It is the guild document of Colombian coffee growers, which allows them to choose and be elected in the Coffee Elections, a democratic and pluralistic process that takes place every four years throughout the coffee country, which covers 23 departments and 603 municipalities in the country.
This union document has had an important evolution in the services it offers. In 2006, through the alliance of the Federation of Coffee Growers (FNC) with the Banco de Bogotá, it became the Smart Coffee Card, an instrument with financial functionalities that integrated a band and a chip through which they could be carried out safely and Traceability payments for sales of coffee and FNC programs.
For 2014, with the objective of increasing the advantages of the Cédula and the Smart Coffee Card, the FNC Steering Committee approved the linking of a savings account. In that sense, as of July 2019, the Smart Coffee Certificate had allowed banking more than 380 thousand producers in 420 municipalities and 20 departments.
This is how the Smart Coffee Certificate, in addition to being the identification of Colombian coffee growers, is also an instrument that has allowed its financial inclusion, a unique model in the country’s rural sector.
Based on the purchase guarantee, the institutional coffee marketing process is structured, which is carried out with: the setting of the base price that is quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, the quality of the grain is rewarded with the yield factor process and Special coffee programs. However, tools for price protection and an export model of coffee in small quantities that contribute to the profitability of Colombian coffee families are made available to producers.
In Colombia, more than 2.2 million people depend economically, and directly, on coffee growing, that is, about 25% of the rural population in 22 of the 32 departments of the country and in 600 municipalities (53% of the total ). But coffee, in addition to being a dynamic element of the regional economy, continues to have an important weight in the Colombian economy, since it represents more than 8% of total exports and contributes about 12% of the Gross Domestic Agricultural Product. All this based on an economy of family farms, in which 96% of the producers have less than 5 hectares planted in coffee.
In this monthly publication you can find the climatic information for the Colombian coffee region for each of the months of the year, and its relationship with the agronomic practices for coffee cultivation, depending on the coffee region and the growing state of the crop.