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COPLA Regional organized, on Friday 3rd of April in Montelimar – Nicaragua, a meeting between COPLA’s Partners: CIES (Perú), GNTP (Bolivia), Nitlapan (Nicaragua) and ODI (UK) and Latinamerican trade network’s representatives.

By Eliza Barclay

By Eliza, Barclay

LIMA, PERU – When Carlos Ygreda launched his family-run, organic goat farm in the impoverished Chillon valley north of Lima in 2001, he found few customers for the three to five kilos of goat cheese he produced per month.

Then Ygreda joined forces with several other small organic producers to organize a weekly organic market in Lima, called the Bioferia. Slowly, venerable Lima chefs like Gaston Acurio began visiting the market, tasting the products and ordering them to serve in their restaurants.

COPLA Regional launches a call to networks and civil society organizations working on trade and poverty to submit proposals focusing on communication of evidence based on research and targeting policy makers and other relevant actors of the public policy process aiming to improve civil society’s influence.
The award, financed by COPLA, will be of USD 3.000 and it will be destined to finance the proposals of communication that better translate the evidence to different communication formats.

“Yes, but is it ‘Good for Development’?”

Karen Ellis and Jodie Keane, researchers at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), are hoping that becomes a question on the lips of supermarket shoppers around the globe with their proposal of a ‘Good for Development’ label for produce. Their November 2008 review of a basket of existing labels – including Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and the GlobalGAP among others – indicated that there may be a market niche for just such a label.

COPLA proposed, from the start, that dissemination of evidence should be, primarily, rigorous but adapted to its different target actors. It implied working with different languages, formats and media; therefore, in addition to communicating across new formats like stories, we have incurred in new media.

Vanesa Weyrauch, codirector of the Civil Society Influence Program at CIPPEC, participated of the "Course: trade, gender and political influence" organized by IGTN's Argentinean Focal Point of the Latin American chapter. She dictated a session, on November 6th, on how to plan political influence.