The Seeds of Promise - Los Angeles Times

“With additional financing from migrants in California and the Mexican government, Sanchez’s co-op is building a food-processing plant that will employ dozens of this Zapotec Indian community’s 5,750 inhabitants. Starting this summer, the co-op’s 134 growers plan to supply 10,000 1-pound jars of organically grown, pickled cactus each week to an expanding specialty-food market in the United States.

The venture is a village-level display of the power of remittances, the billions of dollars that migrants earn in rich countries and send home to sustain their kin. It is part of a search by struggling communities, international aid agencies and governments for ways to harness this flow to alleviate the poverty that drives people to migrate in the first place.

Migrants have been sending money home, in one form or another, for centuries. But only recently have economists recognized its significance. Today, remittances are the largest, fastest-growing and most reliable source of income for developing countries. Poor nations reported $167 billion in receipts from overseas workers last year, according to the World Bank, more than all foreign aid. Including unrecorded transactions, the bank estimates that the total exceeded $250 billion.”

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