👉🏾 The collaboration with Stanford

👉🏾 The road to being sustainable and purpose driven

Subscribe to the show on any of your favourite platforms iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts. 

https://podcast.app/the-elephant-in-the-room-p1758338/?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=share

Memorable passages from the interview

👉🏾 We spent a year traveling all over Tamil Nadu, backpacking looking for people who collect honey. And I will continue to refer to them as honey hunters because they collect honey from the wild. And we realised that when you start this development process, most of the time we look at environmental issues, we look at development issues, but we tend to leave the market out of the mix. Which in a sense is part of the triad of conservation, livelihoods and enterprise. And if you don't have the mix, you may move forward, but it will never be complete. And many times in the development context, we tend to avoid the market because we see it as a different beast. We don't want to engage with it. 

But for us, it was very important that we engage with this part. And so right from the mid-nineties, we engaged with the market. We tried to create our own brand and move forward. But finally in 2010 as an organisation, we decided that we needed to free up Last Forest as an organisation which we incubated at that point of time. That allowed us the freedom to be able to engage with the customer side.

👉🏾 When we work from the development side in the market space, we tend to come very highly from the producer side, because that's where our engagement is. We would like to give good prices to the producer. We would like to give them a guarantee in terms of prices. We tend to deal with the customer and the market - here is the product take it, or leave it. You should buy it just because it comes from small communities. It comes from marginalised sets of people. And we then tend to leave it, but not engage with that set of customers but they would like to know where the product is coming from, the story behind the product. And finally for a customer, the product has to make sense. There has to be a quality part of it, and there has to be a functionality part of it. And if those two don't meet then, it's an empathetic purchase, but it's not a purchase that will continue to happen. 

In our journey, we kept both sides and focus both on the producer side and the customer side. Do we tend to guarantee income? I don't think we can fully guarantee that, but what we try and do is, we know that there is a certain set of people that we work with and we have them employed more or less throughout the year.

👉🏾 Two other things happened. One is we kept our e-commerce site open, right through and we told customers, we are there with you. But we need your support also at this point of time. There were customers who bought in, they waited for sometimes over a month for the products to be delivered, but they knew that the cash that was required by the organisation was crucial. And so they paid up front.

The second thing that I think just phenomenal was that we were pivoting early this year towards the export side. And the fair trade community, they were great in the way they placed their orders at that point of time, because it allowed production to take place in the villages. It allowed cashflow for us. That in a nutshell is how we survived the pandemic. And I think we've gone through the worst period but it has allowed us to face the future with confidence, knowing that the team is strong enough to deal with this sort of a worst case scenario.

👉🏾 In the late 60’s, early 70’s, when the organic movement was gaining ground there was a tremendous enthusiasm in the organic world to be recognised by the state, that they were able to follow their principles and create a niche in the market. This recognition by the state also had its downsides, when it became part of the state policies, then you bring in a whole set of policies/criteria that had to come into place. But what it did in this whole process was that it left the small and marginal farmers out of the certification process. So rather than certification becoming an enabler, it sort of ring fenced a certain set of people who could afford that. 

And it also assumed that, you were literate enough, you were able to deal with paperwork and you had enough financial capability to be able to bear those costs. And at that point, many groups tried to stay out of it. But then when you have to engage with the market it became very difficult. So many of us, not only Last Forest and its parent institution Keystone Foundation. But many other groups around the world, they tended to find local solutions, which made sense in a local market. All these groups came together in the early 2000s. And today we have a system which is called the ‘participatory guarantee systems.’ This is something that is recognised worldwide, and it allows small producers, farmers to peer review each other. And to be able to put that process to a form of guarantee out into the market. Today, this has been recognised in India as a credible system. The government has adopted this and it has become part of the market system.

👉🏾 One key part of this peer review system is that there are enablers in terms of civil society organisations who are able to put the process together. So you could have many farmers, but you need some a facilitation organisation that is able to put this data together and to be able to curate it, so that it is available for diligence at any point of time. It depends on you, whether you want to make it cumbersome, which normally is there in a third-party system. We tend to, because of one fault you create a new system just to correct that fault, but that fault it maybe by just 5%, but you pushed in the other 95% into that system. So in PGS I think it is the approach and how you deal in certain contexts. There may be areas where even if you have a local language in many places, people are not able to read and write. You can still videograph the entire conversation. And that becomes richer guarantee rather than just a yes and a no. And that I think is much more relevant today because customers would like to know that story.

