The Argentine growth has always been strongly related to exportation among its history: the exportation of leather in a first instance and then of salted meat, which was the first product of the argentine industry. Then these products were replaced by the exportation of wool and finally in the last decades of the 19th C of frozen meat and cereals, mainly wheat. The last decades of the 19th C were characterized by the full implement of the agricultural exporter system related to the production of quality meat and cereals, in order to do so, capitals were required (mainly British), working people to be employed in the production, (that’s why European people were interested in immigrating here), and the distribution of lands for the production of large states (latifundios), where the immigrants settled as lessees. Although this model of production generated much wealth, it also expressed its limits: the dependence of the production of one or two products which made the economy vulnerable and stress the dependence on England, who imposed the rules of this second colonial pact.
The Argentine economy of the second half of the 19th C was based on the exportation of agricultural products. In order to give an incentive to the inclination of the country, in 1866 the SRA (Sociedad Rural Argentina) is founded and it was integrated by a group of the most important landowners of the country which were dedicated to the breed of ovine cattle. This society proposed to modernize the agricultural production, in order to do so, they spread new techniques of innovation in the process of crossbreeding and in the organization of the agriculture of the country. Their slogan was: “cultivar el suelo es servir a la patria”.
From 19th C on the bovine cattle begun to improve and the production of cereals grew. At the end of the 19th C the cold stores appeared which allowed the exportation of quality meat. The first cold stores had strong influence of British capitals. The necessity of working people motivated the arrival of immigrants which settled down basically in Buenos Aires, the littoral provinces and Córdoba. Many of them worked as tenant farmers and lessees. During the first decades of the 20th C this farmers had more and more difficulties to fulfil the conditions established in the contracts signed by the colonizer enterprises or the landowners.
In 1913 there were new strikes produced by the chacareros. The great majority of FAA leaders were socialists and anarchists. This movement did not questioned the model and it did not wanted to destroy it, it wanted to make it more benevolent, all the same, for the landowners the pretentions of the lessees meant the loss of great benefits, and for this reason, they tried to destroy that organization but they could not. The farmers left the crisis strengthened and joined in trade unions.
The agricultural exporter model generated an uneven economic growth which privileged the pampa húmeda and excluded the rest of the country with exception of Cuyo (wine production) and Tucumán (sugar production with destiny to the intern market). The outbreak of World War One altered the commercial circuits and generated an economical-agricultural exporter crisis. The foreign capitals baked down on their entered to the country.
The crisis unleashed from 1919 and which is prolonged in the 1930’s set out a change related to the economy. The state takes part more openly and adopts some financial measurements and a series of organizations to support the exporter sectors, for instance, the Banco Central, the board of grains, the board of meat, wine and cotton. Their job was to buy the production at fixed prices in order to protect exportation. A series of public works were implemented creating the national highway administration. The treaty Roca-Runciman had a great repercussion, with this treaty England had to maintain the amount of meat that they bought to Argentina, at the same time, Argentina guaranteed a safe market for England’s exportations and services, and it also gave a benevolent treaty to British enterprises assuring their interests. They also assured to Britain the monopoly of the public services, for instance, the tranvias anglo. In these years industrialization by substitution of importations that concentrated in Buenos Aires, Gran Buenos Aires and in the rich areas of the littoral was produced, strengthening the regional imbalance that the agricultural economy had generated.
In 1922 an episode called 'the Agrarian Matter' was produced when the farmers of Alcorta village faced the landowners and decided to use the strike as an instrument of protest. During their struggle they demanded a better period of contracting, a lowered in the prices of the rent and of the percentage of the production that had to be given to “aparceros” and “exenciones” of taxes. The strike was spread to the south of Santa Fe, south of Córdoba and north and west of Buenos Aires. In July of 1912 the Federación Agraria Argentina (FAA, Argentine Agrarian Federation) was organized. It was an organization of the chacareros which were on strike which helped them to improve their contracts.
During the Peronist stage (1946-1955) the tendency of the state intervention to the economy continued and it also extended. Two important institutions arose, the Banco de Crédito Industrial, which gave credits to PyMes, and the Instituto Argentino para la Promoción del Intercabio (IAPI), which controlled the exterior commerce buying the harvests and selling them in the intern markets and, and at the same time, it was in charge of buying merchandise in the exterior.
In this stage, the Argentine government created and bought a group of enterprises that transformed the state into businessman, for instance, Somisa, or the growth of military fabrications, the nationalization of the railways, telephones, which had great importance as symbols of sovereignty. From 1949 on, the march of the economy began to get difficult since the state had spent great reservations of currencies with which the country counted after the Second World War. It had great difficulties to face the payment balance, it accepted its capacity of importation and this affected the industrial activity which depended on the importation of basic consumables, as the petrol and steel, equipment and spares.
