There’s no shortage of coconuts in the Pacific, but finding a commercial market for grass roots growers has been a challenge.

In Samoa, Tania Nugent found a group of rural women organisation set up to assist rural women has managed to find a market for virgin coconut oil - by encouraging villagers to go organic.

Tania Nugent: Here in the village of Faleasiu in Samoa, this family is making the most of the plentiful supply of coconuts on its land - by extracting virgin coconut oil - oil produced from fresh, rather than dried coconuts.

Tuputa Meafou, farmer: This production is only our family. We do as a family business, my son, daughters, my two sisters, my younger brother and one of my aunty and her husband, so all my extended family is working here.

Tania Nugent: Tuputa Meafou and his family were encouraged to start producing virgin coconut oil by Women In Business Development Incorporated, a local organisation set up by seven Samoan business women.

Adi Maimalaga Tafuna'i, WIBDI founder: It was about the time when we had two devastating cyclones and in 1993 a taro leaf blight just devastated the taro, which was the staple food of the Samoans and our main export crop. So that meant people in the villages were really, really suffering.

Tania Nugent: Women In Business began to look for ways to help rural Samoans.

Adi Maimalaga Tafuna'i: Local markets are almost non-existent, so what we thought that we needed to do was add value to the products that we did have, and find a way to export them to niche markets.

Tania Nugent: The organisation now employs project officers to train coconut farmers to become oil producers. It also provides equipment - a grater to shred the coconut flesh, a drier and a press to extract the oil.

Jess Mowat, WBDI Project Officer: The idea is once the farmer starts making an income, to start gradually paying off those items.

Adi Maimalaga Tafuna'i: And they were all producing just beautifully and then they said, "You said we were going to make money out of this. Where's the markets?' So the journey to find markets was the big problem.

Super Visor Auvele, WIBDI Project Officer: One thing for sure, Samoa as a Pacific island state, we're very isolated from the big markets and export wise that's still a challenge in Samoa.

Tania Nugent: The solution came with the growing international demand for organic products. The organisation launched an organic farming program and set about gaining certification for rural farms.

Super Visor Auvele: Since Samoa is already working that land traditionally, like traditional farming, so that's part of organic and that's why we can easily tap them into the organic program.

Tuputa Meafou: My father work in our farm and he doesn't want to use any chemicals so when the history come up to the office they look at it, it won't give them a hard time for us to be certified because everything been grown naturally.

Jess Mowat: We work with NASA which is the Australian certification body and they rely on us to make sure all the farms are adhering to all the organic standards. We're now up to about 204 certified organic farms and we're well over double that on our waiting list to become certified so it's really growing rapidly. Being certified the farmer gets a higher price and they can secure that niche export market.

Tania Nugent: Their efforts caught the attention of international cosmetics chain Body Shop which had searched the globe looking for the right source of certified organic virgin coconut oil for its products.

Adi Maimalaga Tafuna'i: The Body Shop has made a commitment that they will buy their virgin coconut oil only from the farmers in rural Samoa. So they won't buy it from a factory. They have to produce it so they would like to see what they put into this to be going right back to the farmer.

Women In Business's role, is just as a facilitator, we actually buy the oil from the farmer because he needs his money right away. We store it and every two months now we pack it up into drums and ship it out to the UK.

Tuputa Meafou: For one drum of 18 kilograms of oil it need 220, 225, 230 depending on the size of coconuts to fill that drum. We just make the oil and the office of Women In Business, they collect the oil every Friday.

Jess Mowat: We've got an actual microfinance program at women in business to try and lift them up from subsistence living and actually make a saving and put stuff aside for their family and for the future.

Tuputa Meafou: It benefit much our family not only to have our daily expenses, but to have something in the bank.

Super Visor Auvele: We are helping people earn an income where they live. Whatever resources that are available, they should tap into that instead of going to Apia or the urban areas to find jobs and leaving their land.

Adi Maimalaga Tafuna'i: It's not whole villages changing, it's changing family by family, but we feel that those are the kind of changes that are lasting.

Tania Nugent: And Women in Business has learned from the past to plan for the future. The organisation is working on a disaster mitigation plan, to ensure growers can keep up supply.

Adi Maimalaga Tafuna'i: We really need to reach out to the region, because when we have natural disasters they're catastrophic. A cyclone can just devastate a whole country. So what we would like to see is if that happened to us then we would like to be able to tell The Body Shop that if we can't supply the oil for some reason we will be able to get people in Tonga to do it or people in the Cook Islands, or something like that.


Women in Business Development Incorporated: www.womeninbusiness.ws