The end of Argentine Beef as we know it?

This is truly sad news, fans of Carne Argentina.

I'm speaking to those fans of that lean, flavorful, organic-by-default, low LDL, high HDL, 1/3 the calories, no hormones, no antibiotics, crazy-good red stuff that puts everything to shame back home.

Please believe me. This is really happening:

I've spoken before of the crisis that exists for those here that persist in producing the traditional free-range grass-fed beef for which La República is so rightly famous... now my seeming rant is, lastimadamente, being noted even in the foreign press.

With the Kirchner administration's announcement that it will subsidize US-style feedlot beef, virtually every link in the food chain will be receiving assistance from the federal government except traditional beef producers.

Don't take my word for it...you can easily verify this yourself.

This is simply insult to injury when you consider that beef producers now operate under restrictions like NO other part of Argentine agriculture (slaughter-weight, export limits, price control campaigns, etc.)

Now with "free" corn for the US-style feedlot producers...the next big beef story may well be the droves of estancieros that will be putting their land to other uses. ANY other uses.

In fact, Mrs. Yanqui Mike and I are penning the last few details for a conversion of 100 to 300 hectares to corn or soy production. That will blow all of the organic bragging rights that we have for all of our cattle because of the close proximity to the agro-toxins that come with it.

The lovely Ms. TangoinherEyes once asked me, in response to a Gancia-flavored description of mine, why I don't explain more of the differences between Argentine beef and what we were all raised-on in Norte América.

I told her that I didn't think people would be very interested.

My Sitemeter, however, tells me otherwise. My traffic goes up in response to cow / beef / pampas posts.

Feedlot beef is disgusting, tastes bad, horrible for cows, and is bad for your health!

Leave me a comment if you want some more on this subject.

You are NUTS...

...if you are not reading the tremendous blog from Rosario, "D for Disorientation". Punto. Chau. Basta.

(Hee hee... maybe you'll start picking up "Barcelona" off your local newsstand, too! It's good for your Castellano. It's like a cross between the Onion and Weekly World News.)

Hands down, there is simply NO replacement for Pablo Flores' blog among us angloparlantes.

Stop not reading him!

Force him to put a Paypal Donate button on his site. Then start sending him money everyday so that he can continue and increase his efforts. Shut up and do it.

He is informed, erudite, and non-BsAs centric. He's vitamin P...and your health suffers without it.

Audio-The Inflation Thang in Argentina

Back from the campo...and what do I see in my inbox? La Argentina in the yanqui media again!

This one has audio and you can get it here.

If you've been following the local papers you already know that it's a big story for a couple of reasons: the inflation that expats usually DON'T notice and the fact that Argentina issues inflation indexed bonds.

Maybe I'm like you...it takes literally years of increases in the price of the delicious produce here for me to personally, finally take note of it. It goes without saying that local families take note much earlier.

Secondly, La República derives a lot of income from government issued bonds that are indexed to Argentine inflation. These bonds can be traded because of the confidence in the government's inflation figures that regulate their relative value in the market.

This controversy began last year when the final 2006 figures for inflation here came in just a wee tad below the double digit level. That was a mighty achievement for an economy that, truth be told, was probably growing faster than China (China's growth figures are largely suspect because of the Chinese propensity for exaggeration...Argentina's growth figures are taken cum grano salis for the local tradition of not wanting anyone to know how much money you REALLY make.) Last month's figures for inflation here seemed to many a continuation of last year's suspected low-ball.

Bueno. When you're growing this fast inflation is something that you'll have to expect and deal with...and Kirchner's administration is taking very big steps to deal with it (sometimes a little TOO BIG as far as we in the cow bidness are concerned.)

The yanqui audio is a little too shallow and too provincial to describe what's happening down here but, hey-what-the-hell, we are on the other side of the planet after all.

However, what could have been mentioned in the piece, imho, is that just the mention of how the "I" word wreaks havoc in the hearts and minds of Argentines anywhere above the age of 45 or so.

In order to be fair to Kirchner... and be fair to our foreign intellects... we need to understand.

When we yanquis speak of inflation-South-American-style... we're speaking of Argentina and what began to happen here about 30 years ago. While our President Ford was handing out "WIN" buttons (whip inflation now), Argentina's inflation rate exceeded 300%.

In 1985 the rate here was 672%

Ford was faced with a seemingly undefeatable +12% inflation rate. Double-digies, baby, for the first time in American history.

I (maybe you, either) can't begin to fathom 100%, 200%, 300% inflation rates... they say that one month it was 1000%.

My wife helped me TRY and understand it: imagine that you own a shop, you buy the things for sale in your shop at what you consider a fair wholesale price... you put price tags on your stuff and sell them for what you consider a fair retail price. Simple, eh?

But what happens if you don't know, can't tell anymore, what a fair price is? When running around like CRAZY changing price-tags doesn't work anymore...

...you just don't open your doors.

Yep. During those years here, shops full of merch wouldn't open. Because they feared that at the end of the day they would have ended up selling everything at less than what they were worth.

Sorry, that was a long description. But the Marketplace Radio piece really didn't do justice to the fear that inflation strikes in the hearts of voters here.

I like K. I have some big disagreements with some of K's policies.

