By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 16 2000 (IPS)

Farmers in Argentina declared a six- day strike Monday to protest the grave crisis plaguing agriculture, and to demand a government policy aimed at helping producers out of their troubles.

Some 200,000 small and medium farmers representing three associations stopped working Monday to demand tax breaks, a reduction in the cost of basic inputs, and price supports when necessary.

“This is the worst crisis in 50 years, and we have received no response,” Manuel Cabanellas, the president of one of the farmers’ associations, Coninagro, said Monday.

“After 10 months of negotiating with the new government, we see no political determination to take measures to pull the countryside out of this stagnation that is dragging us down further and further,” he added.

Farmers today are caught up in a painful paradox. While recent yields have been among the highest seen in decades, international prices have been on a downward spiral since 1997, collapsing by up to 50 percent in three years, while taxes have risen and the cost of key inputs has soared. Fuel prices, for example, are three times higher today than 10 years ago.

That means farmers who plant 2,000 to 3,000 hectares of wheat find it virtually impossible to support their families or pay their farmhands, because the price per ton, which plunged from 200 to 100 dollars over the past two years, makes it difficult to cover anything more than costs despite the bumper crops.

Prices began to slide in the wake of the financial meltdown that broke out in southeast Asia in 1997, as demand for grains and oilseeds dropped.

But despite the recovery of the Asian economies, sales did not rebound to the hoped-for extent. Nor did prices, due to the subsidies shelled out to farmers in industrialised countries.

According to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) –the “rich nations’ club” — the European Union, the United States and Japan spend a combined total of 360 billion dollars a year in subsidies for farmers, a practice that has kept prices low.

Argentina, meanwhile, instead of supporting its farmers, taxes them heavily, thus forcing them to compete at a disadvantage on the international market. The countryside is no longer profitable for anyone but large agribusiness companies that have accumulated enormous tracts of land and produce huge volumes.

The price of diesel fuel, used to run farm machinery and the trucks transporting grains in Argentina, has skyrocketed from 18 to 52 cents a litre in the past 10 years, while farmers have been targetted by a number of tax hikes as well.

For that reason, middlemen, truckers and food processing industrialists have joined the farmers in the strike, the first held by agricultural producers since President Fernando De la Rúa took office in December, but the third staged in the past year and a half.

Only the large landowners grouped in the Rural Society, most of whom are stockbreeders, refused to join the strike.

Besides being hit less hard by the slump in commodity prices, stockbreeders have been paralysed for nearly two months by an alert over outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, which were finally controlled.

Farmers also owe around six billion dollars in debt, as well as taxes due to delays in payments to state banks.

Many farmers have mortgaged their land, and then lost it when it went to the auction block — part of the parallel processes of the growing concentration of property in a few hands and the rural exodus.

The Argentine Agrarian Federation says profitability in the sector has fallen by 25 percent from the 1990s average, despite the continuing struggle of farmers, their growing efficiency and the increasingly large volumes produced for export.

Since De la Rúa took office, rural leaders have met a number of times with Agriculture Secretary Antonio Berhongaray. But they have concluded that the official “has goodwill, but no instruments” for tackling the severe crisis, said Cabanellas.

Economy Minister Jose Luis Machinea met with farmers last week to offer them rebates and other tax breaks. But the rural leaders rejected the offer as too little, too late, and declared a strike that will freeze activity in the sector and could lead to scarcity of farm products in the cities of this Southern Cone nation of 37 million.

Farmers and truckers have been staked out at key points along the nation’s highways to protest and to ensure that everyone obeys the strike, which is to end at midnight Saturday unless the government provides a satisfactory response before that time.

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