Damaged since the previous six-year term, the headquarters of the National Financial for Agricultural, Rural and Fisheries Development keeps its doors open but its services are very restricted.
The staff that attends to credit applicants is moving, while a hundred executives from the regional coordinations await the payment of their settlements, some for their entry into the voluntary retirement program, others because their expired contracts were no longer renewed ” for austerity reasons. And most of the middle and upper managers, in remote work, to avoid the fourth wave of infections.
Remote work has been the new normal. And it is that the general director, Baldemar Hernández Márquez, has dispatched the matters of his competence from the southeast of the country —sometimes in Villahermosa, sometimes in Mérida—, due to his intermittent medical disabilities, not all attributable to his SARS infections. CoV-2.
Whether the move will be definitive or whether the FND’s headquarters —in the Escandón neighborhood— will be reinforced, there are still no definitions. Everything depends on the decisions of the Ministry of Finance.
Paradoxes of the health contingency: a boom period has begun for agro-industrialists, with increases in food prices and an increase in exports that will now be affected by the rise in the exchange rate and the cost of insurance premiums for disasters natural. For small producers in the Mexican countryside, without access to credit, insurance and modernization, good harvests just don’t come.
Meanwhile, the “tabasqueñización” of the institution completed 18 months. Baldemar Hernández Márquez took over the reins, instead of Javier Delgado, after a discreet step through the coordination of the integration centers of well-being. Both positions have been direct presidential appointments.
From CEPCI to FND, non-stop. With Hernández Márquez, María Isabel Montoya arrived at the Deputy Directorate of Administration, who previously was in the direction of processes and organizational structures of the integration centers.
But one thing is directing the tasks of the Nation’s servants and another, very different, of the field staff that manages and collects the credits for the agricultural producers. Employees by outsourcing and structure personnel were subjected to a “terror treatment” with threats of dismissal for unjustified absences, regardless of the health contingency, which contrasts with the exceptions for middle and upper managers, with continuous access to Covid tests .
The labor policy at FND has been undergoing adjustments for a semester. Before the end of 2021, the employees of the central offices and regional coordination hired by outsourcing were forced to sign their resignations. Most were not rehired, “by orders from above.”
With a noticeable decline in the placement of credits and an expansion of the overdue portfolio, the FND is on the verge of paralysis. In addition to the delay in the adaptations of the new headquarters —a building located in front of the Morelia Garden in Roma Norte, owned by the Ministry of Economy— there are major complications in the move: the correct functioning of the banking core, a pending from the previous six-year term that it worsened in the two-year period that Javier Delgado directed this government agency.
During that period, the proposal to turn the institution into a development bank, which would be called AgroFin, foundered. In the last year, Hernández Márquez’s team focused its actions on the implementation of the so-called Secure Credit —created by presidential instructions— that would be processed in the Integral Development Centers, a modality that resulted in a drop in the placement of the FND.
The administrative disorder has led to stricter controls of the most treasury authorities. And although the decision to focus credit allocation on the agricultural sector rather than on small producers has served the head of the institution to strengthen ties with state governments, it has also generated criticism within the sector.
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Journalist and columnist for El Economista, author of Doña Perpetua: Elba Esther Gordillo’s power and opulence. Elba Esther Gordillo against the SEP.
