Meeting minutes: 3 Oct 2010

Meeting with Nasir Mansoor from LRC Sindh

Attendance: Nasir, Aman, Ahad, Cindy

Nasir Mansoor was in Lahore, we met him to hear him talking about his idea to organize agro based cooperatives in Sindh.
Overall, the central idea is to focus our efforts on building a sense of community and solidarity among the displaced poor through concrete projects that bring them together to work on common goals.

Agro-based cooperatives

How many families in supported camp: 70
Location of camp: a school near Thatta
Relief provided by SLRC: food items (uncooked) worth Rs. 30,000, every three days
This is in addition to food and shelters provided in other areas such as Morro. In Morro, the UN distributed around 2,000 shelters in collaboration with the SLRC.
How many families per cooperative: 20 - 40
Activities planned: dairy farming, traditional Sindhi weaving and needlecraft, poultry farming, fish farming (in artificial pond)
Each activity would be managed and staffed by a group of seven to ten families, depending on how many of them have already done this kind of work.
Ownership and management: the cooperative will be managed by a committee consisting of women and men from the affected families (with a slight majority of women?) The committee will also include a few members of the SLRC whose role will be to facilitate the organisation and running of the cooperative. The question of the final ownership of the cooperative is, to my mind, still open. Will it be registered as a partnership or a private limited company with shares for the committee members? In whose name will the land, on which the cooperative is founded, be registered? I think it would be important and interesting to find the appropriate legal framework for this initiative.
• Location of cooperative, land: there is a lot of land available for purchase between Karachi and Thatta and also on the Hub side. Some of the affected families own land in these areas and are willing to provide it for the cooperative (1-2 acres). The question would be: should the cooperative buy it from them? However, the ideal size of the cooperative is around 6.5 or 7 acres, so that all the facilities envisaged can be constructed without congestion. So, we will in any case need to augment the affected families' landholdings with some additional purchases in contiguous areas.
• Price of land: about 1 million PKR for 10 acres 

• Rationale of the selection of activities: these are all activities that these families were involved in before the flood - some for their landlords, some for contractors. The SLRC will connect the families directly with the urban and semi-urban markets for their produce, enabling them to gain sovereignty over their own labour.
The NTUF's previous experience with running women's cooperatives in Karachi and Hyderabad will be very valuable in tending to all the important details of setting up the cooperative in a just and fair manner such that:
• no one family or group of families gains at the expense of the others
• no child labour is involved
• the basic needs of all the member families are met, while, at the same time, those who do more or better work, gain in proportion to the value of their produce. In other words, this is not communism, but a kind of tamed capitalism (Scandinavian model?)
• women are recognised as equal or even the determinant members of the committee and of the families whose voice and whose role is critical to the achievement of the objectives of this alternative model
• solidarity, accountability and self-help are established as the core values of the functioning of the committee

• These 3 cooperatives are now self ruling

• Nasir was skeptical about the feasibility of prioritising the construction of communal structures such as schools and dispensaries over individual houses. This means that the setup cost of the cooperative goes up quite a lot, given his rough estimate of Rs. 30,000 - 40,000 per house. That is, a minimum of Rs. 900,000 just for house-building.Rebuilding house for the members of the cooperative whose houses have been destructed is a prerequisite
Just as with the cooperatives in the cities, these cooperatives would also function as social clubs for the community, enabling them to resolve their internal disputes and to back each other up in case of difficulty.
The cooperatives will be the venue for the holding of study circles, adult literacy programmes that would also educate the members in terms of practical skill development, hygiene, basic nutritional needs, esp. of women and children, reproductive health, etc.

• We might be able to use the funding of TDH for theses projects but only if we can prove their beneficial effect on children as they are their main focus. A proposal for TDH should be written with a section on how these cooperatives would improve the live of the children. 
• Nasir told us that one of the most worrying problem that is starting to arise is the sexual abuse of children in the camps as well as children being used in hotels as sex workers. Ensuring that their parents have an income would be a way to act against those forms of children exploitation.