| | |  Business News 
Mexico: Big and Small Firms Harness Sun's Rays
 Emilio Godoy - Inter Press Service
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February 10, 2010
| | Each solar dryer can dehydrate eight kg of cactus fruit at a time. (Xoxoc) | |
Chapantongo, Mexico - It was Isabel Cortés, the family matriarch, who started the project. In 1990, she started looking for a way to market xoconostle, the sour variety of the nopal cactus fruit that is abundant in this arid part of central Mexico, in the Mezquital valley.
Twenty years later, her initial efforts have given rise to a family business in which she and her four children are partners. The company uses alternative techniques to process the fruit and is supporting efforts to expand the planting of nopal, the prickly pear cactus native to Mexico, to help curb soil erosion in the valley.
One of the firm's innovations is to use solar energy to produce dehydrated xoconostle, which in the Nahuatl indigenous language means "tuna agria" or sour cactus fruit. The fruit is placed in solar dryers mounted on the company's roof.
The firm, Productos Orgánicos Hacienda San José El Marquez (San José El Marquez Hacienda Organic Products) is located in the Chapantongo municipality, 100 km north of the Mexican capital.
"The xoconostle has fallen out of use, it's not eaten much anymore," says one of the partners, Gabriel Cortés, who studied Hispanic literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
"Production levels are small, so we are geared to the gourmet market. Solar drying maintains the nutritional properties as well as the flavour," he tells IPS.
The company is just one example of the growing use of solar energy in industrial processes in Mexico.
Sea salt
Another case is found 4,400 km northwest of the Mexican capital, on the border between the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur, where the Compańia Exportadora de Sal (ESSA) operates.
ESSA, a joint venture between Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan (49 percent of shares) and the Mexican government (51 percent) founded in 1954, produces and exports sea salt.
The company, which operates one of the biggest evaporative salt works in the world, is located on 33,000 hectares of land in a sunbaked region.
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