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THE VITAL SECTOR The mining sector is a vital sector for Mongolia. Mongolia has a sparse population and has no goods but minerals to export except cashmere, wools and meat etc., a few products from animal husbandry.

CHIDO GOVERA

Tuesday, 2017.12.26 №26

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CHIDO GOVERA Head of ‘Future of Hope’ Foundation

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Chido Govera is the founder of the Future of Hope Foundation and an expert in mushroom farming. Defacto: Please tell us, what brought you to Mongolia? CG: I came through a connection with Tuvd Agency to teach a group of people here to farm mushrooms. They had learned about farming mushrooms from Professor Gunter Pauli of the Blue Economy. Defacto: Prof. Pauli was on our program, as well. So how is it going? Tell us about the process for growing mushrooms. CG: We’ve had a good start. Hopefully the people of Mongolia will get interested in eating mushrooms. But why mushrooms? Actually, it goes back to when I was eleven years old. I grew up as an orphan in Zimbabwe. I was out of school when I was a young girl of nine years old, and I would be married off when I was ten. At eleven I learned to grow mushrooms. After that, I really felt that this was something I wanted to share with the world.

I began growing mushrooms, and from the sales, I was able to help other orphans in my community. I wanted more of that. You grow mushrooms with agricultural material that would otherwise be thrown away. We take that material and convert it into high-value, nutritious mushrooms. Defacto: Is this “waste” product left over from restaurants? CG: It’s from a lot of things. We have been to the market here where people are cutting wood, and there is a lot of saw dust left over that people are not using. We take biomass like that and convert that into mushrooms.

There is a roastery in Ulaanbaatar, where they are roasting coffee. I hope to get in touch with them in order to obtain the leftover coffee material from the roasting process itself as well as the cafe, and convert that into mushrooms, too. Defacto: I first heard about this process when I met you in Washington, DC at the World Bank annual meeting. President Kim of the World Bank was introducing a young lady from Zimbabwe, who had not only grown mushrooms, but who also had a full passion to introduce it to the world. By the way, your name means “passion”, yes? CG: Yes, in my native language, Shona, my name means “passion”. Defacto: I remember my visit to Zimbabwe in the late 1980s to the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. It was one of the more successful developing countries in Africa at the time. I remember in the morning the milkman would deliver milk to peoples’ houses. It was a beautiful country with a fantastic coastline.

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CG: Zimbabwe is a beautiful country, I think. We have lovely people and beautiful nature. Also, I think we can do a lot in agriculture. We have done it before—only now we are struggling. But I really think we can still pick ourselves up and make things better. We only require more and more individuals to step up and take matters of food and development into their own hands. Defacto: Where are the mushrooms grown? CG: The place where you grow mushrooms can be adjusted to fit the circumstances of any place. For example, in some communities in Zimbabwe we build mud houses thatched with grass. And in other places we do wooden houses. But, in the city, you can’t build some of these things, so we look at other parts of the city. For example, you can turn a basement into a mushroom growing area. Or a shipping container works, too. We have done this in several places. For example, in Congo, there where shipping containers were used to carry materials for a brewery, and they were just sitting there. This was to be the first place where we used them to grow mushrooms. Defacto: Can you use animal waste for growing mushrooms? CG: Yes, here in Mongolia, we are using a combination of sawdust and cow dung—that is, “mature” cow dung, after it’s been composted. You can also use manure from goats or chickens. Defacto: Let’s discuss the economics: how much input, how much output? How much do they cost? CG: In a square meter of space, you can put around 200 kilograms of biomass, and that converts to around 100 kilograms of mushrooms over a period of three months. You would harvest this parcel 4-5 times. For example, if you made it today, your first mushrooms would sprout 2-3 weeks later, and you would harvest your first mushrooms by the fifth week. You wait another 7-10 days, and you harvest some more mushrooms. And this repeats about 4-5 times. In other words, a month of incubation time, followed by two months of harvesting. So you could do this 3-month cycle 4 times per year. I understand that here in Ulaanbaatar, a kilogram of mushrooms is going for around MNT30,000? So if you have 100 kilograms, you could have MNT3,000,000 each cycle. It depends on how much people are buying, of course.

