Economy Minister Sergio Massa said in the last few hours in a meeting with the Federal Council of Agriculture (CFA) that he had asked a cereal exporter go out to “break the market” with offers for soybeans higher than the rest of the buyers. The goal was to raise the price of oilseeds, which had fallen since the introduction of the 2 soybean dollar and the resulting glut of supply. “If not, what ends up happening is that exporters benefit and producers suffer,” Massa said.

As had happened during the implementation of the 1 dollar soybean, the price offered by exporters in the early days of special exchange rate at 230 pesos per dollar was less than the theoretical ability to pay. At the start of the day on Monday the value offered was 80,000 pesos per ton and then housed approximately 85,000, when until a few days before the value reached up to 95,000 pesos per ton. As they say in the industry jargon, exporters were “hunting in the zoo”. In this context, the Syngenta company came out to offer 88,000 pesos per ton, which took on new meaning from Massa’s statements.

Syngenta is a company of Swiss origin purchased five years ago by the ChemChina company, for 43 billion dollars. Its main activity is not grain trading but the sale of seeds and inputs, an activity in which it is one of the world leaders. The CEO of the company in Latin America South is Antonio Aracre, high-profile entrepreneur with a fluid dialogue with Sergio Massa and other officials. Aracre, who will leave the company in December after 36 years, publicly admitted that in a private chat with the economy minister he was told he would go “higher” on the market, and that the minister replied: “break everything”.

Aracre is an accountant graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, has postgraduate studies at UADE and Austral University and has been sympathetic to the government of Alberto Fernández since the beginning of his mandate, when it was part of the failed “Mesa Against Hunger”. At the time, the entrepreneur proposed that the agricultural sector donate one percent of the production of the 2019/2020 campaign to fight hunger. “Argentina produces flour, oil, milk and meat for 150 million people. Allocating one percent of that production to that vulnerable population (1.5 million people) shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive for the supply chain,” he claimed.

Subsequently, Syngenta’s CEO appeared on several occasions with former Economy Minister Martín Guzman, who, when he resigned from his post, assured that he “was a great Economy Minister” and that “politics has been very unfair to him”. “We’re friends. We have a very similar perspective on the economy and the country,” he said.

A few weeks ago, after the first version of the soy dollar was implemented, the entrepreneur was in line with the idea stating that “it was a remarkably effective measure for the objectives it set itself, to avoid an exchange overflow and an even more accentuated loss of reserves than had been recorded before the measure”.

These public appearances generate some noise among agricultural producers, there are those who ask to boycott the company by stopping buying its products, but the company continues to be one of the leaders in the sale of inputs in the local market.

Following Aracre’s departure from Syngenta, Marcos Bradley, currently director of crop protection marketing for Latin America South, will assume the position of general manager of the crop protection business for Latin America South.