Cheese program

Dairy product program is the most recent program among the communities we partner in Uvs Khovd Provinces, Western Mongolia. During COVID our SLE product purchasing and shipping to overseas is restricted and some communities have almost stopped making handicraft products. Therefore, we need to do something else to support local communities which we have been engaged in over two decades. We needed to think and discuss what kind of project could be which is (main criteria is) affordable, raw materials are available and sustainable by the communities and it should be basic.

The main idea was to be resilient for the changing climate local herders need to seek livestock value added products such as dairy products and fully utilizing livestock other products.

 Main difference between our existing project SLE and the cheese project is that communities are 100% responsible with selling and marketing. We will be supporting their activities such as providing labels and packages, promoting them for market and events.

2. Which communities are involved?

Currently, we are working with Khovd and Uvs province 7 communities for curd and cheese making projects. We would like to expand this project further to other communities such as Gobi Altai Province and several other communities.

3. What is the geographical focus?

We focus on Western Mongolia where our community based conservation activities have been implemented for over 20 years. In the future we would like to continue implementing this across snow leopard habitats where we work with local communities.

4. What is the work being done within the program implementation?

So far we supported 10 communities to

•   train how to do standardized dairy products
• Helps by experts and our long discussions communities identified their own brands (some communities are very good to making ghees, some good to do curds)
•  We provided 4 different types of packaging and labels to the communities
• We delivered some necessary equipment such as a freezer, measuring items, and shapes.
• We support those communities to expose into the market (local and national level) paid for fall exhibition shelf renting, coming to UB to sell their products during community expo as well as connecting with local community fairs.
• Improved production facilities.

This cheese project framework can come under spatially explicit conservation which is sustainable use of ecosystem resources together with species and habitat conservation with name under “community responsible area” which means communities to manage their pastoral land and an area of land dedicated to the protection, maintenance and sustainable use of natural resources, and managed through local communities.

Dairy product making community members are agreed to place a certain amount of income (10%) from dairy products they have sold into the community funds. Community funds will be increased so that communities are able to do any conservation activities in their community responsible area based on the shared decision. In total, participating communities are protecting 119,487ha of snow leopard territory through their livelihood activities.

Help to change local people’s perception -Getting support from conservation organizations will often allow a softener and more positive oriented towards wildlife and nature conservation.