By Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir, HAF president
December 16, 2015

We learn as we live. The High Atlas Foundation has been planting seeds in community-managed nurseries since its birth in 2000. Only this year have we come to learn this simple fact: the people’s seeds are equity, and financial institutions grant and loan to the people’s organizations based on that equity.

Now, get this: we can plant 800,000 fruit seeds in two community-managed nurseries in the marginalized country sides of Oujda and Figuig for a total cost of $60,000. Their equity value after two years, when those seeds mature: one million dollars.

I am writing to inform every reader that your pennies become dollars and your thousands become hundreds of thousands and even millions if we invest in seeds, which we absolutely must do with the start of the planting season, which begins in January and continues until mid-March 2016.

I have spent recent months crisscrossing this beloved land of Morocco. Perhaps it’s so across the planet, but I feel that Morocco, especially, is awash in endless potential.

Please help us plant. It is true that a seed planted today is not just food and livelihood for generations and centuries, but can actually be compounded so that one seed can become 20. Thankfully, financial institutions know that the organic agricultural value chain bears returns exponentially higher than what most Moroccan family farmers currently receive as income.

Those exponential returns, empowering the people’s cooperatives and associations, are then used to build schools, clean water systems, opportunities for women and youth, and human development dreams.

Again, friends, help us plant and launch a new future for the most worthy and disadvantaged among us.

With wishes that all your dreams come true,

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir

President

High Atlas Foundation