Guatemala Log

July 30, 2012

Sirs, I am the first Secretary of Food Security of Guatemala. I am an engineer and am very concerned about the issues you raise. I now am the president of a sugar processing plant in Guatemala so we are constantly working and repairing equipment. In Spanish, a sugar processing plant is called a "ingenio" which in Spanish means ingenious. We have more than 60 engineers at my ingenio. We have a collection of: chemical, mechanical, industrial, electrical, systems, computer, agricultural, civil, materials engineers. We have built the sugar industry in Guatemala by buying surplus and obsolete parts of old mills in other countries and tweaked them into production. We are EXTREMELY GOOD at modifying existing tools and machines to make them work for us. In short, we have a ton of academic and practical experience. We also have machinery, tools, etc. We have tons of scrap metal. And now we have your plans.

Five years ago, I was the first secretary of the SESAN (Secretary of Food Security of Guatemala), a cabinet level position during President Berger´s government. Even though I am now running my company, I am extremely concerned about our food insecurity and lack of productivity of our rural farmers. They don´t have the resources to be more productive since they basically only have hand tools.

I saw your initiative in Reader´s Digest and peaked my interest. I am now REALLY interested. I would like to have a chat with you to explore having a laboratory here in Guatemala. I can put it in our sugar mill and I can get the support in time and resources from other sugar mills in our country. Engineers LOVE solving problems and when we are talking about the possiblity of changing lives, they will be in full support.

Pls let me know how we can get some traction in this direction. I am a friend of President Perez Molina and of the US ambassador and the head of USAID here in Guatemala. I am sure we can get a whole lot of support and funding for this initiative.

I don´t want to do it by myself. You have the experience and have a learning curve that should be taken into consideration.

Let me know if this is interesting to you. I am also an Aspen Institute Global Leadership Network Fellow. By the way, you can google my name, you should get some info.

Best regards and awaiting your news, Andres Botran