The former minister of the Ministry of Agricultural Development (MIDA), Jorge Arango, elucidated this Thursday about the current situation that the country is going through in terms of production and the shortage of certain products in the basic family basket.
He pointed out that national production must be protected, so that when these crises come they will not find us in the great dependency that we have. “If we had taken the corrective measures years ago, if we had done like the other countries in the world: protected their national production and then imported what we need, we would be in a better position to face these changes that some do not depend on us. They are from outside ”, he argued.
According to the former official, the highest cost of food is when it does not exist and he made reference to the production of onions, mentioning that it was destroyed by excessive amounts, “it fell and we almost did not produce, almost a year ago and a half, or two years, there were only 300 to 400 hectares of production in the country ”.
He recalled that the onion came to cost $ 100 dollars a quintal and there was no outside. In turn, he stressed that the Panamanian state has to protect and control these excessive imports a little, and now there are more than 1,200 hectares of onion production in the Highlands and there are about 400 more in the Natá area, which has fact that the onion has dropped more than half its cost.
Arango emphasized that you must work a little more and stop so many strikes and parties. “Stop buying fewer cell phones, taking fewer drinks and starting to produce because the country has all the capacity to produce. What we have to stop are some consumption habits that we have deeply ingrained such as fucking, drinking, here it cannot be that a large number of workers do not arrive at their jobs on Mondays because they spent it taking Sunday. These are not times for relaxation, “he said.
He concluded by stating that among the items that are considered to have a shortage are all those that are dependent on oil, “we will have a shortage of fertilizers and we will be very affected in spare parts for machinery.”
