Sergio Massa tries to seduce the field with signs of rationality

Reality always rises The main announcement made last night by the new Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, when he inaugurated his office in great fanfare, was that agribusiness exporters signed $ 5 billion in the next 60 days. Bill Clinton would say, “It’s agribusiness, stupid.”

Real things, you don’t believe in. Until last week, the villains in the film were “the cursed silobag”. The president himself had joined the demonizing chorus of “soy farmers,” who held the beans and held them responsible for the dollar shortage. Now it turns out that, where Fernández saw the problem, for Massa it was the solution.

Seriously, it was an act of rationality. Not very original either. When Mauricio Macri’s government took office in December 2015, and found itself in the minefield of the K administration, he needed the resources to get out of the corralito and the splitting of the exchange. Alfonso Prat Gay, who had to grab a red-hot iron, negotiated an advance on exchange with agro-export. It took three months for the harvest to arrive, but those $ 2 billion January 2016 They were a silver bridge.

Now history repeats itself, and not like a cartoon. Even if, let’s say everything, these 5 billion committed for August and September they would come almost naturally. On Monday, agribusiness was reported to have liquidated $ 3.2 billion in July. Under normal conditions, the trend would have continued in August and September. But the noises in the room had complicated the picture.

Exporters liquidate foreign currency for two reasons. One, to buy the goods they need to work (soybeans) and produce the two main derivatives of their business: high-protein flour and oil.. If for whatever reason the producers don’t sell you, the exporters don’t need to bring dollars.

The second way is to sell dollars to set the exchange rate to which they export. Soy products have withholding taxes of 33%. To cover itself against any eventuality (increase in export duties), agribusiness closes the stock exchange by registering and paying. What agribusiness did is similar to playing the Little Prince with his friend: “I order you to do what you were about to do”.

So it was about calming down a bit. And Massa, at the start, seemed to opt for this variant. There is more: he summoned the liaison table to sit down to negotiate, which implies thinking more about the future flow than the current stock. He also left the itch to talk about retentions. A cautious statement from the Argentine Rural Society, released after the announcements, avoided mentioning the critical issue of export rights, but marked the field in terms of export restrictions and other alchemy of past trade managers.

The minister also placed the need to expand exports as a central axis. He has joined agribusiness to the mining, lithium, energy and information technology sectors. Of all, the one who moves the needle today is the first.

Reality always rises, Jorge Castro is often right.