In the 80’s (20th C) a lot of people from Ceres, a town in the province of Santa Fe, like many others from other cities in the province felt attracted to beekeeping because of the possibility it offered of being able to work independently investing little money at the beginning of the activity, producing with homemade material, gathering wild bee colonies and learning the business from the comments made by the more experienced beekeepers who had come from the province of Buenos Aires looking for new and better places.
That is how there was an important growth both in the number of beekeepers and in the number of beehives in the area, reaching a total of a hundred and twenty (120) beekeepers and twenty thousand (20.000) beehives by the year 1995.
Until then, the kind of beekeeping done in the area was an old one, which consisted in leaving an excessive amount of honey in the beehives for the bees to feed during winter time, medicating them unnecessarily in most of the cases and contaminating the surplus honey, lacking some sort of planned management to be able to get all the potential the area offered. Thus, the use of natural resources was inefficient and the product obtained was not pure because of the chemicals used.
In 1995, due to a serious flood in the area, the Ministry of Production of the province of Santa Fe together with the City Council and the commerce representative institutions of the city of Ceres, as well as the INTA, National Institute of Agrarian Technology, made up the ASSOCIATION FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) which was to be in charge of administering U$S 200.000 to be used in order to reactivate and develop productive activities in the area. The Secretary of the City Council in Ceres was Mr. Mario Vidal at that time. This was also the time when the national government’s enterprises were under the process of becoming private, which resulted in many people from Ceres getting some money by way of compensations, but becoming unemployed at the same time. These facts encouraged the idea of Mr. Vidal to support activities such as apiculture, which do not require much initial money. Thus, he got in contact with the above mentioned Association for Regional Development. Together with its President, Engineer Carlos Callacci, who was also the Director of the local branch of INTA (National Institute of Agrarian Technology), they came up with what would become the first project of such institution: Project 001: “Development of Apiculture in all its Aspects”. The first step was to provide technical personnel to train potential beekeepers who lacked the know–how. Consequently, two professionals were trained by PROAPI (National Apiculture Program, sponsored by INTA) and they in turn brought to the area the latest innovations in beekeeping at the moment.
In 1996 the first training sessions and workshops were organized, and in May of that year the ‘new beekeepers’ and some people who had been involved in the activity were given training and monetary support.
Since then, there are 20.000 new beehives and 100 new beekeepers working through this program.
In 1997 the City Council of Ceres together with the Social Development Department of the National Government offered money and training to beekeepers, which increased the number of beekeepers and beehives.
It is worth mentioning that the most important contribution made to the area by the above mentioned projects was the new outlook on apiculture, an apiculture made possible by the joint work of people, planned and evaluated in the process, i.e., a business enterprise.
As a result of the periodical meetings of beekeepers and technicians, the idea of getting government support came to continue with group work in this area and to take the idea to other cities/regions. Engineer Callacci suggested that this group of people working together join a national program called ‘Rural Change’. This program is under the direction of the National Secretary of Agriculture and it is put into practice through the National Institute of Agrarian Technology (INTA).
Besides, this program offers continuous training to the consultants and the possibility of exchanging ideas between the consultants and the producers of the different groups that were formed. Even though the initiative was spread in the province through the Provincial Apiculture Council, only five groups worked really hard. They were the groups from the city of Galvez, Rafaela, Humboldt, San Justo and the one from Ceres.
The Ceres beekeepers group was started in June 1997 and is nowadays made up of 16 producers with 12,500 beehives, with good perspectives of growing. They work together and meet once a month to talk about different issues that concern them all and to listen to the consultant lecturing on a technical aspect related to the time of the year.
The consultant visits each enterprise once a month too. An annual plan, which is adjusted as needed every month, is drawn for the management of the enterprises together with an annual economic and financial analysis.
At the beginning, the biggest challenge within each group was the development of human resources and relationships and the implementation of this new technology offered by PROAPI.
Once the groups were organized, time came for the second phase which included the joint merchandising of the products and the joint purchase of supplies. That is how, after several meetings, the idea of having a cooperative enterprise was born and COSAR, “Cooperative of Apiculture Supplies COSAR Limited” was born with Mr. Mario Vidal as its first President.
