"Whole World Botanicals offers Single Source Indigenous(tm) botanicals from the Peruvian Andes and the Amazon rainforest. Above left, Dr. Viana Muller, Co-founder of the Company receives freshly harvested organically grown maca roots from a female farmer in one of the communities with which we have partnered for 14 years."
Assisting with Economic Development-Providing Loans to Farmers
"Co-founders of Whole World Botanicals with farming families from the cloud forest region in the Central Sierra of peru with NGO supporters" Ever since 1997, WWB has sourced several of its botanicals by giving interest-free loans to communities living in extreme poverty in order to help them move out of subsistence production into producing cash crop on their own land.
We began by making interest-free loans available to our organic maca-growing partners. These Quechua-speaking communities in the high Andes of the Central Sierra of Peru were converting some of their grazing land for their herds into agricultural land. They used these loans to buy maca seed and rent heavy machinery to break up the pasture soil.
In 2006, WWB began an economic development project with thirty families practicing subsistence farming in the cloud forest region of Junin. Some children there had orange hair, a sign of severe malnutrition. Families requested help with producing a cash crop that was beginning to gain substantial international interest and asked for assurance of a secure market for their harvest. WWB has given loans of more than $500 per family to begin organic production of a tropical tree with seeds high in Omega-3 oil. They've just harvested their first crop. Whole World Botanicals will introduce this exciting new product to the U.S. market in 2008.