Our participatory democracy is legitimized every four years, when federated coffee growers elect, by direct vote, their union representatives to the municipal and departmental committees. The departmental representatives also make up the National Coffee Growers Congress (the highest authority and instance of deliberation of the union).
The latest elections were held in September 2018 under the principles of transparency, legitimacy, representativeness and empowerment of federated coffee growers. The voter turnout reached 57% of the coffee electoral roll, a proportion higher than that of the presidential elections in Colombia (53.4% in 2018) and Chile (49% in 2017), which confirms the great legitimacy and representativeness of the union.
Participation of women in union governing bodies increased substantially, from 8% in 2014 to 15% in 2018 in the departmental committees, and from 16% in 2014 to 24% in 2018 in the municipal committees. And as a sign of generational integration and staying of young people in the countryside (another great challenge for the coffee sector), 20% of representatives in the departmental committees and 34% in the municipal committees are under 45 years old.
These good results are the fruit of a continuous effort to bring coffee institutions closer to the coffee grower base. For this purpose, new communication and participation dynamics have been helpful, such as Conversemos con el Gerente (Let’s talk with the CEO), which have enable to listen first-hand to tens of thousands of coffee growers; national meetings of women and young coffee growers, and workshops on union leadership across the country, in which thousands of coffee leaders from the different departmental and municipal committees have been trained.