More than 300 families of small rice producers in the department of Huila will benefit from a project through which a plant will be launched to process the grain, in an initiative that has the support of the national government.
Lázaro Salazar Medina, manager of the Users Association of the El Juncal Land Adaptation District, highlighted the importance of the project that responds to a clamor for several years in the township of the same name, in a rural area of the municipality of Palermo, and said that “It is the hope of small producers to free themselves from the hegemonic power of big industry.”
Salazar Medina explained that, until now, these companies buy rice from growers, but there is little room for them to obtain better income.
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The project that is being launched is a plant to store, dry, thresh and package rice, which will provide new possibilities for the economic reactivation of the region.
The initiative is valued at more than 13,000 million pesos and has co-financing from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Rural Development Agency, Asojuncal, the Colrice Fund, Fedearroz and the Government of Huila.
For its completion, more than twenty thousand square meters will be intervened in which a rice mill will be built, which will incorporate equipment for drying, storage, threshing and packaging the rice ready for cooking.
Directly, 96 small and medium-sized producers will benefit, along with nearly 900 growers from the municipalities of Rivera, Yaguará, Neiva, Campoalegre and Palermo.
Only in this last municipality, producers have sowing with laser measurement, technology that allows them to reduce water use by up to 50%.
A similar program is already underway in the region of Catatumbo, Norte de Santander, whose spokespersons were at the event in Huila to show how this initiative is developed.
Jesús Homero Morales, president of the board of directors of Asozulia, highlighted that they have a mill and drying plant to process their own rice that they grow on 9,200 hectares.
