In the three months since threatening to strike and withhold soybean exports in February, the leaders of Argentina's agricultural groups — the Argentine Rural Society, the Argentine Rural Confederation, the Inter-Cooperative Agricultural Confederation and the Argentine Agriculture Federation — reached a consensus to negotiate with the government as a single entity through the Mesa de Enlace. The coalition has also been busy gauging the demands of its various constituencies and their willingness to participate in public protests. And in Buenos Aires on May 28, alongside the city's mayor, Mauricio Macri, coalition leaders launched a "national protest plan" against the federal government's agricultural policies.
It has long been Argentine government policy to negotiate individually with the agricultural groups and to avoid collective talks, but that strategy may now be outdated. Despite the government's best efforts to fracture the coalition, the Mesa de Enlace appears to be holding together and will likely negotiate as a single entity. To avoid massive protests, the government may indeed adjust its strategy and enter into negotiations with the confederation, but such a move would not represent a genuine change of course or openness to reform. Instead, it would be primarily a tactic to buy time and attempt to delay the protests — ideally until after the October elections.
Differences from 2008 Protests
The Mesa de Enlace will likely find it difficult to coordinate a protest movement of the same magnitude as the one in 2008, when five months of steadily building protests culminated with some 250,000 demonstrators taking to the streets. Then, a proposed increase in agricultural export taxes gave protesters a clear issue to rally around. Considering the diverse array of protester demands this time around, organizers are facing a more complicated task.
Foremost among the issues are inflation and price controls, which the government has implemented on certain foodstuffs in select supermarkets throughout Argentina. While these measures hold prices for consumers constant, production costs still increase with inflation, which is reportedly higher than 30 percent in the country. Increasing transportation and energy costs, combined with a heavy tax burden, are further reducing the competitiveness of the agriculture sector. Unlike 2008's export tax issue, which affected only agricultural exporters, inflation and price controls negatively affect a much broader cross-section of the population. Thus, the task of agricultural groups in the coming weeks will be to present the problem in a way that is specific enough to not be confused with general economic malaise, but broad enough to generate support from a wide array of social and economic sectors.
With Argentina's midterm legislative elections in October nearing, this year's protest movement will also include a political component that was absent in 2008. The country's opposition is divided, and opposition politicians can be expected to attempt to leverage the agricultural protests for political gain. For example, just a week after announcing that protests are looming, Eduardo Buzzi said he is considering running for office in the October elections. This suggests that even if the Mesa de Enlace succeeds in getting the government to negotiate, the political utility of the protests for some of the groups' leaders may prolong the unrest to various degrees for the next five months. In 2008, the farmers succeeded in defeating the export tax increase by causing large-scale disturbances in Buenos Aires. This year, the challenge for Buzzi and the Mesa de Enlace will be to prevent the protests from becoming overtly politicized and to maintain public focus on the economic issues.
Knowing that it cannot dramatically redefine its economic policy just months before the election, the government will try to buy time by offering the coalition piecemeal reforms without significantly changing the structure of the economy. Nevertheless, the persistence of Argentina's economic challenges despite the Fernandez administration's best efforts to control them indicates that additional and more substantial course corrections may be inevitable after the vote.
