New Packing System
 

As part of our continuous improvement efforts, this year we decided to spend some time discussing innovative ways to pack our pupae, not looking for ways to unpack the pupae much faster and easily, but also trying to reduce the materials used and improving the protection that we give to our lovely butterflies. 

After some months of evaluation and sketches, we finally created a completely new set of packing boxes that we started using in May and that have received very positive feedback. 

If you new ideas or ways to make this process easier, feel free to share the with us!

1st National Congress of Butterfly Breeders

In February 2019, we feel very excited for having sponsored the 1st National Congress of Butterfly Breeders in Costa Rica, organized by SINAC (acronym that stands for National System of Conversation Areas) in coordination with the School of Biology of University of Costa Rica. SINAC is the main government institution in charge of supervising all butterfly farmers in Costa Rica, as well as regulate all export activities that we do in Costa Rica with butterflies, a key element of our wildlife.

In this 2-day event, all our breeders were able to attend to different presentation from government officials, independent researchers, and other key stakeholders, information that could help them understand the shared responsibilities we have around protecting this activity in the long term, and the efforts that Costa Rica is doing in terms of regulations that could impact their activities.

While 2 days could be seen short to attend the questions of more than 100 participants, we think that creating these spaces for the ecosystem of breeders was a positive sign from the government authorities to share with this sector who have been “forgotten” for many years, and open a new portal for collaboration and education. 

New Regulations affecting our activity 

Over the past 1.5 years, after the publication of a new regulation applicable to a National Law for Wildlife Conservation, all butterfly breeders and exporters have been subject to a new set of processes and requirements in our activities that have significantly changed the way we have worked over 3 decades. This situation required that CRES, as the leading exporter of butterflies in Costa Rica, started calling and scheduling meetings with different government officials so we can correctly define how to implement these new processes in all butterfly exports.

At this time, we continue discussing with different officials across the board trying to get to final answers around the processes, but this is part of the challenges of any democracy and bureaucracy, where decisions can only be made by certain top official that are hard to reach, and in the meantime, we are on dealing with the obstacles one by one, trying to keep up with the export activity in the best way possible.