Lockdown affecting agribusiness and local food producers differently in Argentina. Challenges and opportunities for food sovereignty.

In the whole Argentine territory, a quarantine was declared by the recently elected Peronist government in the early stages of contagion itself, on 19 March. Unlike other Latin American countries, there was less hesitation in implementing this measure to control the spread of the virus, even at the cost of other concerns such as economic growth, the virtual default on the foreign debt, and the opposition of the biggest companies’ representatives. The President, Alberto Fernández, answered some businessmen who quickly started firing workers: “Well, guys: the time has come for you to profit a bit less”. However, despite a decree forbidding dismissals during the lockdown and the Presidential speech, firing did not stop.

Swift government action also resulted in problems for the production and access to food. Firstly, the urban population reliant on supermarkets and grocery stores are facing the brunt of inflated speculative prices and shortages of some products as the government is not being able to control retail prices either. This is especially so for fruits and vegetables, whose rising prices are swelling intermediaries’ pockets: while peasants remain to be the overexploited link of the chain, consumers end up paying more for the food produced by them. This type of intermediation is just one of the reasons why Argentina’s food prices inflation rate is one of the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Moreover, as 47 % of the population has informal jobs and unstable incomes, and as these informal workers depend on their day-to-day earnings to survive, the government made a one-time payment of 117 USD to low-income freelancers and informal workers. It also increased allowances for pensions and social plans destined to unemployed or underemployed people and put the Army to deliver food in poor neighbourhoods, where the main food assistance is still organised by social organisations. Additionally, among other measures, the government decided to make extraordinary payments of around 40 USD through Food Cards (Tarjeta Alimentar), which were released in January 2020 – just a few weeks after Fernández came to power – as the core of the Plan Argentina Against Hunger (Plan Argentina contra el Hambre).

But all this is certainly not enough. Many people – especially in slums, rural areas and indigenous communities – do not have access to the internet to deal with the bureaucratic procedures to access financial aid, and many neglected areas hardly receive any public assistance. Furthermore, inflation keeps growing as the informal dollar exchange rate does (it increased by 40 % since the quarantine started, one month and a half ago). The memories of pillaged stores during the 2001 crisis overwhelm anytime the quarantine is extended for another 15 days (since the first presidential decree on 19 March, the nation-wide lockdown has been extended twice, the last time was on 26 April, when only some smaller cities were exempted). For keeping “social peace”, religious institutions, together with some companies, banks and corporate think tanks organized philanthropic donations. 

Paradoxically, since the end of the 19th century, Argentina has been a major exporter of agricultural products, and until 2018 it was among the top ten exporters of agricultural products in the world. So how is it possible that people depend on food aid? 

After the last twenty years of an agriculturalization/soyzation process, this country produces agricultural commodities, mainly soybeans, corn, wheat and sunflower, and their by-products. According of oficial preliminary data, in 2019, almost 30% of the global value of this country’s exports were based on animal fodder, food industry waste, and cereals, while animal and vegetable fats, oils, waxes, oil seeds and meat accounted for another 19,4 %.  Despite its enormous agricultural production capacity, after four years of neoliberal measures during the Macri administration (2015-2019), added to structural poverty conditions, hunger is one of its main social problems, i. e. 35,5 % of the population is poor and 32% suffer from moderate or severe food insecurity. And the current COVID-19 pandemic only worsened it. 

Additionally, Argentina is the third country in the ranking of transgenic crops producers, after the USA and Brazil, and a major consumer of agrochemicals: approximately 500 million litres of agrochemicals are used each year on its fields, causing serious and controversial health and environmental problems. This is particularly important because, as several studies show, these chemicals affect the immunological system.

Even if current actions aim at population’s well-being, the present government’s measures are contradictory, as they were in previous Peronist neo-developmentalist administrations (2003-2015).  From the beginning, the declaration of a compulsory quarantine excluded some ‘essential activities’. While formal agribusiness (and other exporting sectors such as mining) has been defined as ‘essential’, many of the informal activities linked to food production for local consumption ended up being treated as non-essential. As a result, agribusiness for exportation keeps running without major troubles, spraying rural populations with agrochemicals, and deforestation for expanding the agricultural frontier does not stop, further compromising indigenous peoples’ access to food and water. Recently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reduced taxes on imports of the necessary supplies for local pesticides and herbicides production, showing the intention to deepen the industrial agriculture model, despite the contestation of an increasing part of the population.

Meanwhile, the small and medium-scale food production sector supplying the local market encountered many extra problems due to the quarantine, apart from the lack of access to land, credit, and social protection, among other structural problems it already faced. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Livestock (former Ministry of Agroindustry), this family farming sector, as it is often called, produces 70 % of yerba mate, 62 % of tobacco, 61 % of spring chicken and of aromatic plants, 60 % of pork and 59 % of vegetables. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this sector also produces a third of the milk and a quarter of bovine and caprine livestock and generates 53 % of the rural employment nationwide.

From seed distribution to food supply chain logistics, the local food production sector has been disrupted, partly due to its informal condition. Things get complicated as policemen do not allow normal circulation to producers and logistics people, as well as to the rural population in general, which cannot reach production sites or travel to nearby towns in order to attend health centres or even buy food for themselves. This is an even bigger problem for those non-agroecological producers, extremely dependent on external inputs (i.e.,  agrochemicals).

Trying to comply with urgent food demands, the government started signing tenders for overpriced and low quality-food with concentrated companies of the wholesale sector and the agri-food industry. Meanwhile, popular, social and solidarity economy projects and organizations, born during the previous neoliberal era in the 1990s and especially after the crisis of 2001, and mostly ignored by the State, are expanding their networks and blooming despite this abandonment. In the same vein, small and medium-scale producers of nutritious foods (mainly fruits and vegetables), linked through alternative distribution channels to this popular economy, are experiencing an unexpected expansion of their consumers. By sorting out production and logistics problems in creative ways (i.e., by encouraging autonomously organised collective purchases of food baskets, increasing home delivery, and collectively negotiating especial permits to circulate), many initiatives and organizations responding to the idea of food sovereignty keep selling (and donating to the most vulnerable) agroecological, transitioning and conventional food, ensuring fair prices to people. In sum, fair trade, agroecology, and agri-cooperative foods and products are reaching a new public, interested in stable prices and home delivery, some of them seeing the demand at least duplicated, and in some cases even decupled. 

Developments on the political and agrarian front show some signs of a near-future that may bring institutional support for small family farmers, even if measures remain contradictory.  Before the pandemic, the Fernández-Kirchner administration showed signs of support to small farmers’ organizations. Moreover, the creation of an Agroecology Direction within the Ministry of Agriculture, the arrival to this Ministry of some representatives of rural movements, and the naming of a representative of the Union of Land Workers’ (Unión de Trabajadores de la Tierra, UTT), a small farmers’ organizations, as the president of the Central Market – the biggest food market in the country – are some steps into this direction. Still, organizations of small family farmers and popular economy projects are demanding more presence of the State. And the hegemony of agribusiness and supermarkets has not been defeated. At least not just yet.

Photos sources: laverdadonline.com / pausa.com.ar

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