The General Director of the National Association of Coffee Growers, Germán Bahamón, announced the start of an austerity strategy accompanied by additional measures in the organization to improve efficiency and provide greater benefits to coffee farmers.
These decisions, which accompany the transformation process of the Federation, aim to reduce the costs of the headquarters in Bogotá by 20%.
As part of this purpose, according to the union, seven management positions as well as unnecessary expenses such as club memberships and television subscriptions were eliminated.
In this sense, Juan Esteban Orduz, after working hand in hand to reshape the commercial function of the foreign offices and four months after submitting his resignation, will leave the presidency of the New York offices.
Management in New York will now be exclusively commercial. That means it must promote sales of green coffee, roasted coffee and freeze-dried coffee in the United States.
In addition, Bahamón called on the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, to advance the legal procedures to present to the National Committee the alternatives for the sale of the properties in New York and Tokyo, thus improving the income of the National Coffee Fund to meet the needs of coffee cultivation .
“In the selection process, I presented my vision of the federation to the coffee farmers, pointing out that one of the challenges and objectives is to make the union sustainable and that austerity measures, along with the coffee clamor, are a fundamental element for this purpose,” said Bahamón.
He added that more than 30 years after the end of the price pact era, in which coffee had the opportunity to bring progress to the country, the organization has suffered from structural market fluctuations that “have directly affected us, in that sense it came “. moment to prepare the union for the completion of its first 100 years and prepare it for the years to come.”
For the manager, the basis of the pursuit of efficiency is to create a collective awareness of the “immediate need to produce a culture of austerity, built on concrete situations that allow a reorganization of the union in order to transfer more and better benefits” . the coffee farmers.”
