Uruguay and Brazil celebrate suspension of Argentina beef exports

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Argentina continues to go in the opposite direction of the rest of the world. While the country’s government enforces restrictions on meat exports, its competitors take advantage of the opportunity to reposition themselves in the markets it has neglected.

The arguments supporting the restrictive measures were made public this week by Vice President Cristina Fernández. In her social networks, she highlighted a report by TN TV channel on the price of meat. In the video, a butcher points out that prices have not increased for the last two months, after having climbed more than 100% year-on-year.

According to official theories, with this type of measure the government seeks to control domestic prices to prevent inflation from skyrocketing.

What they fail to point out is that this artificial brake on meat prices has led to the dismissal of 400 workers linked to the activity and the reduction of overtime -a hard blow to the pockets of a little over 6,000 workers linked to slaughterhouses in a large part of the country. According to data from the meat sector, losses caused by these measures could reach US$1 billion.

But yesterday two neighbors once again showed Argentina that, often, the official story has little to do with reality. On the one hand, Uruguayan President Lacalle Pou announced that in the first 8 months of 2021 beef exports to China grew 205% and that these sales accounted for 60% of total exports of this type of product. The accumulated inflation in Uruguay, in these first 8 months of the year, stood at 6.2%.

Something similar occurred in Brazil. Foreign sales of beef in the first 8 months of the year totaled US$6.2 billion, a growth of 15% compared to the same period of 2020. Accumulated inflation for this part of the year reached 5.5%.

These two regional examples show that there is no direct link between prices on the shelves and a country’s meat exports. Clearly, the Argentine government is wrongly assessing how meat consumption conditions can be improved.

Thus, the results are not the ones desired by the implemented public policies. For the time being, measures that failed in the 70’s are being implemented in a meat market with no relation to that time in Argentina and in the world.