massa during his last meeting with the liaison/archive table
Prior to the meeting with Sergio Massa, scheduled for today, the four entities of the Liaison Table -the Argentine Agrarian Federation, Coninagro, the Rural Society and the Rural Confederations-, faced with the economic impact of the drought that is plaguing various regions of the country, announced yesterday that they will demand “urgent measures”, while ensuring that if there were no positive responses they could analyze forceful measures.
The meeting with Massa and the Secretary of Agriculture, Juan José Bahillo, is agreed for today at the headquarters of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), in the town of Castelar, province of Buenos Aires, where rural entities will demand, in In principle, local, provincial and national Declarations of Emergency and Agricultural Disaster in the areas affected by the drought should be expedited, and they warned that they could call for a cessation of commercialization if there is no solution to the demands of the producers.
In this way, they understand, the measures that the law provides such as the suspension of advances of Income Taxes, the extensions or exemption depending on the case of provincial taxes or incorporating the forced sale of wombs for the calculation of the Income tax.
“In the hearing called by the minister, of which we were informed, other organizations and national officials will participate. We will technically present the map of the current situation of the sector and we will demand urgent measures and specific points to be resolved as quickly as the case warrants,” they said in a statement.
THE CLAIMS
In the anteroom, from the Liaison Table they explained the agenda that they seek to address today with the head of the economic portfolio: “We will technically present the map of the current situation of the sector and we will demand urgent measures and specific points to be resolved as quickly as the case warrants. ”. Specifically, the ruralistas anticipated that they will request the suspension and/or extension of taxes such as Profits and VAT and differential rates to access credit.
“We ask the Central Bank to repeal the resolution that increases the financial cost to soybean producers and guarantee access to credit. As well as eliminating the circular for producers with a collection of 5% of the Central Bank’s soybean and wheat stock,” the official statement details.
Along the same lines, the Liaison Desk made a request to the banks: “We plan to promote loans at affordable or subsidized rates to meet the commercial and financial commitments of the affected producers, and generate lines of working capital. We also request to extend the expiration dates of the rural cards”.
For its part, the AFIP was not left out of the requests: “We ask to suspend VAT withholdings in the settlements of grain and finance sales of the 2022/2023 campaign and to suspend VAT on inputs.”
In a press conference after the meeting, the president of the Argentine Agrarian Federation (FAA), Carlos Achetoni, indicated that “after having requested a meeting and under the current circumstances we want to define the points that the bases have been asking us for. We have had first-hand the urgent need to install the problem and for it to have urgent answers as well”.
For his part, the president of the Argentine Rural Society (SRA), Nicolas Pino, held in a meeting “it will be possible to clearly assess the current situation, not only climatic, but in the macroeconomics of how this drought is affecting.”
