President Luis Abinader received at the National Palace a delegation of leaders of coffee grower organizations from the South, to whom he reiterated his commitment to the development of the coffee subsector by freeing it from a debt of almost RD$400 million that it had with Banco Agrícola y the French Bank.
The meeting lasted about an hour and was attended by the executive director of the Dominican Coffee Institute (Indocafe), Leonidas Batista, and the spokesman for the deputies of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), Julio Fulcar, who coordinated the meeting between the president and coffee leaders.
Abinader listened to the proposals of the visitors to the Government House as contributions to the official plans aimed at developing the national coffee industry, given that on April 11, during the celebration of the National Coffee Day, the president instructed the direction of institute to deliver within a month a project that would be developed in the subsector.
The president promised to weigh the proposals after analyzing them together with the director of Indocafe and also received several communications from the various organizations that attended the meeting.
Proposals
The leader of the Federation of Coffee Growers and Farmers for the Development of San Juan (Fecadesj), Antonio Luciano, also asked the President to meet with the coffee growers of the North and the Government’s contributions to the coffee subsector.
Luciano recalled that what the organizations were looking for was the renegotiation of the millionaire debt, but he valued that the President decided to assume it, which guarantees greater institutional strengthening and better results of official actions.
Among the actions set out in a document signed by the representatives of various organizations in the sector, the financing of a four-year project that includes 400,000 tasks for the promotion, rehabilitation and maintenance of coffee plantations is proposed, beginning with the first 100,000 in the Enriquillo, Valdesia and El Valle regions.
The initiative will benefit some 36,000 families directly and, indirectly, 50,000 in communities with the highest poverty rates in the country.
They also request the expansion to the other coffee-producing areas of the country, of the titling program, initiated in the Sierra de Neyba and that thousands of tasks cultivated with the aromatic grain and other crops be excluded from the national parks and nature reserves for titling.
Likewise, they requested support for denominations of origin, extension and expansion of agroforestry projects, construction and improvement of roads, neighboring roads and interparcelarios, among other measures.