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Tax pressure and instability have held back Argentine agriculture, Bayer executive says
🇦🇷 Argentina /Economy & Trade

Tax pressure and instability have held back Argentine agriculture, Bayer executive says

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Context piece
  • Bayer Southern Cone CEO Juan Farinati said Argentina’s tax burden, particularly export taxes, has led farmers to focus more on production costs than productivity.
  • He also linked economic instability to debates over purchasing, financing and payment, rather than investment returns.
  • Farinati called for a broader discussion of seed intellectual property, saying Argentina could otherwise lose about $3 billion a year in potential soybean technology gains.

Argentina’s farmers have spent too much time calculating costs and too little time asking how to produce more, according to Juan Farinati, president and CEO of Bayer Southern Cone. Speaking at the Bayer Innovation Showcase in Huxley, Iowa, Farinati said tax pressure and instability had pushed the agricultural sector into a defensive posture.

Export taxes, known locally as retenciones, have been a dominant feature of the tax burden for more than two decades. Farinati said they affected the sector not only by adding costs, but also by shifting attention toward the cost per hectare. Farmers, he argued, do not sell hectares. They sell tonnes.

The issue of tax pressure has affected the sector from different angles. Besides obviously being a cost for the sector, it has made us focus much more on cost than on productivity and on the cost of what we produce.

— Juan FarinatiFarinati described how Argentina’s tax burden has shaped agricultural decision-making.

The real calculation should combine investment with yield, he said. A farmer needs to ask how much an input costs and how much it increases production. Fertiliser, fungicides and improved crop materials could all form part of that conversation, with the goal of reducing the cost per tonne as much as possible.

The producer does not sell hectares, the producer sells tonnes.

— Juan FarinatiHe contrasted the focus on cost per hectare with the sector’s actual output-based business model.

Farinati said instability had reinforced a different set of concerns: how to buy inputs, how to pay for them and how to obtain financing. He described Argentine agriculture as inherently productive, but said the policy environment had conditioned the debate around productivity. With export taxes in place, a farmer must be more productive, not less, to remain competitive.

He also expressed optimism that Argentina is having a deeper discussion about intellectual property in seeds. Farinati said the debate should move beyond producers versus seed companies and focus on how to recover the roughly $3 billion the country loses each year because it lacks all the soybean technology it could otherwise use.

What allows me to lower my cost per tonne as much as possible? Fertilise more? Apply fungicides? Use certain materials?

— Juan FarinatiHe outlined the productivity-focused questions he wants farmers to consider.
About this summary

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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