With the delivery of a guataca, a metal file, pruning shears and a pair of boots, the rural development program Sembrando Vida, financed by Mexico, began last Tuesday in the Cuban provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque. The project, according to a Mexican government source, will benefit “5,000 producers with 10 arable hectares that will be grouped into cooperatives.”
Felicia Mesa Pérez is one of the beneficiary farmers. The woman, a native of the Mayabeque municipality of Jaruco, received the module of tools in a bag with slogans alluding to the project. In addition, she was promised that “machinery, chemicals, grain and vegetable seeds will arrive soon,” according to what he told the peasant to Radio Jaruco.
The cooperatives will have 31 Mexican and Cuban technicians responsible for advising the process in a personalized way, with the aim of strengthening the economic, social and environmental capacities of the region, the station assures.
Although the usual protocols of Sembrando Vida stipulate that there should be no intermediaries when delivering inputs to peasants, in Cuba the program will operate differently. The Island Government will receive 150 dollars a month from each farmer and will manage the money, a Mexican government source confirmed to 14ymedio.
A investigation of the information platform Connectas revealed that this project, to which Mexico initially allocated 63.5 million dollars for its implementation in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Belize and Cuba, “has received criticism for the expulsion of beneficiaries of discretionary manner, the opacity in the management of farmers’ savings and the delay in the investigations that denounce their mismanagement”.
In Honduras and El Salvador, where the aid program lasts eight months, according to the investigation, the beneficiary farmers had “withheld part of the economic support for a supposed savings fund,” which was never returned. The Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation denied the accusation, but offered no evidence to the contrary.
Another of the failures detected by the investigation was that “in some locations agricultural inputs were lost because they did not arrive at the best time for planting.”
The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador donated 31,000,000 dollars to El Salvador to start Sembrando Vida and another social project, called Young People Building the Future in 2019. In an event held in the canton of El Achiotal, in the department of La Paz, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele assured that “in a single day” 20,000 jobs were generated. In a first subsequent balance, the creation of 21,256 indirect jobs was announced.
Unlike what is planned to be done in Cuba, in El Salvador the plan was to finance a group of 1,250 beneficiaries. Each person would be given $250 per month, but as the project progressed, that amount decreased.
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