📋 Tender Overview
With an investment of close to 13 billion, the Government of Change leads, through a popular public alliance, the guarantee of the resource for the construction of a rice processing plant for the Association of Users of the Land Adaptation District (Asojuncal), in the department of Huila.
The President of the Republic, Gustavo Petro Urrego, together with the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Jhenifer Mojica, arrived in the municipality of Palermo to lay the first stone of a plant that will change the lives of rice farmers who depend on this activity for their livelihood in Campoalegre, Neiva, Rivera, Yaguará, Villavieja, Sardinata, Algeciras and Palermo.
It is a fulfilled promise that Minister Mojica had made with Asojuncal since November of last year, which today becomes a reality thanks to the political will and a government that aims at the associativity and capitalization of small agricultural producers so that they develop the countryside, provide food for Colombians and generate wealth and employment.
This is what President Petro said in his speech: "This is our agricultural model: in addition to distributing land from unproductive to productive, it is that productive people, associating, can initiate industrialization processes on their property. That is the agrarian model that we are promoting in the country."
For her part, Minister Mojica urged peasants and agricultural producers to form associations and present productive projects. "What is happening here in Asojuncal we want to happen in a million and a half hectares that we want to leave delivered in this four-year period, to hundreds of thousands of people and associations," he said.
He added that "the most difficult task of agro-industrialization, beyond structuring projects, is to find organized human capital with the administrative capacity to be able to go further, to be ambitious, to take on more challenges and tasks. But it's not impossible, what happens is that it requires partners like Asojuncal, with a lot of capacity and organizational strength."
This public-private partnership is co-financed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Rural Development Agency, Asojuncal, the Colrice Fund and Fedearroz, as well as the Government of Huila.
The project includes drying, packing, storage and threshing equipment, which will benefit more than a thousand people in the region and will allow small rice farmers to no longer depend on the purchase price of large processors, but will have the opportunity to generate their own brand, manage fair prices and benefit from the entire production chain. This means that "we will no longer be the poor peasants, but an associated company that generates wealth," as Luis Higuera, president of the Rural Development Agency, pointed out.
For Lázaro Salazar, manager of Asojuncal, this achievement is the result of the peasant struggle and a government that protects life. "It is one of the great satisfactions we have today because we once again feel that the law of the countryside and the peasant matters. With the Agrarian Reform promoted by President Petro, we feel identified and represented by a friendly government," he said.
