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It is necessary to prevent more foreign capital from leaving the country due to the legal and physical insecurities faced by the production sectors.
No one dared to correct President Milei when, in his opening speech at the annual exhibition of the Argentine Rural Society, he denounced that transporting grains along 700 kilometers of roads to reach Rosario is more expensive than sending them to Europe. Milei could also have been shocked, without fear of being wrong, that the lack of sufficient draft in the ports surrounding this vital city for agroindustry means that many ships leave with half their holds empty. They end up filling up on Brazilian coasts, with the consequent loss of opportunities for Argentine products.
Fortunately, a critical awareness has begun to emerge in the country regarding the hollow slogans of populism that have alarmingly delayed Argentina in relation to the general development of the constellation of nations in recent decades. Here, everything has been paralyzed for many years by unanswered demands, bureaucratic regulations that disrupt the activity of national companies and shatter the hope that new investments will be made to exploit our potential natural resources and expand sources of work.
The opposite has happened. Dozens of foreign companies have left Argentina, fed up with the obstacles to their full development and the combination of legal and physical insecurities that would complete an unreal picture in other parts of the planet.
The countryside has suffered from this phenomenon like few other sectors of the economy. This is evident in the absurd result that for every 100 dollars produced by the soybean harvest, 71 dollars go to the State, as has been documented by institutes specializing in agricultural studies. Less light is shed on a daily basis on the weakness of the infrastructure that should be part of the logistical base that makes rural activities possible in a materially sustainable way. President Milei put his finger on the sore spot in Palermo with just one example among hundreds.
There is an urgent need to make improvements to roads, bridges, and railways, and to deregulate air activity as much as possible.
Infrastructure is a critical component of agricultural activity, because without it there is no transportation, storage, or distribution of a production that generates, even with all the deficiencies currently perceptible, 60% of exports and 25% of total employment. According to the Federal Road Council, Argentina has 100,000 kilometers of dirt roads. Specialists in the field have denounced that the lack of paving means that the transport of cattle on these roads results in a loss of 2% of the weight of the livestock. That small dairy plants, without the capacity to store refrigerated milk, must dump milk. That other farms, such as fruit farms, suffer insurmountable damages that would not otherwise occur.
There is an urgent need to make improvements to roads, bridges and railways. We must deregulate air activity to the maximum extent possible, with full awareness that the world is demanding more and more high-quality and fresh products, in line with new trends in food safety. We know: the State was left in ruins by years of futile squandering, ignorance of civic duties, corruption of the rulers and ideological rhetoric whose impact, if it is frightening to see ourselves in our own mirror, let us say that it has led to extreme situations such as those experienced today in Venezuela.
We know: “There is no money.” Nothing more natural then than to see claims like the one just formulated by Gustavo Idígoras, president of the Chamber of the Oil Industry, prosper. He asked that the capital market be opened for infrastructure works that are delayed and prevent the country, only in the grain sector, from producing 20 million more tons per year. At the heart of the requests of this nature is the operational and legal update of the Paraná-Paraguay Waterway - whose privatization process was enabled yesterday - on which the port terminals and oil factories of Greater Rosario essentially depend, through which 80% of our agricultural products leave. It is a waterway that is fed by the traffic of the deteriorated routes 8, 9, 11, 12, 33 and 34.
Only the mobilization of private capital under attractive conditions for the risks involved in high-cost investments will ensure that this waterway not only operates on the terms that are rightly proposed, but also that pending needs are addressed, such as greater and more efficient rural electrification and connectivity to a satisfactory degree with a view to using new technologies appropriate for a truly developing world.
Source: https://www.lanacion.com.ar/ |
