The company already had Ica's certification, but no seed producer in Colombia had yet met the necessary requirements set by an international protocol for Good Agricultural Practices.
According to the 2011 National Agricultural Survey, close to 90,000 families in Colombia work in the production of potatoes; an essential product in this country's shopping list. Each hectare of crops gives work to 110 people annually, meaning it is a great source for employment in the regions of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Nariño and Antioquia.
Furthermore, with the opportunities brought by free trade and the arrival of increasingly more demanding companies and consumers, the modernisation of the Colombian agricultural sector is more than a necessity; it is a challenge to achieve greater competitiveness.
More than three years ago, Alejandro Estévez Ochoa, manager of Plantar de Colombia and one of the leaders in the industry of seed and potato production, decided to invest in innovation and agricultural sustainability, starting a project for the certification of potato seeds, accompanied by the sales departments from Mercadeo and Bayer CropScience."
Beatriz Angola, Custodial operations manager at Bayer CropScience and former adviser for Plantar de Colombia assured that one of the great benefits of this type of certifications is that they give you control over the productive process, they optimise processes and, of course, improve profitability.
As with every protocol of Good Agricultural Practices, agricultural production should focus on three basic pillars: firstly, respect for the people working with the crops, taking measures to improve their quality of life; secondly, looking after the environment to ensure that the production's impact on it is minimal, and finally, financial sustainability.
One of the strategies proposed for these protocols is the Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which means that the technical assessor, before recommending the use of a pesticide, must inspect the fields to monitor any problems and decide what the best way is to control and tackle them, whether by using biological products, traps, fertilisers or chemical tools.
José Vilar, agricultural engineer at Plantar, assures that "this process lasted barely three years, which makes us very happy." He added that the hardest thing to implement with Global Gap was the workers' integration with one another, as during the harvest season up to 150 people with different jobs are there.
Source: Larepublica