There are different perspectives on the push for institutional reform by critics like Dignidad Cafetera. A sympathetic view casts the leaders of the strike as reformers determined to see through the unfinished business of the reforms proposed more than a decade ago. Another, less charitable view sees the leaders of the paro cafetero, painting them as opportunists in a struggle for power over the country’s coffee sector.
President Santos told reporters last month that some of the leaders of the strike are using the protest to try to abolish the Federation altogether. He will not allow that to happen. But he has also been a steady advocate of reform.
As Minister of Finance in 2002, President Santos signed the prologue to the Commission’s final report, endorsing its findings and recommendations and echoing its calls for reform.
More recently, he opened the 66th National Coffee Growers Congress in November 2011, calling for a “general reengineering” of the Federation.
In mid-2012, he returned to the theme of institutional reform during celebrations of the Federation’s 85th anniversary: “I have always been a great champion of the country’s coffee institutions…But every institution, in order to be relevant and be strong, has to have a kind of continuous improvement, to ask itself every day: Are we doing things well? How could we do them better?”
By the time President Santos addressed the 67th Congress, he was more pointed: “I would like to insist on the formation of a new commission of experts to…study the critical issues that affect the [coffee] sector today.”
In Februrary, his government formed another high-level Commission—the Comisión para el Estudio de la Política y la Institucionalidad Cafetera—and appointed Juan José Echavarría to lead it, an economist with sterling credentials (he studied at Oxford and has served as a director of Colombia’s central bank) and knowledge of the country’s coffee institutions (he worked for a time with the Federation). The new Commission has been working for months and is expected to issue its report and recommendations for reform during the fourth quarter of 2013.
Source: [via]
