General Assembly Meeting, April 2016
General Assembly Meeting for this time is quite different. It is only because the meeting is the first activity for the multi stakeholders in cocoa sectors which are organized in Cocoa Sustainability Partnership in 2016, it is also the milestone of the implementation of Collaborative Program between Directorate General of State Crop, Ministry of Agriculture Republic of Indonesia and Cocoa Sustainability Partnership (CSP) in a joint effort to tackle the problems in the development of sustainable cacao in Indonesia. The ceremonial signing of this collaborative program is attended by Mr. Dr. Ir. Dwi Praptomo, M.Sc., as Director of Perennial and Refreshment Crop, Directorate General of State Crop, Ministry of Agriculture Republic of Indonesia and Mrs. Rini Indrayanti as Executive Director of Cocoa Sustainability Partnership, and the program is named as Cocoa Economic Cluster Partnership, CEPAT, by focusing on establishment of better synergy and collaboration of stakeholders involved in cocoa sector development in Indonesia that would lead to better sector environment, and in order to speed up the achievement of the target of cacao production and productivity with concerning the sustainability factors.
The expected outputs, furthermore, from this collaboration are 1) Available model of multi stakeholders collaboration that scalable to other regions in the country; (2) Available model on fertilizer and planting material dissemination mechanism for farmer based on ready farm fertilizer principles; and, (3) Documentations of learnings and best practices on sustainable Cacao Economic Partnership-CEPAT available for cacao stakeholders. Accordingly to its function, this Collaborative Program will be implemented under the umbrella of Permentan No. 50/2012 regarding the Agriculture Area Development and Permentan No. 46/2014 regarding the Establishment of State Crop Area that will cover following activities, such as Good Agricultural Practice, Farmer Organization Development, Access to Market, Integrated Extension Services (PPL & FF Private Sector), Post-Harvest Management, and Engagement of Youth.
Regarding that the scope and outreach of Collaborative Program Cocoa Economic Cluster Partnership (CEPAT) is considered wide, this joint cooperation program will be focussed on on three key areas that were identified as the prominent factors in ensuring the production and productivity increase, i.e. (1) Fertilizer and soil nutrition; (2) Access to planting materials; and, (3) Extension and farmer empowerment.
In this General Assembly Meeting, VECO Indonesia, as represented by Mr. Peter Sprang, presents a method in data collection which is managed and implemented together with SenseMaker. The method is applied by summarizing the stories of farmers as respondents of problems that they face in increasing the cacao production and productivity in their areas and will be analyzed in order to see the tendencies of core problems and farmers' experience. This application based data collection system is recently implemented in area of Polewali Mandar, West Sulawesi, by Veco Indonesia with their respective partner organizations .