Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 22, 2009
This is the title of an article at the Mankato Free Press about the March 13th Regional Southern MN Economic Development Summit. The Rural 
Enterprise Center’s agripreneurs development model was voted the second most important priority for the development of the Agriculture and Food Sector as it pertains to the incorporation and full utilization of skills, assets and visioning 
coming out from the Latino/Hispanic communities of the region.
We are currently developing the strategic plan for the large scale regional deployment of this model with a launch strategy focused in 8 SE MN counties, but including strategic outreach to other promising targeted Hispanic/Latino communities in the region.
Our economic development model is centered in capitalizing on Hispanic/Latino assets, including the work ethic, agrarian background, family values, and matching this to the regional economic opportunity found in the agriculture and food sectors and related manufacturing. The model includes a phased step-by-step approach to support families from their current economic situation, through a process designed to deliver consistent short, medium and long-term returns and competitive advantages for the region.
Our model seeks to effectively capitalize on key regional economic opportunities where Hispanic/Latinos have competitive advantages, while contributing regional product brands, an new economic development strategies that also address low wage issues through enterprise development, thus addressing poverty as a structural issue related to wealth migration patterns, not as a result of lack of resources in our communities.
Our model is designed to contribute to the reversing of the downward trend in wages that has characterized the food, agriculture and its related manufacturing sectors over the last two decades. This factor has caused our region to fall in competitiveness compared to the rest of the state and the nation. Trends like this, are the result of lack of innovation and creation of opportunities that have consequently cause a massive out-migration of young people who don’t see value in row crop agriculture, machinery and low-wage assembly line work that comes from this sector’s manufacturing processes. While this is true according to the findings of the Regional Competitiveness Project, it is also true that these sectors represent the second most important strength and future opportunities.
For us at the Rural Enterprise Center, this factors provide the raw material and the detailed analysis needed to develop our regional plans and strategies, with the big picture in mind, but with the improvement of the family unit as the end-goal. Our model does not have "job creation" as a strategy, but as an end result of a system’s thinking approach. We understand economic development to be the result of innovative enterprises that add a competitive advantage to our region in key sector of opportunities, through the use of our strengths and competitive advantages, especially in the new immigrant Hispanic/Latino sector.
We are keeping our attention in economic development strategies in the food and agriculture sector that contribute to the future trends and opportunities in sustainable designs, and can present a challenge for our youth to engage further in the natural sciences, technology, low-impact equipment, carbon sequestration, soil sciences, microbiological and an endless list of opportunities if we go beyond row crops and jobs oriented thinking in this sector.
The regional competitiveness process looked far and deep and generated a road map that if continuously improved will deliver the enterprises that will take advantage of the long-term economic competitiveness for the region. This process will be culminating on May 15th at the Southern Minnesota Strategy Summit.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 18, 2009
I receive information just as many of you in the thousands of gigabytes a day, but every once in a while, something so powerful that it becomes irresistible to share comes along. Below is a link to one of those things worth sharing widely.
By the way, don’t think of this as judging people who do things that to others think to be wrong, none of us have the right to judge others, but we all have a fundamental responsibility to think about the consequences of our actions and the impact of our choices in our ability to preserve the natural environment that sustains life.
Think of what each of us are doing and how much we know about the consequences of our daily actions, are we aware or do we just assume others will fix what we destroy in the process of living our lives. Why is it that we still see so much indifference in relationship to the consequences of our way of thinking and acting about development, global trade, consumption, etc. We have come far enough into a path of self-destruction that we have to change our ways, there is something so fundamental and far reaching to the consequences of not doing so that we really need make a move, specially in the area of economic development.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 16, 2009
Food and energy is something we cannot go without, and the farther these two come from where we use them, the less sustainable they are, this is a matter of logic and economic fact not a matter of opinion, or political leaning, or weather we agree or disagree on global trade.
The fact is that we don’t account for the full cost of our foods and have been living under the illusion that a banana is really only $0.75 cents a pound. It isn’t, what happens is that we are only paying for a small part of the full cost of producing it, bringing it from Brazil or Central America and delivering it to our stores and picking it up. The carbon emitted, the water, soil and air pollution in the production cycle, and many other costs are just being passed on for others to pay, either down the rivers and oceans, or down to the next generation.
I just ran into this Sixty Minutes episode with Alice Waters and thought everyone living in rural areas of the U.S. should watch, and if they work in economic development, help them recognize that their most important assett is not land waiting to be “developed” but land for food production as a strategic economic advantage that must be preserved and enhanced for the long-term survival of our rural communities.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 4, 2009
Although Latino/Hispanic communities and entrepreneurs are still behind in understanding the value of organic agriculture from a health standpoint, at least we can start understanding it from the economic opportunities that this industry represents as told from the top.
Some of us have been on the organic sustainable agriculture wagon since before we immigrated to the United States, but so many still consume products that not only come from places where other Latino/Hispanics labor the fields exposed to highly toxic chemicals and un-humane laboring conditions. As consumers or laborers, we don’t only lose as part of the synthetic chemical dominated agriculture industry.
I just came back from an annual conference of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services in La Crosse WI. The keynote speaker Vandana Shiva, is one of the most outspoken world leaders and pain causing thorns on the side of global chemical agriculture polluters and grain monopolies.
She provided a full review of what it takes to produce food in a healthy way, for the soil so that it can sustain production for centuries on its own energy and 
bio-systems, for the farmer so that he/she does not get poisoned with their family as they farm, and for eaters, so that they have an option to choose responsibly produced foods and exercise their role to complete a biological cycle that is as old as earth itself.
Deep inside, I think we could all agree that since our beginnings our evolution process designed us to depend on a symbiotic and highly complex infrastructure of interactions with the earth, our environment and every living thing around, even those that kill us have a purpose in our evolution.
This original design has advanced for billions of years and its yields in terms of making the earth productive and our bodies healthy, will never be matched by playing around at the end of the R&D chain that nature set forth well before there were scientists and corporations who paid them to find ways to interrupt such process by killing the soil’s trillions of organisms, and millions of species that make up our earth’s diversity.
Having met thousands of people who are no longer part of the destructive forces of our industrialization processes is so refreshing and hopeful, despite the fact that our biological systems are been destroyed much faster than we can rebuild them. I see a lot more understanding that preserving nature’s rich diversity and complexity is part of our own preservation and opportunity to continue to evolve and adapt to changing conditions on earth.
It was great to meet with farmers and responsible companies and re-connect with so many people in the hundreds, some of them with good quality tracks of land, some of which we have started negotiating as we are always looking for resources that can help us introduce new Latino families into sustainable, organic agriculture.
Enterprise Center’s agripreneurs development model was voted the second most important priority for the development of the Agriculture and Food Sector as it pertains to the incorporation and full utilization of skills, assets and visioning 
coming out from the Latino/Hispanic communities of the region.
