Colombia: Producers demand roads reparations in order to produce strawberries for exporting

When Olmué Colombia - the first factory in the country to process individual tropical fruits and frozen vegetables - started up producers and the mayor of Palmira, José Ritter López, asked president Juan Manuel Santos for surfaced roads.

Chileans, who invested in Olmué Colombia, are also interested in strawberries, but only if they're quite ripe. The problem is that some good roads are needed, to stop the fruit being damaged.

The mayor López asked to surface the "strawberry way" that goes from Combia, in Palmira to Tenerife, in El Cerrito, about 45 kilometres.

Rodrigo Villegas, manager for Olmué Colombia, said that they brought Chilean experts to assess farmers in Tenerife about the strawberry production as the idea is to harvest it while ripe, and not before that, as it happens presently and makes the fruit lose its sweetness.

Olmué needs 70 hectares of strawberry and Santos showed his interested when told that each hectare generates 3 or 4 jobs and 8 to 12 when it's harvest time.

Source: Eltiempo.com