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Lionel Galis is French, but he has been dedicated to beekeeping and forest agriculture in Chile for more than 20 years. With his company ‘Saveurs des Andes Aritimes’, flavors of the maritime Andes, he mainly exports honey from the Andes and Patagonia, and morchellas, wild mushrooms. This year he presented his products at the International Food Show in Paris, closed for four years due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paris opened its doors to the global agri-food sector with the International Food Show, a kind of showcase where professionals from the sector present innovative bets and trends for the future, without losing sight of one of today’s creeds: sustainability.
This year, the fair brought together 7,000 companies, 88% international, and with a somewhat peculiar context: the rise in prices and the crisis in raw materials. Despite everything, Lionel Galis is optimistic about the good reception that his products have had. “It was the opportunity to present our products from the Chilean terroir and the native forest,” explains this civil engineer, originally from the southeast of France, who changed the management of works for beekeeping and the forest environment two decades ago.
When he settled in Chile with his family, he immediately began working with the National Forestry Corporation of Chile (CONAF), to participate in a reforestation, soil stabilization and native forest protection program. “In the early 2000s, I found morchellas in the native forests and also some very interesting flowering trees for beekeeping and we decided to invest,” explains Galis.
And this is how it is producing and exporting to France, honey made in the Andes, in San Fernando, in the Sierra de Bellavista, known as “The Swiss Alps of Chile” or in Patagonia, in the Lago Ranco region, in the commune of Riñinahue.
In Chile, there are more than 1,350,000 hives and 9,600 beekeepers. “The power of Chilean beekeeping lies in its native forest because precisely with CONAF there is a law to protect those native forests and in those forests there are many honey trees. 80% of Chilean beekeeping takes honey from those native forests “, emphasizes the producer.
Almost 20% of beekeepers export honey, “something vital”, according to Lionel Galis, who assures that the commercialization of honey guarantees the protection of the native forests of the Andes and Patagonia. But from a perspective of caring for the planet and making sustainable products, does it make sense to transport honey between one side of the Atlantic and the other?
“Chilean honeys are unique in the world. The trees are endemic to this forest, they are not found in other parts of the world like the tiaca or the tepú. By maintaining responsible craftsmanship, this allows us to maintain these forests. When I export 12 tons of honey by boat, I am going to emit 10 tons of CO2. But we have to understand that this native forest represents 20 million trees that absorb 10,000 times the amount of CO2 that we have emitted”, argues Galis, who acknowledges that he has to do pedagogy among his French clients to convince them of the sustainability of importing Chilean honey.
