Exporters of oranges and mandarins, primarily those from Entre Rios and Corrientes, demanded the national and provincial authorities do something to help the citrus industry deal with their trade and economic problems. They also said that the only options they had were to either go out of existence or to give away their fruit as a last resort.
Mariano Caprarulo, director of the Chamber of Exporters of Citrus from Argentina's Northwest (CECNEA), said the pear and apple production crisis is a mirror of the citrus crisis.
On the radio, Caprarulo said they had never received the financial aid they were promised in February, after they they had met in Buenos Aires with the highest authorities of the Ministry of Agricultural Industry.
"In February, we travelled with the governor and met with Ricardo Negri, the Secretary of Agriculture, and with Minister Ricardo Buryaile. At that moment we were promised loans of 100 million pesos for one year in order to export 1,500 million pesos, which was very important for the region, but nothing was done," he said.
Caprarulo said the cultivation and marketing of citrus were in a bottleneck.
He acknowledged that "there are lots of programmes - ads for SMEs, a programme for productive recovery, and institutional strengthening; but they are all initiatives for the medium and long term. Nobody at the national or provincial level is doing anything to make the activity profitable."
He also stated that, at present, when the producers of the Upper Rio Negro Valley are protesting, "nobody answers the phone; not the governor, nor the minister, or the president. Additionally, the Minister of Agro Industry, Ricardo Buryaile is lying to us."
The manager of the Chamber of Exporters of Citrus from Argentina's Northwest questioned "the lack of effective policies to restore the profitability of the regional economies and to finance the producers after six years of crisis."
Source: laprensa.com.ar