KEY POINTS:
Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez is on a collision course with her country's all-important big farmers, provoking strikes, food shortages and clashes in the streets of Buenos Aires barely three months after she first took office from her husband, Nestor Kirchner.
Fernandez swept to office on promises of populist and institutional reform. In practice, however, she has disappointed many of her critics who hoped she would be more pragmatic than her sometimes doctrinaire husband, and outraged the farmers who grow the country's most valuable export - soy beans.
For the past three weeks, farmers have been on strike in opposition to a proposed tariff increase on soybean and sunflower seed exports from 35 per cent to at least 42 per cent. They have blockaded hundreds of roads, leaving Buenos Aires and other big population centres starved, not only of grains but also of the country's number one culinary obsession, beef.
The smaller farmers, in particular, have complained that they cannot make ends meet with the higher tariffs. However, feelings have become so frayed that when Fernandez's Government proposed repealing the tariff increase for smaller producers, the farmers' representatives rejected her out of hand yesterday.
"The proposal is very unclear," farm workers' leader Ricardo Dagoto complained. "We still haven't seen any of the fine print."
A lot of the bad blood centres on a controversial pro-government protest leader called Luis D'Elia, who served in Kirchner's Cabinet and now acts as an unofficial proxy for the new President, motivated, he says, by "hatred of the whorish oligarchs". When farmers and their supporters marched through Buenos Aires last week, D'Elia headed a group of counter-demonstrators who engaged the farmers in a fist-fight directly in front of a major government building.
The next evening, D'Elia had a place of honour directly behind Fernandez as she made a speech defending her soy tariff increase and urging the farmers to respect public order.
Officially, D'Elia speaks for no one but himself - he was thrown out of the Kirchner government for expressing support for Iran's radical regime - but he maintains an office in a government building, and many Argentines are enraged by his seemingly close association with the first couple. Fernandez sees the new tariffs as part of her stated policy of redistributing wealth away from the big growers and the mercantile classes more generally, in favour of the poor. She has dismissed the farmers' complaints as a "protest of plenty".
The three-week standoff is beginning to bite hard for all Argentinians, pushing up food prices and leaving supermarket shelves half-bare. Some of the dispute is about the country's growing reliance on soy as a cash crop.
This certainly meets growing demand for soy from Asia and provides the country with valuable export revenue, but it has also prompted concern about domestic food production; agricultural job losses; the wisdom of single-crop farming; and a panoply of environmental issues from deforestation to water pollution.
- INDEPENDENT
