April 12, 2009 — Entering the Fintrac headquarters, a museum comes to mind; amidst the bustle of traffic on the Charlotte Amalie waterfront, it is an oasis of peace and solitude.
At first glance, that is. The facade hides the industry buzzing inside, with people managing projects from Honduras to Ethiopia.
Fintrac President Claire Starkey and her husband, Vice President Tom Klotzbach, are busily engaged in the two second-floor offices overlooking Charlotte Amalie harbor.
Starkey glances at the harbor view.
"Luxurious," she says with a smile.
It's a far cry from Washington, D.C., which was the company headquarters until four years ago. In 1990 the two took over the company, which was founded in 1975 in the United Kingdom. Starkey has a background in small-business management. Klotzbach is an economist.
"We decided to relocate," Starkey says. "We needed a tropical place that was under the U.S. flag, a place that had easy air access to other countries and somewhere where we could offer agriculture training in a place where farming would be difficult."
St. Thomas has proven to be all of that with its easy air access, tropical climate and difficult farming conditions. St. Thomas is, in fact, ideally situated to be the nerve center of the international company's operation. Another attraction to the Caribbean, Starkey reveals: The couple got married 20 years ago on Barbados.
"Our mission is to contribute to the eradication of poverty in developing countries by increasing agricultural incomes," Starkey says. "We innovate and introduce market-led, productivity-enhancing, eco-friendly and sustainable technologies, practices and crops for income generation and food security."
Fintrac's projects are financed by partners with public and private business development service providers.
"USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, is our biggest client," Starkey says. The company also collaborates closely with non-governmental organizations, educational and research institutions.
These are very busy people. St. Thomas is the nerve center for operations extending from the Caribbean to Latin America, Asia, Africa, Central America, Europe and India.
"Traveling in the Caribbean and Central and South America is more accessible from the Virgin Islands," Starkey says.
The offices are indeed museum-like — quiet, the walls filled with mostly local art: paintings by Edie Johnson and some Haitian art alongside photo blowups of pepper arrangements from Honduras, fruit from Jamaica, photos of local farmer Charlie Leonard with his pepper crop and Lucien "Jambie" Samuel poised on the beams of the greenhouse he built with Fintrac's guidance.
However, that's where the museum atmosphere ends. Behind artfully situated enclosures, the offices teem with energy: information specialists focus on computer displays and talk on the phone, perhaps consulting with Honduras about a marketing problem.
The hub for all these far-flung endeavors is St. Thomas, with 17 employees. Eight more work in Washington, D.C., and 130 are in the field anywhere from Central America to Africa. The St. Thomas employees are almost all local hires.
Fintrac is an Economic Development Authority beneficiary.
"We buy everything locally that we can," Starkey says, gesturing to the dramatic African Kuba cloth dividers that dramatically punctuate the upstairs floor space. "I got the fabric from the African shop in Royal Dane Mall."
Richard Pluke, Fintrac's senior agronomist and entomologist, has become an integral part of the local farming community over the past four years.
"We wanted to teach farmers how to produce profitably in adverse conditions," he says.
The hills of Bordeaux offer those conditions liberally. In 2007, Pluke supervised the building of two greenhouses on those hills.
"Because the greenhouse's environment is controlled, the yields are far greater," Pluke says. "Temperature, bugs and other diseases can be controlled in the protected environment. They increase farmers' yield exponentially."
Pluke also travels far and wide — Honduras, Jamaica, Ethiopia — consulting on a wide spectrum of problems.
"We have worked with the Bush Millennium Challenge," he says. "The challenge is to financially responsible countries with low levels of corruption. Honduras is one of them we are already working with."
Their client farmers typically achieve income and productivity increases from 100 to 400 percent, Pluke says.
"Everything is market-driven," Pluke says. "What potential prices are, whether you can produce at a decent profit all the way to farm planning, irrigation, nutrition, pest and disease control, harvest and post-harvest."
One reason for Fintrac's successes, he says, is "we get in there and get set up quickly." He continues, "Our results are sustainable. Farmers and allied agribusinesses are more competitive, profitable and better able to adjust to changing market conditions after a Fintrac project."
For more information on the company or to apply for a job, visit fintrac.com.
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