This is a CTP of initiative: La Via Campesina/MNCI (Argentina)
This CTP focuses on the controversy developed in March 2008 after the implementation of resolution 125/2008, promoted by the Ministry of Economy, which established the new regime of mobile retentions (special taxes) for the export of grains.
The grain exports retentions had been imposed in 2002 by the government of Eduardo Duhalde after a sharp devaluation of the Argentine peso. In this way, it was sought to avoid a generalized increase of food products and also to generate a new source of tax collection. In 2008, the international prices of some grains (especially soybeans) had increased exponentially and to adjust the tax system to that variation the government decided to implement the new regime.
This measure was resisted by the entities that group the producers of this type of crops associated with international trade, and generated a conflict that lasted 129 days. The agricultural entities began several weeks of lockout with cuts of routes and causing the food shortage of the main cities.
This fact is understood as a CTP for the MNCI, because it placed in the public agenda the problems associated with the advancement of agribusiness. As a counterpart, the peasant movement promoted a debate on food sovereignty and proposed to distinguish producers associated with the international market from family farmers. In this way, the MNCI supported the measure taken by the government:
"With the 125, we have a clear position in favor of resolution. We always said that it was a necessary measure for us, because it discouraged the rise of soybean production. Although it was not the structural 'measure' we supported it and we continued, there, seeing that we had to start thinking otherwise Kirchnerism. And then comes a whole package of measures by all known that we also recognize and there we said 'well, obviously from this political group there is an intentionality'.”
The conflict was resolved with a bill sent by the government to Congress that was rejected in the Senate chamber. This meant a hard political defeat and a rupture within the ruling front. It was the vice president himself that resolved the vote against his own government. However, the whole conflict allowed to establish new links between the national state and the peasant movement.
The emergence and consolidation of the National Indigenous Peasant Movement is the counter to a broader process associated with the expansion of the extensive production of transgenic crops for export. The authorization by the national state of the use of transgenic soybean and maize seeds consolidated the export profile of the Argentine agricultural sector. This favored a new process of concentration of the land for extensive farms and displacement of population towards the cities. Likewise, the use of transgenic crops favored the expansion of this type of production to marginal lands in which peasant populations were located. With the devaluation applied in 2002, the state established the retentions with which it was able to capture a portion of the profit generated by this business and at the same time contain the local prices of food. The variation and volatility of international prices led the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to establish a system of mobile retentions by which the tax was adjusted according to the international price. In the face of this, the institutions that grouped the agricultural producers (Rural Society, Agrarian Federation, Argentine Rural Confederations and CONINAGRO) joined in a liaison table to reject the measure and initiated a strong measure of protest with cuts of route and cessation of commercialization. Taking advantage of this situation, the opposition political parties came out to support the lockout and when it had to be defined in the congress they voted against the government's proposal. Its deputies and senators were those who voted against the law of the government that sought to regulate the system of mobile retentions managing to give a hard political defeat to the government. In short, the conflict ended up being a political defeat for the national government, but in economic terms the agro-export sector did not benefit at all since international grain prices soon fell and retentions remained at the same percentage (35% in the soybean case, for example). The open confrontation of the national government and representatives of agribusiness led to an alignment of the MNCI and its member organizations with the national state policy.
This CTP is directly related to the agricultural policy implemented in Argentina since the mid-1990s. The approval of the incorporation of transgenic crop varieties opened a new stage of expansion of commercial agriculture in the country. This process caused significant changes in the productive dynamics extending the agricultural frontier on land occupied by peasant populations.
Thus, in these territories the first peasant organizations were formed from different processes of political organization dating back to the 1970s (under the military dictatorship). The social and economic crisis of the beginning of the 21st century contributed to the definitive organization of these movements.
In the midst of this crisis, the government of Eduardo Duhalde applied a devaluation of the peso and established a system of retentions to the exports of the main crops like soybean, maize and wheat. In 2008, international soybean prices surpassed U$s 500 per ton. Faced with this situation the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner established a system of mobile retentions to avoid a deepening of the soybean process experienced by the Argentine countryside, to avoid a transfer of these international prices to the internal costs of food and to capture a part of this extraordinary income by the state.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had won the presidential elections of 2007 and succeeded her husband Néstor Kirchner as president of the nation. In his presidential formula, they incorporated Julio Cobos as a vice presidential candidate who came from another political party (the Radical Civic Union). The strategy was known as "Transversality".
