2006.03.10: March 10, 2006: Headlines: COS - Zambia: Small Business: Imports: Service: Marriage: Oxford Press: Keith and Jenny Gelber met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Zambia, now helping African farmers
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2006.03.10: March 10, 2006: Headlines: COS - Zambia: Small Business: Imports: Service: Marriage: Oxford Press: Keith and Jenny Gelber met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Zambia, now helping African farmers
Keith and Jenny Gelber met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Zambia, now helping African farmers
After Keith’s stint in the corps was over, but before he left Zambia, he started a business with a Zambian man buying peanuts and sunflower seeds, two of the nation’s main cash crops. He said he was tired of watching middlemen buying from rural farmers at one price, then selling the seeds and nuts in the city to oil companies for five to 10 times that.
Keith and Jenny Gelber met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Zambia, now helping African farmers
Oxford Township couple has sweet business
Couple met in Peace Corps, now helping African farmers
Friday, March 10, 2006
A chance meeting of two Oxford Twp. residents in a burger joint in an African capital 8,120 miles away led to a marriage and a unique honey business.
Keith and Jenny Gelber are slated to import 40 tons of organic tree honey this year from Zambia, a country in southern Africa.
The honey will be bottled here in the United States under the Gelbers’ Zambezi Honey label and will be available to consumers in May.
For the couple, though, there’s more to the business venture than getting into a niche food market. It’s also about improving the quality of life for people they lived and worked with for years in the Peace Corps.
“It doesn’t take a lot to make a huge difference in someone’s life when it comes to economic empowerment and income generation,” Keith said. “There were families of eight in my village, and I’ve done the math, making less than 10 cents per day. And even then, they would only have money a few months out of the year.”
The couple joined the corps independently in the late 1990s. He was working in water and sanitation, building pit latrines in one part of the country, and she was working in another, helping farmers build ponds and raise fish, when they ran into each other in the country’s capital, Lusaka.
“Love, I guess, can blossom in strange places, even some sub-Saharan capital,” Keith said. “We met as Jenny was actually finishing. I convinced her not to go back to the states. I said, ‘We just met, why don’t you stay in Africa a little longer?’”
After Keith’s stint in the corps was over, but before he left Zambia, he started a business with a Zambian man buying peanuts and sunflower seeds, two of the nation’s main cash crops. He said he was tired of watching middlemen buying from rural farmers at one price, then selling the seeds and nuts in the city to oil companies for five to 10 times that.
So he started buying them himself from the farmers at much higher prices. By the end of the first year, he had purchased 500 tons of sunflower seed.
“We ran it sort of as a nonprofit,” he said. “We walked away at the end not making any money, but not losing any money, but we almost tripled how much farmers were getting for their sunflowers and peanuts.”
The couple eventually returned to the United States and got married. But, as Jenny said, “We dreamed of going back. Zambia was under our skin.”
Jenny said the couple returned for a year in 2004 to try to start a small farm to teach conservation and subsistence farming, but the venture didn’t work out. After a year, they decided to move to Oxford to take over a family farm.
Before they left, though, they met a man who was teaching the farmers to cultivate honey in the forest. The organic-certified, 5,000-farmer operation was buying honey for about 40 percent higher than the going rate, in the mode of Keith’s old sunflower seed venture.
Once the honey farmers are trained, Jenny said, their incomes increase by about 100 percent. Because Zambezi Honey is cultivated in tree hives, it also gives the Zambians a reason to preserve their forests.
When the farmers start seeing the increased income, usually going from about $3 to $7 per month to about $14 per month, the impacts can be dramatic.
“When farmers have money, they spend it on two things — to send their children to school and to go to the clinic,” she said. “Malaria and HIV-AIDS is endemic. Tuberculosis is endemic.”
From there, Keith said, people will buy metal sheets to build leak-proof roofs, radios to tune into weather forecasts and bicycles to cross the distance to the nearest town, which can be 60 miles or more away.
The remoteness, though, does have its benefits for the honey.
In order to be certified organic, the bees aren’t treated with antibiotics, it’s not processed with chemicals and the bees aren’t feeding off sprayed or genetically modified crops, which makes truly organic honey difficult to produce in the United States.
In addition, he said the honey is certified kosher and is bottled in New York.
The Gelbers are slated to roll out Zambezi Honey at the All Things Organic trade show in Chicago in May. They plan to start selling the honey in health and organic food stores with direct sales on their Web site. The honey will also be available to customers looking for larger quantities for bakeries and other food manufacturers.
Locally the honey will be available in Oxford at Oxford Natural Foods, Main Street Gourmet and Sustainable Style.
Contact Chris Dumond at (513) 820-2025, or e-mail him at cdumond@coxohio.com.
When this story was posted in March 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Oxford Press
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Zambia; Small Business; Imports; Service; Marriage
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