010 The Honey Hunters of the Nilgiris with Mathew John, Last Forest Enterprise

Shownotes He is a pioneer championing the honey hunters from the Kurumba and other tribes in the Nilgiri Biosphere in the Western ghats for the last decade. Mathew John, Managing Director of Last Forest Enterprise is helping protect indigenous communities who have been sustainably harvesting honey for thousands of years from honey cliffs and bee nesting trees. As a social enterprise its success is embedded in its ability to bring together the triad of good development: conservation, livelihoods and enterprise. When I read about the honey hunters and Last Forest in @30Stades I was fascinated with their thousand year living traditions and practices. So when Mathew agreed to be a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast, I was beyond thrilled. In this episode Mathew talks about backpacking for a year in his quest towards finding the perfect honey👇🏾 👉🏾 About COVID-19 and its impact on the business and local communities 👉🏾 The problems with global organic certification processes, and the peer review ‘Participatory guarantee systems' 👉🏾 The honey hunters in the Nilgiri biosphere, their living culture 👉🏾 Indigenous communities as stewards of the environment, The Indian Forest Rights Act, and the recent supreme court ruling in India 👉🏾 The collaboration with Stanford 👉🏾 The road to being sustainable and purpose driven Subscribe to the show on any of your favourite platforms iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts. https://podcast.app/the-elephant-in-the-room-p1758338/?utm_source=iosandutm_medium=share Memorable passages from the interview 👉🏾 We spent a year traveling all over Tamil Nadu, backpacking looking for people who collect honey. And I will continue to refer to them as honey hunters because they collect honey from the wild. And we realised that when you start this development process, most of the time we look at environmental issues, we look at development issues, but we tend to leave the market out of the mix. Which in a sense is part of the triad of conservation, livelihoods and enterprise. And if you don't have the mix, you may move forward, but it will never be complete. And many times in the development context, we tend to avoid the market because we see it as a different beast. We don't want to engage with it. But for us, it was very important that we engage with this part. And so right from the mid-nineties, we engaged with the market. We tried to create our own brand and move forward. But finally in 2010 as an organisation, we decided that we needed to free up Last Forest as an organisation which we incubated at that point of time. That allowed us the freedom to be able to engage with the customer side. 👉🏾 When we work from the development side in the market space, we tend to come very highly from the producer side, because that's where our engagement is. We would like to give good prices to the producer. We would like to give them a guarantee in terms of prices. We tend to deal with the customer and the market - here is the product take it, or leave it. You should buy it just because it comes from small communities. It comes from marginalised sets of people. And we then tend to leave it, but not engage with that set of customers but they would like to know where the product is coming from, the story behind the product. And finally for a customer, the product has to make sense. There has to be a quality part of it, and there has to be a functionality part of it. And if those two don't meet then, it's an empathetic purchase, but it's not a purchase that will continue to happen. In our journey, we kept both sides and focus both on the producer side and the customer side. Do we tend to guarantee income? I don't think we can fully guarantee that, but what we try and do is, we know that there is a certain set of people that we work with and we have them employed more or less throughout the year. 👉🏾 Two other things happened. One is we kept our...