The protests developed by the agricultural organizations imitated the forms used by other social sectors during other conflicts: the cut of routes. Since the mid-1990s, groups of unemployed workers had implemented this type of protest methodology, locally called "piquetes" This modality of protest was also adopted by settlers of the city of Gualeguaychú to protest the installation in the neighboring country of Uruguay of a cellulosic industrial plant in the coast of the Uruguay river that divides both countries. Many of the protestors participating in this claim were the protagonists of the 2008 protests.
This CTP presented clear processes of contestation within the MNCI. The main conflict was associated with the organization's position on the conflict.
Historically, the MNCI emerged in processes of confrontation with national and provincial states demanding concrete policies that protect and favor different forms of peasant production. However, since its creation in 2003, the organization established fluid contacts with the national government to advance in different demands.
The conflict unleashed in 2008, produced a serious disjunctive. Many of the protestors stated that the main disadvantaged by the measure implemented by the government were the small producers and that favored the big businessmen of the sector. The MNCI, which groups small producers of family agriculture, expressed that the protagonists of the protest did not represent real small producers.
"The Liaison table (Mesa de enlace, in spanish) represents mainly entrepreneurs and corporations that benefit from the current high concentration of land, natural assets and markets. It is an association of people that holds that the most important thing in life is profit and profitability. For them private property and excessive profit are the main pillars of a society. For them the land is one more commodity. The real countryside has nothing to do with that: land, nature and peasant families are life, solidarity and work "
For this reason, the MNCI was in favor of the application of mobile retentions as a mechanism to curb the advance of agribusiness on the land occupied by peasants. This positioning had it significant costs as it generated discussions within the movement itself. The risk was to be too closely associated with the national government, when in fact it was considered that the agricultural policy implemented until that moment favored land concentration and commercial agriculture for export.
For MNCI referents, as for the majority of the population in Argentina, the events associated with CTP were unexpected.
The president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had won recently the presidential elections with a wide margin and in most of the provinces had won the same political party of government. There was nothing to suggest that such a political crisis would be unleashed.
In addition, from the perspective of MNCI members, the national government had maintained a policy that favored large-scale agriculture based on the use of transgenics for export. It is true that the organizations that promoted the protest were raising their discontent over the excessive intervention of the national state in the activity, but in economic terms they were living a stage of exceptional profits.
The criticisms raised by the associations that staged the protest against the government could not think to the scale of the conflict nor its resolution.
On the MNCI side, until the conflict erupted the movement was more concerned with articulating its demands vis-a-vis the national state. It was not on its agenda, taking a pro-government stance or participating in street demonstrations in favor of measures such as resolution 125.
The conflict arising from resolution 125 made it possible to shed light on the heterogeneity of rural socio-economic structures and the existence of relegated and often invisible agricultural producers. The representatives of family agriculture found in this conflict a "window of opportunity" to make their voice heard at the highest level of political decision. While the President was confronted with the main professional organizations that historically defended different interests grouped in an unpublished "liaison table", the political negotiations also were played with other organizations of the familiar agriculture, that the government identified like a political ally.
The government then mobilized a discursive record that opposed business agriculture to the "other" agriculture, vehicle of ethical and environmental values, and presented them as antagonistic realities; Rural development NGOs. If this opposition is more of a rhetorical figure than a strict reflection of reality, the two models nevertheless respond to different measures of public policy and social subjects. During this period, movements such as the "Frente Nacional Campesino", which received the support of the Ministry of Social Development (one of the funders of rural development projects), emerged. In addition to bringing ideas about family farming, this type of grassroots movement supported, of course, the government's stance during the conflict.
Finally, negotiations with the National Family Agriculture Forum led to the creation of the Secretariat for Family Agriculture and Rural Development in 2009. While initially it did not lead to major changes in the lives of small producers, A symbolic act that recognizes the need to renew the strategy, instruments and institutional arrangements governing rural development. Family agriculture thus becomes a political and economic figure.
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