Vol. 72/No. 15      April 14, 2008

On March 11, taking advantage of rising grain prices on the world market, the government in Buenos Aires raised export taxes to as much as 44 percent on soybeans, sunflower seeds, wheat, meat, and other agricultural products. Just four months ago the tax had been hiked to 35 percent. With local and income tax, the total levy on agricultural exports is now 75 percent. While affecting agribusiness and wealthy farmers, the taxes hit small farmers the hardest.

For more than two weeks, organizations representing 290,000 farmers have set up at least 400 roadblocks across the country, especially in the soybean-producing central and eastern region. They have organized tractorcades in Córdoba and other cities. The roadblocks have prevented trucks from delivering farm goods, paralyzing exports of beef and grain and emptying supermarket shelves in the cities.

Kirchner, saying the government will not negotiate until the strikes end, has deployed paramilitary riot cops against the farmers.

Four major farm groups have spearheaded the protests. They include both the Argentine Rural Association (SRA), the traditional organization of capitalist landowners and agribusiness, and the Argentine Agrarian Federation (FAA), which organizes small farmers, known as chacareros.

The government is boosting its coffers at a time of rising food prices on the world market and a boom in Argentine grain production, which reached a record of 90 million tons last year. The sliding tax rates are based on international grain prices, rising or falling as prices go up or down. Argentina is the world’s second-largest exporter of corn and third-largest of soybean. President Kirchner, who succeeded Néstor Kirchner, her husband, claims the tax increases are designed to “redistribute wealth”—to generate income for increasing employment and subsidizing food prices at home. Inflation in Argentina was 20 percent last year, and nearly 11 million working people—30 percent of the population—live below the official poverty line.  
 
Attempt to pit workers vs. farmers
The ruling party is Peronist, a term that comes from the bourgeois nationalist movement of Juan Peron, who used nationalist and proworker demagogy to win popular support.

To justify the tax measures, government officials and supporters have tried to pit urban workers against rural toilers. Progovernment “Everyone with Cristina” rallies took place in Buenos Aires March 25 and April 1. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT), Congress of Argentine Workers, and other unions mobilized their members to fill the Plaza de Mayo, where Kirchner accused the farmers of “extortion.” The Córdoba paper La Voz reported March 27 that a group of truckers attacked a farmers’ protest camp in Laboulaye, Córdoba province.

In contrast, the farm workers union UATRE has called for negotiations between the government and farmers’ organizations.

Bourgeois opponents of the Peronists have seized on the farmers’ mobilizations to organize several antigovernment protests. Thousands of people, many of them from upscale Buenos Aires neighborhoods, have held pot-banging demonstrations, known as cacerolazos, blaming the government for the farm crisis.

Peronist goons led by Luis D’Elía, a former leader of protests by unemployed workers and then an official in the Kirchner government, physically assaulted antigovernment demonstrators at a March 25 cacerolazo.

While the capitalist farmers of the Rural Association claim to speak for the entire “Argentine countryside,” a lie promoted by the capitalist media and the Kirchner government, the conditions of the wealthy ranchers and the chacareros diverge widely.

“The state is going to take in $12 billion this year in export taxes on soybeans alone, but that money does not make it back to the countryside,” Argentine Agrarian Federation vice president Pablo Orsolini told the IPS news agency. “These taxes hurt large producers very little,” disproportionately burdening small farmers, he noted.

The FAA proposes that export taxes vary depending on the size of the farm. Under such a system, farmers producing less than 600 tons of soybeans a year would pay taxes of up to 25 percent, those producing between 600 and 1,500 tons pay 35 percent, and those with higher outputs pay a higher rate. “Eighty-five percent of farmers fall into the first two categories,” Orsolini said.

On March 31, 19 days into the farmers’ strike, Kirchner refused to roll back the tax increase, but offered some concessions, including a tax rebate for small farmers and transportation subsidies in more remote areas.  
 
 
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