QCOSTARICA – Farmers will hold a peaceful march and demonstration this Wednesday in the streets of San José, to express their disagreement with the government’s decisions towards the agricultural sector.
The main objective of the demonstration will be to express disagreement over the country’s intention to join the Alianza del Pacífico (Pacific Alliance), which they say will put an end to small and medium-sized producers and hand over the country to importers
Read more: Pacific Alliance would open Costa Rica to a market of 230 million people
The route will be from the Parque de la Merced to the Plaza de la Democracia in the center of San Jose.
The organizations consider the Government’s intention to incorporate the country into the Pacific Alliance as a threat to the country’s social welfare and a tombstone for the agricultural sector, after decades of neglect that made the country highly dependent on imports.
“The social policies of this government are not going to favor the majority of this country, they are going in another direction and they are definitely going to bankrupt the agricultural sector and come to deliver everything to importers,” said Gilberth Díaz, president of the Sindicato de Educadores Costarricenses (SEC) – Costa Rican Educators Union.
The table of organizations that will support the agricultural sector in the march that supports the sector included unions, student federations and Professional Colleges.
“(This decision) is an involution to economic reactivation because it is a sector that represents chains that produce and generate work and wealth for the country,” added Lenin Hernández, general secretary of the National Nursing Union (Sinae).
“(In Costa Rica) we don’t even produce the pinto that we consume every day,” Hernández said, referring to the country’s high dependence on grains such as beans, corn and rice.
Farmers around the country have expressed their opposition to the Executive’s position regarding the sector, since they assure that it will stone a sector weakened by this abandonment that could not compete with countries that do support their agricultural sector with public policy.
The country’s fragile food security, the organizations assured, is sustained by “the efforts of the organizations and all the people in the national production sector who keep the food supply in the country standing.”
For his part, former president Luis Guillermo Solís asked the population to support the farmers.
Unions, student federations of state universities and representatives of the Frente Amplio (FA) and the Partido Liberacion Nacional (PLN) political parties announced their support for the demonstration.