In 1952 the government proclaimed a new five-year plan which persecuted the fall of consume, the support to the agricultural production, the control of the salary demands and the opening to foreign capital. In 1955 this government was overthrown by a coup d’état, and in 1958 Frondizi took the presidency, he was candidate of the UCRI (Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente). An economical plan which wanted to impulse the heavy industry (metallurgy, iron and steel sector, petrochemical) was proposed with the contribution of foreign capital and technology investments, this plan also wanted to modernize the countryside improving the mechanization of rural works and raising the production of the sector. Between 1959 and 1962 the foreign inversions grew spectacularly. Over 60% were of American origin and the 66% of the total concentrated on the petrochemical industry and in the production of tractors and cars. In 1962 the president was overthrown by the military forces.
In 1966 a new coup d'etat ended with the presidency of Illia, who was from the Radical party, and imposed as President the General Onganía. That same year, the Economy Minister, Krieger Basana, proposed the new economical measurements. He devaluated the peso in order to reduce the financial pressure and he wanted to incentivize the industrial activity offering loans, he established retentions to the agricultural exportations and diminished the prices of importations. In 1970 Onganía retired and in 1973 Cámpora took on the presidency, he belonged to the FREJULI party (Frente Justicia Unión y Libertad, Justice Union and Liberty Front).
The coup of 1976 sets the idea of the intervention of the state in order to secure the free market, to attract foreign inversions that had to reactivate the economy of the country, to provide facilities to the entering of imported products, and the financial market was liberalized. The UIA (Unión Industrial Argentina, Argentine Industrial Union) faced the Economy Minister Martinez de Hoz because he was against their interests. The SRA (Sociedad Rural Argentina) stayed close to the military government although it had some conflicts with the damages that the dollar value generated to the importations.
The successive democratic governments: Alfonsin’s, Menem’s and so on, could not stop the continuum economical and social crisis, and the increase of poverty, which finally broke out in 2001, this was the reason why President De la Rua resigned the presidency. After a period of presidential successions, in 2003 Nestor Kirchner was elected president, and then, in 2007 his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who positioned her government as a continuum of the government of Néstor Kirchner, was elected president. In 2008 shortly after Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took the presidency a confrontation with the countryside representatives took place. The conflict arose when the government impulsed a series of mobile retentions to the grain exportations, which had as an objective to eliminate the impact of the international values over the internal market. The economy minister, Martín Lousteau, made public the sketch of the mobile retentions, flour, oil, chicken, pork and even milk entered into the sketch of analysis of the government and in the drawing of a new price scenery, in which incentives and more retentions would be part of the government resolutions. The original thing was that, since the resolution, a mechanism of mobile retentions would look that the net price of the exporter continued being approximately the same, although the international value moved violently upwards or downwards.
When these public measurements were made public diverse countryside organizations reacted with a lockout. The four rural entities announced the continuity of the protest and the conflict seemed to enter into a dead end. The CARBAP (Confederación de Asociaciones Rurales de Buenos Aires y La Pampa) rejected the constant and increasing tax to the agricultural sector and considerate the increase of the retentions as a new abuse from the government. Our country was divided between people who supported the government and the opposition.
Finally the conflict reached the parliament, in the deputy chamber the resolution was approved, but when it reached senators chamber it was draw (empate) and the one who broke the deadlock (desempatar) was the vice president Julio Cobos, who consolidated an institutional fracture and, as a consequence, the president Cristina Kirchner removed the resolution.
In conclusion, it can be seen that there was an uneven model of growth which benefited the Pampa Húmeda but not the rest of the country. There was also the creation of an economical dependant model which became more pronounced with the government of Peron, it consisted on the industrialization by substitution of importations. From the 1960s on the policies which tended to transform the country in an industrialized one incremented. This modernizer or developing model would reach some rates of growth but it also would suffer different disruptions because of the continuum political crisis and also because of the alternation between civil and military governments. With the coup of 1976, self denominated “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional”, the economy minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz generated a change placing as dynamic sector of the economy the financial sector.
In the year 2008, the government established a project of retentions to the agricultural activity which was rejected by the federations which nucleated the sector and divided the society between those who supported the government with this measure, and the opposition, which supported the agricultural sector. The parliament rejected the resolution and the government decided to remove it. Although this produced a diminution in the conflict, it is still latent nowadays.
Bibliography:
Vázquez, Alonso. (1999). Historia de la Argentina Contemporánea. Ed. Aique Polimodal.
Recalde, Héctor. (2000). La Argentina Contemporánea- desde la caída de Rosas hasta la presidencia de Menem. Ed. Aula taller.