But I understand that currently all of your mushrooms are coming from outside of Mongolia, which is partly why they are so expensive. We will still try to fetch a good price from the mushrooms that we will grow here, but we want

to have a local product that is good and accessible to the local people. Defacto: Tell us about some of your success stories. CG: Right now, I’m most impressed with the results in Zimbabwe. I run the Future of Hope Foundation there, where we work with young women and girls—mostly orphans—who are out of school because they can not afford to go. Some are affected in some way by HIV/AIDS.

My foundation takes groups from different communities, train them to farm mushrooms, and send them back to their communities to start farming. With those mushrooms, they can not only feed themselves, but they can also bring them to market. This year, we have been able to secure an agreement with a chain of supermarkets in Zimbabwe to sell our mushrooms in their stores. With the profits from the sales, some of the groups are already able to send some of the children to school. Or they can go to the city and get antiretroviral medication. Or they can afford to buy sanitary pads, which is a big issue for girls. The community groups are able to address these issues together. Defacto: How large is the project? How many people participate? CG: Zimbabwe has a population of around 12-13 million people...and 1.2 million orphans. Personally, I am fostering seven young orphan children at my house. They are able to attend school, yes. But many more don’t have a foster parent or a family member that can help them go to school. This results in a cycle of abuse and poverty that widens with each generation of children who are born under these circumstances. Since 2013, when I founded the Future of Hope Foundation, we have trained 13 communities. Defacto: Where did you learn about this process? CG: Actually, Gunter Pauli was my foster father. I met him when I was 11 and learning to grow mushrooms. His foundation, the ZERI Foundation, facilitated that African scientists could learn to farm mushrooms back then. When they finished the training of scientists, they had some money left over in their budget. So they decided to give the knowledge to the people who needed it most, which were young orphans in communities that were struggling to get food.

In my case I was living with my grandmother who had a piece of land, and as a young girl of seven years old I had to learn how to farm. And each time I would try to grow corn, which is a staple in Zimbabwe. But at the end of the day, I had only corn stalks in my field and no food. Knowing that this was the reality of many young orphans, especially girl orphans, because they are responsible for feeding the family. Defacto: Particularly the large metropolitan cities have many coffee shops and consequently much left over

coffee “waste”. Now more and more are converting it to mushroom growing. CG: Yes, a lot of people now have begun to utilize the coffee “waste” for mushroom growing. And after you grow the mushrooms, whatever is left from the growing process that you could not convert into mushrooms is actually good for the garden. Not only because it makes the vegetables grow, but research has shown that it heals the soil, cleans it of pesticides, etc. As an example, I moved to my current home last year. When I got there, the soil was very heavy and sticky when wet. It was very difficult to work with. But the waste from my mushroom farm goes directly to my garden, and it's becoming easier and easier to work the soil.

We are building right now an integrated food production system based on the waste of the mushrooms that we grow. With it we will grow vegetables and feed chickens. We are also working with Belgian artist, Koen Vanmechelen, who is cross-breeding chickens, and who currently has the biggest genetic bank for chickens. We are introducing the Planetary Community Chicken Project that we are going to integrate within the food production system. We hope to develop a system that a community can replicate and thus receive multiple benefits. Defacto: What motivates you to keep going? CG: I truly believe in the power of food to change the way of things. I think that when people can control their own food needs, it will become much easier to work towards sustainability. It will become much easier to work through our political instabilities that we face, especially in poorer countries. It will make us free to learn and to grow in a way that we are supposed to be. At least in my case, controlling my own food was really the key that unlocked my potential. As a woman, I could reclaim my dignity. I could say, “No, I will not get married for food. I will get married for other reasons”.

So it will help us to fight many issues that are very pressing in our world right now to have people accessing their own food, to have food businesses that are putting sustainability as the centerpiece of business. It is something that is going to be very, very important. My particular motto is that I want to be the change that I want to see in the world. I choose it everyday. That’s what keeps me moving. I do it in my small way, influencing others wherever I can. This interview has been edited for space and clarity 2016.10.15 Full interview available here: http://jargaldefacto.com/article/chido-gowera-chido-govera

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