👉🏾 Many of these traditions which they have would have come through their understanding of the forest and nature. That's where slowly it becomes a tradition and part of that culture. So when they collect honey from these bees, there is a harvest, which is in sync with the bees at that point of time. That they never take away a hundred percent of the combs, that they sing to the bees when they come down the forest made ladders and they leave as sacred places and those become gene pools for the next generation of bees. So I think their understanding of the ecology is much more than we give credit. Because we come from education defined by us, we never see their knowledge as an education that that they have been through and a life journey that they have been through. And I think it's important then for us to unlearn many of the things that we have learned to be able to understand what they speaking or showing us.

👉🏾 Last Forest was incubated in 2010 and the mother institution remains a non-profit organisation, which is Keystone foundation, and that works with many of these communities. And so Last forest is able to donate some amount back to Keystone to be able to carry out work in these communities specifically give for activities like help for running a community newspaper or running a community radio. I think some of this also goes back directly to producers as dividends. So Keystone also incubated another organisation, which is a producer company, which works with the producers directly. And that organisation which has over 1,600 members, is able to receive some of the part of the profits from Last Forests and is able to then plough it back as dividends to this collective.

👉🏾 Unless you equip the communities themselves to deal with this, it's not something we can control. We are always outsiders. I may work here 50 years. I will always remain somebody who comes from a different life experience. And so unless you equip these communities that they can deal with many of these scenarios whether they can be part of decision making bodies, whether they can engage with the political class. All of this, we have to be able to facilitate so that they make they're able to engage and make decisions. Very important is you can put forward choices and the decisions are theirs, decisions are not ours to make. If you constantly work, train, give them enough exposure of how many communities around the world have dealt with this. In our own country, we have so many of these communities, some of whom have become very strong and are able to voice themselves. I think also that we must get people who are in urban spaces to recognise this set of people, because then we value them. We value their diversity. We tend to look at everything in a very homogenised manner, and we are very comfortable within that scenario because diversity makes us uncomfortable. It asks questions of us and, whether it is colour, whether it is the clothes we wear, whether it is the beliefs we hold, all of that. And I think it is important that the large growing urban set of people are able to recognise this diversity in our own country and to be able to value that. 

👉🏾 Most organisations tend to be on one side. So either you are for the people or you are for the environment. And we never see the two together. We need the communities and we need the environment and they both need to be in harmony. And they have lived together in harmony. We have created these divisions of whether these are wildlife areas or whether these are tourism spaces. And so this issue that came up last year, I think there is a gap of knowledge that exists that allowed the courts to come up with this sort of a conclusion. From my point of view these communities are actually stewards of these spaces. They have taken care of these spaces for thousands of years. They have not been the reason that these forests have destroyed. Their footprint, their ecological footprint is negligible. It has never destroyed that diversity and that environment. So to take such a strong opinion. I think that this needs to be re looked at, because I don't see them as the perpetrators of the crimes that we are talking about.

👉🏾 We took this conscious decision that it will be an enterprise that will sustain. It has sustained these 10 years without grants. It is able to meet all its expenses and it is also able to meet the ethics and value systems that it has imbibed and it has started with. So I think the journey is longer and it's more difficult, you are bringing in a business sense and you are bringing in ethics and values. If you are trying to fuse them in our present scenario, it is tough but I think it is possible. We have shown it over 10 years that it has worked. I think it needs a whole new, younger generation to step into these spaces. Their understanding of the world, their understanding of the market, they need to bring that perspective into these businesses. We have made huge mistakes in the last 50-60 years, we have destroyed large parts of our planet. And we are now handing over a planet, which is not so great, but I think there is hope that we will go forward. I think this hope that sustains all of us.

👉🏾 I think that it has stuck to its value systems, that it works with small communities. It works on organic and fair-trade principles. It is concerned about biodiversity issue. It provides local employment. These are very strong values for the organisation and it has not compromised on that. Number two, it has made an impact on the communities that it works with, that it provides them employment. Women are at the forefront of these communities and that there is an income that goes back into these spaces. Another one is that it has engaged on the market side with many of the same principles that the market uses. So it has very strong branding, packaging, quality parameters. This is what the market understands, and it has been able to deal in the mainstream market and build a brand for itself. This is something to be extremely proud of because not many development institutions create a brand. And I think that brand creation and recall for customers about the quality and what the organisation stands for, I think is something that I'm very proud of.

Mathew John Social Media links: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathew-john65/

https://lastforest.in

Other important links:

https://30stades.com/2020/09/21/last-forest-takes-honey-beeswax-products-from-nilgiris-to-global-markets-sustainable-enterprise/

https://yourstory.com/2012/11/it-pays-to-be-exotic-how-an-year-of-bag-packing-led-mathew-john-to-startup-last-forest

https://www.ceoinsightsindia.com/vendor/last-forest-enterprises-an-organization-with-true-inspirational-values-cid-1164.html

https://www.commonobjective.co/mathew-john