After the increases of the last few days with increases of around 20%, the secretary of Commerce Matías Tombolini anticipated that the government negotiates a new price agreement for meat. In an interview with Urbana Play, he announced that they will relaunch Cortes Cuidados with cheaper prices for empty meat, matambre, skirt, roast cover, buttocks and shoulders.
This Tuesday the INDEC will broadcast January inflation data, which according to the private sector will be around 6%. The increase in meat in recent weeks has had a lot of weight in this leap in the index. Now Tombolini indicates that they will try to stop the impact on the index.
“A process has been opened to advance measures that allow us to equalize this impact. There has been a delay in terms of meat prices, but we will not allow abuse either. It is true that the price of meat increased by 62.4% in 2022 (below inflation, which was 94.8%). But in 2021 it had risen 10 points above inflation, 18 points above in 2020 and 8 points above in 2019,” the Commerce secretary recalled.
“Over the long cycle, the increase in meat was greater than in food and drink. There are a number of deals that will be announced shortly. A set of measures that the Economy Minister is about to announce in order to be able to operate on paperbacks in butcher shops and also some powerful provisions on the Care cuts”.
The Cortes Cuidados program remained in effect until September of last year. In the last quarter of 2022, the meat has suffered heavy losses due to the droughtwhich has forced the producers to liquidate the animals due to the impossibility of keeping them.
But that trend was halted in January, when beef increased by about 20%. Given the impact on inflation, the government has tried to implement various measures to curb it.
Among them, he announced a 10% discount for customers on debit card purchases at butchers. But the measure has had no significance since 90% of operations are informal, according to official calculations.
As regards the inflation index which will be announced tomorrow, Tombolini stated that “January has a seasonality due to the weight of the services item in these months, which is more in tourism and leisure. The challenge has to do with the framework of the road map that Minister Sergio Massa drew up six months ago,” the official said.
issue less
In the interview Tombolini admitted the effect of the monetary question on inflation. “Close the fiscal gap and monetary financing of the deficit, by issuing less and accumulating reserves and as one of the complementary instruments is the tariff programmes They cannot exist in a vacuum. It is a pricing program that seeks to operate on inflation expectations but based on the closure of the fiscal gap and the accumulation of reserves”, he underlined.
The Secretary of Commerce also referred to parities. “The wage tensions typical of the dispute between capital and labor have not manifested themselves in such a way as to generate situations that are difficult to reverse. It is an industry that has decided to be part of the solution and not the problem“, She said.
The official noted that “The biggest challenge is for salaries to exceed prices”. And he expressed himself on the request of companies to put a ceiling on wage negotiations. “One can hope that the labor movement accompanies, but that’s why we do not accept this request because they are two separate discussions,” he said.
AQ
Source: Clarin
