Ukraine Milk Communities

Ukraine

Viktor Teres

Director of Heifer Ukraine

"Danone Ecosystem Fund will lend its support to Ukrainian rural families that produce up to 80% of labor intense agricultural products (milk, vegetables and fruits). This project will contribute to uniting rural communities through developing cooperatives and scaling up smallholders. This support is fully in line with Heifer-Ukraine’s mission to work with rural communities to improve the well-being of families while caring for the environment. We are happy to share this mission with the Danone Ecosystem Fund! "

Viktor Kmytko

"We have just inaugurated the first cooperative. By the end of the year, we hope to have launched a dozen. Our partner Heifer is working hard to update the legal basis of existing cooperatives. We are helping them to purchase efficient equipment for milking and storage. We complement each other very well indeed: Heifer supplies its knowledge of cooperatives and the local social environment, while we provide technical and managerial expertise."

In every country where Danone manufactures fresh dairy products, the supply of raw material is almost exclusively local. Therefore business activities of many small farmers strongly rely on business with Danone. In Ukraine, 80% of milk production comes from small farmers whose revenues are currently among the lowest in the country (less than 100 Euros per month /per person in rural area). Their population is in strong decline which represents a real danger for the Ukrainian countryside. Through the Danone Ecosystem Fund, Danone is seeking to support dairy production and to improve living conditions and incomes of such farmers.

By joining forces with Heifer-Ukraine (NGO specialized in rural community development with strong expertise on cattle management and agriculture), Danone Ukraine launched the Ukraine milk communities project which aims at creating 20 agricultural cooperatives, each including between 60 and 80 smallholders. These cooperatives are set to strengthen its small dairy producers and add value to the entire agriculture output. Based in regions close to Danone production site in Kherson the coop will be built on three pillars:

Milking and storage equipment that must improve dairy quality and productivity,
Agricultural and business development training to improve farmers' knowledge and skills,
Shared agricultural services (milk collection and cooling, fodder preparation, veterinary, etc.) that must help optimize costs.

Around 1,000 farmer families should thus see improvements in their quality of life and income.

The second phase of Ukraine milk communities project has just been approved after a successfull first phase of implementation. The objective of this new phase is to strenghten the 20 existing cooperatives and engage more farmers through diversification of services provided by the cooperatives.