Chihuahua.- After six months of meetings to resolve power supply failures for the countryside, identify and dismantle illegal wells and try to reduce the agricultural debt with the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), which amounts to around seven billion pesos, the state-owned company abandoned the dialogue with the producers.
Since January, the CFE has offered agreements to pay a historical debt (from 2022 onwards) of more than 4,770 million pesos and a current debt (from November 2022 to date) of 2,322 million pesos, but very few came forward to pay.
Victor Quintana, a member of the transition team of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (Sader), explained that for this reason the agreements with farmers were suspended, as well as the periodic meetings that had been established with agencies of the Federal Government, to improve the CFE supply in wells for agricultural irrigation and refrigerators necessary for state fruit growing.
It was in that month that the state-owned company’s executives held talks with state farmers, who asked to suspend power cuts to wells with non-payment, in addition to preventing the connection of clandestine wells to the electrical system, as well as proceeding with their dismantling.
CFE officials, headed by the national deputy director, Martín Mendoza, attended to producers from El Barzón, Agrodynamics National, Cotton Product System, the Ascensión and Benito Juárez ejidos, among other organizers, as well as Víctor Quintana, liaison with the sector of the then presidential candidate of Morena, Claudia Sheinbaum
The series of meetings followed an initial meeting led by the head of the state-owned company, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, on January 8 of this year.
Among the points discussed in the dialogue process, Quintana reported at the time, was the debt faced by state producers, farmers and meat packing plants.
“The CFE points out that the historical debt due to policy is frozen. And it proposes the conditions to negotiate the current debt: to set up a working table in which the producer pays in a single installment or makes an agreement for twelve months, in such a way that he finishes paying at the end of the 2024 agricultural cycle, with the condition that at least 25 percent of the current debt payment has been covered from the beginning,” said Quintana.
In another aspect of the agreements, they addressed the problem of failures in the supply of energy to agricultural wells, an area in which the CFE announced that it will guarantee that this agricultural cycle the effects will be minimal thanks to the fact that expansions are being carried out in 5 distribution substations, with an investment of more than 1,200 million pesos.
Since the beginning of the year, however, the CFE has acknowledged that expanding supply will serve little purpose if clandestine or illicit wells continue to proliferate.
They did not come to pay: Quintana
After the agreements and subsequent follow-up meetings, Quintana Silveyra reported yesterday that very few producers actually came forward to pay within the five-month period that expired last June.
Despite this, he said, the CFE gave an additional month for producers with debts to approach the state-owned company to seek an agreement, but there was no response, which cancelled the possibility of resolving this underlying problem.
To date, those who have sought new approaches to achieve payment agreements are the owners of meat processing plants or controlled atmosphere systems, but they have not achieved general agreements like those reached in the first months of the year.
The CFE, he said, opted to suspend the regular meetings that had been held in Chihuahua and although it did not cancel the possibility of new agreements, these will surely be able to be resumed until the arrival of the next administration of Sheinbaum Pardo.
Quintana said that the suspension of power cuts with producers has remained in place until now, although the supply failures of the state-owned company in producing regions such as Cuauhtémoc and Namiquipa persist.
As for the dismantling of illegal wells, which are connected to the electricity grid in an irregular manner or which do not have the concession of the National Water Commission, the problem has persisted, because many of those that were “knocked down” in this process of agreements with the CFE, were reconnected “the hard way,” acknowledged the former deputy.
In the latest reports given by the CFE during meetings with Chihuahua producers, more than 1,500 irregular wells had been dismantled, out of an estimated seven thousand that existed throughout the state; to date there is no report on how many were reopened irregularly.
The problem is not electricity, but water
For the advisor of the Democratic Peasant Front and other organizations, the problem in the countryside is not so much the CFE supply, which continues to have failures in the entity and which should be an aspect to be corrected in the next administration, but the use of water.
At the beginning of the year, the state-owned company had revealed that since 2003, irrigation by pumping had grown disproportionately by more than 300 thousand hectares, which implies 300 more megawatts, with 18,433 agricultural wells with contracts with CFE and an estimated theft of energy by clandestine wells of around 1.7 billion pesos.
According to Quintana Silveyra, the CFE’s electricity supply can be improved and the use of other alternatives such as solar panels is becoming more accessible.
What is very serious and urgent to regulate is the use of water in the countryside, which requires further modernization despite the fact that Chihuahua is one of the states with the greatest advances in irrigation technology.
Currently, he said, 40 percent of the country’s aquifers are in crisis, an average that far exceeds the state, which has overexploited 80 percent of its groundwater sources.
He said that the extraction of water from the subsoil in the state is from “two complete La Boquilla dams”, that is, around six billion cubic meters, while the annual recharge is “one dam”, which makes it visibly unsustainable to maintain that level of expenditure of the vital liquid.
Quintana reported that this issue related to water and electricity supply, with priority in the management of the scarcest resource in Chihuahua, is one of the priorities that Sheinbaum’s transition team is working on in this matter, headed by the next head of Sader, Julio Berdegué.
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