Sergio Massa won 10 days. And he hopes that the rains expected for the rest of January will help him orientate his relationship with the countryside, in the context of the severe drought that is affecting all the agricultural regions of the country.
By committing an agenda of meetings for next week, the Economy Minister opened a channel of dialogue with the Liaison Table, which had been postponed “by at least a month”, as ruralists had requested a meeting at a high level to obtain substantive solutions after meetings with second-line officials and “biased announcements”.
Now, the leader of the Renewal Front is fully involved and has the challenge of achieving global measures that lighten the countryside and do not compromise the fragile macroeconomic situation, heavily dependent on the resources generated by agro-industrial activity. And that they would be scarce this year.
According to ruralists, the climate crisis will lead to losses of 15,000 million dollars and will affect all of society in the coming months.
The economy minister has summoned the ruralists convinced that the scenario will change in February. The meteorological forecasts that INTA has informed you refer to the end of the Niña phenomenon after three years, precisely in February. For this reason, the date of the first day of that month seems almost a magical bet, as if it were a “D-Day”.
In general, specialists agree that a Neutral phase will begin before the end of autumn and a Niño phase will arrive in spring, with normal, if not heavy rainfall levels.
From the field they do not deny these weather forecasts, but warn that the rains will come late. They calculate 50 percent losses in the just completed wheat crop and describe that current soybean and corn crops are already experiencing irrecoverable yield losses.
To the impact on cereal production, the agro-industrial sector which generates the most dollars in exports, withholdings and GDP, we must add more uncertain but very strong losses also on meat and dairy farms.
In this context, the diagnosis of the situation is widely shared. And now it will be necessary to make a fine-tuning to identify needs, with a balance between what is urgent and what is important.
In this sense, Massa has engaged in a copyrighted phrase by Cristina Kirchner. At the outset of her disagreement with government management, the vice president publicly asked President Alberto Fernández to “use the pen” to govern. Now the economy minister has used the same idea to take charge of managing campaign issues that impact the entire economy.
It won’t be easy for you, because going from diagnosis to solutions is complicated in such a serious and complex situation. “We cannot decree that it will rain, we are not guilty of the drought,” said Ignacio De Mendiguren, production secretary, and one of the officials close to Massa, who accompanied him to the meeting. And he focused the need for intervention on “small producers”, in line with the latest segmented aid measures implemented by the Government in the field of agricultural policy.
The head of AFIP, Carlos Castagneto (who replies to Cristina Kirchner) has relativized the situation in the field. He said it is “another of the sectors that must be attended by the government”.
Massa will have to define within the broad spectrum of field visions that coexist in the Frente de Todos. And he is betting that the production surveys by area and activity, plus the forecasts of climatic relief, do not impose contributions that exacerbate the short-term scenario suffered by the tax accounts.
The linking table is not so optimistic about it. They argue that “there are many producers who already have negative economic results and will not be able to pay taxes and a large part of the loans they have taken to dynamize the production wheel.
The expectation of ruralists is that farmers, ranchers and other actors in regional economies are supported so that they can reach the El Niño stage with the least possible level of damage. Massa also dreams of reaching spring in better conditions. Perhaps this will help them find consensual solutions.
Source: Clarin
