Alvoar partnership expands CPLA milk collection
The co-operation between the Cooperativa de Produção Leiteira de Alagoas (CPLA) and Alvoar has expanded milk collection at CPLA’s industrial site in Batalha, a municipality that serves as a regional centre for Alagoas’s dairy basin. The plant is now receiving more than 110,000 litres of milk per day.
Alvoar financed the modernisation of the factory and brought management, technical knowledge and technology to its operation. The arrangement also allows CPLA, when required, to use milk collected from family farmers to meet demand from institutional purchasing programmes run through the co-operative.
Aldemar Monteiro, CPLA’s president, said the agreement had brought benefits to family farming and the co-operative system. He said Alvoar had recognised CPLA’s role in the milk supply chain and that the partnership was helping the co-operative develop while allowing small producers to increase their returns.
Monteiro said confidence between the organisations had grown as the arrangement produced results. CPLA trucks have begun operating through the small-producer collection system, while institutional purchases are being conducted through Brazil’s National Supply Company, known as Conab, as well as municipalities and the Alagoas state government.
Those purchases collect milk from small farmers and supply the local market. Monteiro also said the difficulties previously experienced by CPLA had provided experience for new projects. Among the ideas he identified were distribution models for sugar-cane bagasse, animal feed and other inputs that small producers may lack the logistics or financial capacity to buy independently.
The CPLA president said Alvoar guarantees payment to producers who supply the co-operative. Alvoar is the fifth-largest milk-collection company in Brazil, according to Monteiro. Farmers interested in supplying CPLA can contact the co-operative’s office at the Batalha Milk Processing Unit, where small producers also receive training and other forms of capacity building.
Unicafes-AL is contributing to the training programme and to the search for new markets for CPLA. Monteiro described the partnership, producer support and market-development work as elements of the co-operative’s current operation in Batalha.
