Yerba mate at my local supermarket (Carrefour on Av. Cordoba between Montevideo & Rodriguez Peña10/19/2015 My last stop in Corrientes was the facilities for Primicia brand yerba mate. Primicia is a regional brand of yerba mate – a more suave (softer) taste aimed mostly at the local regional market. A father of one of F’s classmates had given me the phone number of the manager of the yerba mate Primicia’s facilities. I stopped by the factory to establish contact for my return trip in January/February. Las Marías has beautiful, manicured grounds that were especially pleasing to my eyes after passing the dusty neighboring town of General Virasoro. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the beautiful landscaping and buildings but I’ll be back in January/February and I hope to take some photos then. The two Argentines who told me that they had visited Las Marías had raved about their visit, and rightly so, Las Marías welcomes tourists and has created the infrastructure to meet their various needs and desires. From the entrance, it is apparent that Las Marías is prepared for large numbers of tourists. I joined a large tour of some 20+ tourists. Note the lush plants that we passed. During the tour, my 2 years in Paraguay proved helpful when I (the only non-Argentine in the group) was the only person to know the Guaraní name for sevia (ka'a he'ê). Even the tour guide couldn't remember its Guaraní name. After breakfast on Monday morning, I drove less than 10 minutes from Apóstoles in the province of Misiones to Colonia Liebig in the province of Corrientes. My destination was the Liebig Cooperative. German immigrants founded the cooperative in 1926. The name “Liebig” came from the Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company, which had purchased the land for cattle to make Liebig’s meat extract (intended as a cheap and nutritious substitute for those who could not afford fresh beef in the days before refrigeration) and then sold the land to the immigrants. I had encountered Liebig before at the La Rural exposition in Buenos Aires at the beginning of August and at the Fiesta de la Yerba Mate in Apóstoles the day before. Liebig is especially noteworthy because in recent decades the cooperative has been able to break into the competitive Buenos Aires market with its Playadita and Liebig premium brands of yerba mate. I’m also personally interested in a successful cooperative given my experience with cooperatives in Paraguay while as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1998-2000. I spoke with the manager for over an hour. He was very generous with his time and explained a lot about cooperatives, the yerba market, and Cooperative Liebig. Of course, there is still a lot that I need to learn. Cooperative Liebig allows tourists to enter the factory and see the packaging process close-up. What a treat! I timed my trip to Misiones/Corrientes in early October 2015 specifically so that I could see the national and international yerba mate festival in Apóstoles. The festival had been going on for most of the week; I was visiting the last day. I had encountered difficulties in finding information about the festival beforehand. The festival’s webpage never seemed to be functional; the limited information that I could find was on a Facebook site. The minimal schedule that I found suggested that the festival was mostly a cultural celebration. Most of the events entailed meals and/or evening music. Since I was by myself, I wasn’t interested in these aspects of the festival, and so, I had only scheduled one day for the festival. I arrived at the festival around noon or one. The festival was not that big, considering that it is supposed to be an international festival. It seemed more like a Fiesta Patronal (a town celebration) rather than a dedicated yerba mate event. I wandered around but didn’t find many stands directly related to yerba mate. Like a country fair, there were food stalls and entertainment for kids. I wasn’t about to loiter around the festival for a couple hours until the yerba mate stands re-opened. There just wasn’t enough for me to do and no comfortable place for me to read. So, I went to explore the town to see about a place to spend the night and a place where I could stay with the family during a longer stay in January/February. I returned to the festival around 5:00pm and went straight to the pavilion with the yerba mate brands. There were 4 producers of yerba mate with stalls in the pavilion, all of which were companies that are physically located close to the town of Apóstoles. Four Argentine producers out of the numerous brands of yerba mate available in Argentina alone (not to mention Brazilian, Paraguayan, and Uruguayan brands) suggests that the yerba mate festival is more of a local event than a national or international event. Still, the two other guests who I spoke with at the home where I spent the night had traveled from Buenos Aires and the Province of Santa Cruz to attend the festival. Like at La Rural in Buenos Aires in July, the Liebig Cooperative (Playadita brand yerba mate) had a stall. This time, they were showcasing Playadita brand and not their premium Liebig brand. The difference was probably due to the different audiences - Liebig premium is aimed at the Buenos Aires market while Playadita is consumed more in the local regional market. The women at the Liebig stand were especially friendly and helpful. Some stalls were tangentially related to yerba mate. There were probably an equal number of stalls unrelated to yerba mate. After the yerba mate producer pavilion, I went to the building that housed the Instituto Nacional de la Yerba Mate (INYM). All yerba mate producers are legally obligated to register with INYM and consumers pay a tax (represented by a stamp on each package of yerba mate) that funds INYM. INYM promotes, regulates, and invests in yerba mate. Its board of directors is composed of representatives from the various aspects of yerba mate cultivation and production. Every six months, INYM sets the price for the raw material (green leaf and dried) yerba mate.
The Funcación Alberto Roth Roth (a beautiful place on the Ruta de la Yerba Mate in Misiones & Corrientes) grows yerba mate trees, which it then plants or sells. Yerba mate seeds and seedlings are carefully cared for. Growing a baby yerba mate plant is a delicate process. The Jesuits cultivated yerba mate with the Guaraní missions but after the Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish territory in 1767, yerba mate trees were not cultivated again until the beginning of the 20th century (instead, yerba mate was harvested from wild trees). |
Archives
August 2017
|