From “People to People Trade” to an Asian-wide people’s Network

The Asian People’s Fund for Mutual Benefit (APF) is an alternative form of solidarity and exchange between the people of the South and North.

The solidarity is rooted in banana trading from Negros Island in the Philippines to Japan, which started in 1989 and aimed to support socially marginalized people. This was an epoch-making experiment that banana farmers in the Philippines and consumers’ cooperative members in Japan worked together and could export locally grown banana to Japan, not relying on agribusiness controlled by the conventional trading system.