Metafore Intern Takes Tropical Wood Market Knowledge on the Road (April 2005)
Bolivia native and Metafore intern Ana Alicia Eid gains and shares an abundance of information about the U.S. tropical wood market in the first of a series of international seminars throughout Latin America.
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Guatemalan producer Isrrael Girón listens to a
European wood buyer who describes expected
quality of wood for the German market. |
Drawing on expansive research of tropical wood products, Metafore’s International Market Associate, Ana Alicia Eid, worked on the ground in Guatemala to help inform Latin American wood product suppliers about U.S. and other foreign buyers and brokers.
Funded by USAID through its Sustainable Forest Products Global Alliance, Ana came from Bolivia to intern for the North American non-profit organization Metafore for a year. As part of her USAID-funded effort, she traveled to Guatemala to partner with Rainforest Alliance’s USAID-funded Certified Sustainable Products Alliance. She will also be delivering her research findings in other countries throughout the region in 2005.
Ana’s presentation at the Guatemalan conference represented the effort by all groups to improve the social and environmental impacts of forestry operations through the certification of forest practices and forest products. Ana’s role was to facilitate market information flow among some of the world’s wood importers and a group of Guatemalan wood suppliers.
She went into the Guatemalan community before the buyers’ arrival to begin the dialogue. “I thought suppliers should know about their potential buyers’ expectations, in terms of product quality, customer service and business relationships,” Ana explains.
Her research prior to visiting Guatemala sought out what U.S. companies want in their partners. She learned that in order for producers to resonate with a U.S. buyer, they need to be able to communicate with their U.S. or other foreign audience about reliability, consistency of supply, and high quality of material to even be considered.
Ana presented this framework to wood products producers. “I told them that sample quality would be a key factor,” she says. “In addition, I encouraged them to have accompanying information that addresses buyers’ needs, such as the technical characteristics of lesser-known species, volumes available in the long term, and usefulness of species to develop different market segments, and to offer their facts in English.”
Wood brokers and buyers from the United States, Australia and Germany traveled to Guatemala to learn more about this market. The two-day meeting involved networking among the producers, suppliers and non-governmental organizations. In addition to presenting material, Ana was also on hand to help facilitate and interpret exchanges of information.
Participants bolstered business relationships with Guatemalan producers and learned about new products by traveling to a SmartWood-certified community forest concession and two certified sawmills in the Carmelita area.
“Buyers were willing to pay for certified wood that came out of these communities,” explains Ana. “By having this meeting funded by USAID, these community producers did not have to work through a costly broker or consultant to make new customer connections in other countries. In some cases, communities arranged to sell their entire stock of products, which speaks to the effectiveness of the collaboration among Metafore, the Rainforest Alliance and the groups that we united.”
As a whole, this gathering resulted in orders of nearly $3 million in certified lumber and wood products, which will help encourage both sustainable forest management and community development initiatives in the region. Companies such as Global Building Products, EarthSource, International Specialties, Espen, Selva Verde and North American Wood Products made purchasing commitments during this field trip.
Products from this mill arrived from 11 communities and two companies that together manage 461,000 hectares of forest in the Maya Biosphere Reserve.
“In all, I saw that the producers learned how to welcome buyers into their area and make important contacts, learn more about how the market operates, and spread information about Guatemalan products-such as lesser-known species-and the skills required of producers to be successful in the international market for wood products,” says Ana. “This benefited all who were involved; they were grateful for an orientation that helped them all make better business decisions.”
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