The routine of Solbei Villamizar (Venezuela, thirty-nine years old) and her fourteen-year-old son is the same every Saturday. She starts the motorcycle before 7:00 a.m., mounts two baskets on the two-wheeled vehicle, arranges bags, bags, bags in her hands, between her and her son, in the free spaces, where they fit, and they start riding.
She travels two and a half kilometers on her motorcycle, the distance between her house and the market, to sell the crops she grows at home. Sometimes she makes one trip, sometimes two, and every eight days she collects between ten and eight dollars, which represents an extra income that helps his family.
Solbei is not only an agro-producer – in her house she has her own land where she grows beans and cilantro, among others – but she is also a marketer of her work, in charge of distributing her harvest. With her motorcycle, her son and her baskets, she takes care of this fundamental link in the production chain that, in other corners of the region and even in her country, is done in different ways.
Solbei’s challenges in Venezuela are similar to those faced by the four agroecological projects we interviewed for this research. In Mexico, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina, there are particular challenges according to the characteristics of their organizations.
In Ecuador, Eduardo Flor is the administrative coordinator of the company AgroAzuay, which produces and markets agroecological legumes, vegetables and fruits. He is in charge of marketing what is offered by the producers he works with. He does it with a large truck that has its own music. To the rhythm of «neighbor, neighbor, I come to offer you these products of Azuay», he sells baskets of vegetables, vegetables, trout, milk and bread.
In Peru, Rodrigo Montañez, entrepreneur of Paccha Natural, a family business of honey and carob; has a virtual distribution system, through Instagram and Whatsapp, where he coordinates with his buyer the delivery. The same system had been used by Aremi Chan Jiménez, a Mexican agroproducer, and Daniela Mussali, one of the managers of «Cultiva: Alternativas de Regeneración», until they decided to collaborate with a marketing platform to increase their sales.
In Argentina, the Unión de Trabajadores de la Tierra (UTT) has its own marketing company that works with trucks contracted to people outside the association to deliver the products to the delivery points distributed throughout the country. These trucks are usually run informally, without papers and with macho codes from the past, as they believe that women are not capable of doing physical labor or driving vehicles.