Beleaguered spanish citrus body Intercitrus will get a second chance at salvation in September, but producers have all but given up on the organisation.
Antonio Muñoz, newly elected president of the promotional body, told FPJ after an emergency meeting of the organisation’s governing body on July 31: “Representatives from all the colleges of Intercitrus have agreed to meet on September 2. The two associations representative of producers on the body, Ava-Asaja and Coag, have said that they want a significantly reduced budget for the 2008-09 season.
“Now it is up to the director general of Intercitrus, Anabel Siguan, to draw up new, more restricted budget proposals to put to that meeting on September 2.”
Should the different sectors represented at the meeting accept the proposal, then it will be put to an extraordinary general meeting of Intercitrus. Muñoz is hopeful of a positive outcome to September’s meeting following last Thursday’s encounter. “Everyone showed they believe that Intercitrus is necessary, even if it is an Intercitrus that costs less,” he said. “So we hope that by September 2, we will have a budget we can all agree on.”
But the producers’ representatives said the budget Siguan will be drawing up is based just on keeping Intercitrus ticking over on standby should the citrus sector “wake up”.
Cristóbal Aguado, president of Ava-Asaja, said: “The production sector is united. We are in favour of an Intercitrus that has valid content, or we will leave it in hibernation until such time as we all wake up. We are not in favour of the disappearance of Intercitrus, and the lack of consensus is not the fault of the body itself, but of those people who do not want to reach an agreement that benefits the whole citrus sector, including producers.”
No comments yet