Farm
GlobalG.A.P. IFA v6
Audit carried by Leena. Field block, variety, rotation history, inputs register, pesticide-free declaration.
The traditional Egyptian export trade signs on at harvest. We sign in October, for the strawberries that will be picked in February. It is not a sentimentality. It is the only condition under which a smallholder can plant organic and sleep.
On a Tuesday in October of the year before last, Mostafa El-Sayed and his cousin Sameh sat in the front room of a farmhouse in Beheira and read a one-page contract written in Arabic on the left and English on the right. The page named the field, the variety, the planting density, the harvest window, and a floor price in dollars per kilo. They signed it. We signed it. The crop, at that point, did not yet exist.
This is, against the grain of the Egyptian export trade, the only way we know to buy from smallholders. The conventional trade — and we have nothing against it; many of our colleagues work this way honourably — arrives at harvest with a truck. It offers a price. The price is good or it is not. The grower has produced a perishable crop and has, in practice, no leverage.
We sign in October because, by then, the field is unrented and the seedling is unsold. The grower has leverage. We negotiate a floor and a share. We pay forty per cent of the year's contracted value before planting and the balance against delivery, lot by lot. If the crop fails — drought, pest, pricing collapse in the EU — the forty per cent is the grower's to keep.
On the El-Sayed farm, this has meant that Mostafa has, since 2021, planted exactly what he wanted to plant. He runs three rotations: strawberry, broad bean for nitrogen, then a green-leaf — usually rocket or molokhia, chosen against our seasonal demand sheet. We do not require him to follow it. He generally does. He says the sheet is "useful, not pretty," which is the best thing we have ever been called.
Assiut is different from Beheira. The pomegranate growers do not plant; they harvest from orchards their grandfathers walked. The contracting question, in Assiut, is not what to plant, but who pays for the audit.
EU Organic and GlobalG.A.P. together cost roughly seven thousand euros a year per farm at audit-day prices, plus the cost of the consultant's preparatory visits, plus the cost of any soil or water testing the inspector calls for. On a twenty-eight-hectare orchard like the El-Manfaloutis', this is not a sum a family can afford to lose. So most Egyptian organic certification has, historically, been carried by the exporter — who deducts it from the farmer's price, at the exporter's chosen rate, in a season the exporter chooses to honour.
We do not deduct. We pay the audit cost from our margin line and only recover it if the season clears. The El-Manfaloutis have been certified continuously since 2018. They have never paid the audit cost themselves.
Hala El-Manfalouti, who runs the sorting shed, said the change this made was not so much financial as conceptual. "We are not selling to you," she said in October. "We are selling with you." We have not improved on her phrasing.
Siwa is an oasis. It is six hundred kilometres west of Cairo, against the Libyan border, and its agriculture is in a literal sense an island. The Khalil cooperative is eleven families, forty-two hundred palms, organic since 2009.
The contracting question, in Siwa, is the sorting line. Until 2023, the Khalils sorted by hand on a table in a covered yard, which limited what they could grade as jumbo and what — perfectly good fruit, only slightly small — they had to sell as bulk to the domestic market for a quarter of the price.
We funded the second sorting line. We retained no equity in it. The condition was that the line be used by the cooperative for its own grading and its own domestic sales, as well as for the exports we buy. Salima Khalil, the secretary, signed off in a single afternoon. We made back the investment over four seasons via a small adjustment to our shared margin. The cooperative now grades all its fruit on the new line, including for buyers we do not see.
This is, in the language of the development trade, "capacity-building." We dislike the term — it always reads as if the capacity belongs to us. It does not. We funded the line. They built the capacity.
The Hassaneins grow Sudanese-strain hibiscus on the floodplain near Kom Ombo. Solar-dried on raised racks for ten to fourteen days, sorted by colour, sacked in 20 kg polypropylene. The crop has been organic since the late 2000s, on a regime so traditional that the certifier wrote the audit in a single visit.
The contracting question here is timing. Hibiscus prices on the wholesale market move dramatically with the Sudanese export crop. We sign the Hassaneins to a five-year rolling floor that is, in most seasons, slightly above the spot price and, in occasional seasons, well below it. They take the volatility off the table; we accept it.
In 2024 the spot price rose sharply on the Sudanese disruption. They could, contractually, have sold at the spot. They did not. They sold to us at the floor. We owe them, by the calculation we make at the end of each calendar year, a goodwill adjustment in this year's price. It is in the margin.
Each shipment moves with a lot-level traceability file: harvest record, packhouse log, cold-chain temperature trace, phytosanitary certificate, organic transaction certificate, EU customs entry, and the SMETA audit on the workforce. We send it before the container arrives. We do not wait for the buyer to ask.
Audit carried by Leena. Field block, variety, rotation history, inputs register, pesticide-free declaration.
Hygiene, traceability, social audit. Wages, hours, on-site facilities, workforce composition.
Continuous trace from cold store through reefer transit to EU customs. PDF supplied per lot.
Egyptian phytosanitary at Damietta, Dutch plant-passport inspection at Rotterdam for any propagation material moving north.
Bilingual organic transaction certificate, traceable to EU Commission database, per consignment, per lot.
Per-lot record of farmer payment, audit cost, freight, EU handling, and our margin. Shared with the grower at the season close.
29 farms. The Nile delta heartland of our operation. Festival, Fortuna, Green Globe.
The reclaimed-land block west of Alexandria. Year-round artichoke; winter carrot and beetroot for IQF.
The El-Badawi grove on Lake Timsah. Late-season Keitt mango by air.
The El-Manfalouti family and two cooperatives. Wonderful and Manfalouti variety.
Khalil cooperative, eleven families, 4 200 palms. Demeter since 2025.
Hassanein & Sons on the Nile floodplain. Solar-dried calyx and tea blends.
The Ibrahim farm at Lake Qarun. IQF molokhia and herb-bunch production.
Two associated mango groves. Valencia orange winter trial.
Van Rijn Seed Potato (Drenthe), Westland seed houses, Twente irrigation, Eindhoven greenhouse film, Friesland cultures.