The political memory here of inflation, however, makes it almost irresistible to keep your presidential thumb off this particular scale... no matter what the bond market says.

Argentina shuns Mr. Torture

No high-level Argentine official would meet with him, in repudiation for his role U.S. the treatment of terrorist suspects.

www.watchingamerica.com

Latin America wary of new U.S. attention

The diplomatic drive is seen as an effort to counter the influence of Chavez.

By Patrick J. McDonnell, LA Times Staff Writer
February 12, 2007

BUENOS AIRES — The Bush administration's self-proclaimed "year of engagement" with Latin America kicked off last week with broadsides against Venezuela and Iran, a diplomatic tiff with Argentina and analysts wondering whether it all wasn't a little late in the game.

"A veritable diplomatic offensive by a government that has only concentrated on Iraq," wrote veteran correspondent Gustavo Sierra in the Argentine newspaper Clarin after a visit here by R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of State for political affairs, and Thomas A. Shannon, the administration's top diplomat for Latin America.

The pair also visited Brazil, and U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales made a separate visit last week to Argentina and Brazil. The White House confirmed that President Bush would venture to Latin America in March, with stops scheduled in Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico.

The moves are widely seen in South America as an effort to counter the influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has wooed his fellow leaders with oil subsidies, foreign aid and a steady diet of invective targeting "the devil" Bush.

It has become conventional wisdom here, even among U.S. allies, that the Bush administration's fixation on Iraq and the Middle East has left Latin America, once the focus of Cold War conflicts, largely ignored, except for U.S. insistence on aggressive drug-interdiction and free-trade policies.

Chavez has gleefully exploited that void, which many think will widen as a politically debilitated Bush assumes lame-duck status.

The White House effort "is catch up and see what we can salvage," said David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia.

U.S. officials embraced the "year of engagement" theme after recent elections put leftists in charge in much of the region, including pro-Chavez presidents in Ecuador and Bolivia. Conservative and pro-U.S. administrations were elected in key allies Colombia and Mexico.

The Bush administration says it has an ability to work across the ideological spectrum.

"Coming out of 2006, we thought it was very important to start 2007 very quickly with as many trips into the region at as high a level as possible," Burns said in Washington before leaving for South America.

Although U.S. diplomats insisted that the initiative was not intended to counter Chavez's spreading influence, the subject has inevitably flared.

"Frankly, you have to wonder if Chavez's plan is to become president for life," Burns told reporters here.

Most analysts are skeptical that the anti-Chavez strategy will bear fruit in places such as Brazil and Argentina, where leftist presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Nestor Kirchner, respectively, have eschewed Chavez's anti-Washington rhetoric but have welcomed Venezuela into the South American trade bloc known as Mercosur.

Chavez has used the platform to criticize U.S. policies, as he did at a hemispheric trade enclave in Argentina in 2005, when a flustered Bush was unable to craft a new free-trade zone, to Chavez's delight.

"In private, some leaders may express concern about Chavez, but publicly there is a sense of unity among South American countries in defending sovereignty and resisting efforts to divide the hemisphere," said Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American studies program at Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. diplomats' trip to Argentina also provided an opportunity to lash out at another U.S. antagonist — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Chavez ally whose Latin American tour last month clearly upset the White House. Ahmadinejad was pictured kissing babies while in Nicaragua for the inauguration of President Daniel Ortega, a Cold War adversary of the Reagan administration.

"There is a concern that if Iran, through Chavez, is making a presence in the U.S. backyard, then that needs to be dealt with," said Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington study group.

The U.S. diplomats visited the site of a Buenos Aires Jewish cultural center targeted in a 1994 bombing that Argentina and Israel say was linked to Iran. Tehran denies any involvement, but U.S. officials have voiced strong support for Argentina's efforts to extradite former Iranian officials, including ex-President Hashemi Rafsanjani, in connection with the blast, which killed 85 people and wounded 200.

Jewish leaders in Argentina, home to the region's largest Jewish population, applauded the U.S. effort. Luis Grynwald, who heads the rebuilt Jewish center here, called it "a symbol of the action we all have to take against international terrorism."

Critics were quick to assail Washington's human rights record, citing abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. All have fanned anti-U.S. sentiment in a region where Washington's previous interventions and alliances with military dictatorships remain fresh in the collective memory.

The left-leaning Argentine newspaper Pagina 12 mocked Burns' assertion that the Bush administration was "a champion of human rights" and that it supported the Argentine government's efforts to try abusers from past military regimes.

"If Burns' lack of memory of the proved responsibility of the United States in the successive military coups that devastated Latin America in the decade of the 1970s was notorious, worse was his omission of the situation in Guantanamo," the newspaper said, referring to the detention of terrorism suspects on the base.

Also marring the diplomats' visits were hard feelings about pressure from the U.S. ambassador on behalf of an investment fund's push for a share of a major power transmission company. Argentina rejected the U.S. firm's bid, and Burns termed the whole issue a misunderstanding.

Kirchner, Argentina's president, posed for photos with the U.S. envoys but generally distanced himself. It was not lost on the political class here that Bush will skip Argentina next month, but visit tiny Uruguay, just across the Rio de la Plata. Kirchner is weighing a reelection bid this year, and analysts say that being seen as too cozy with Washington is not smart politics.

---

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Andrés D'Alessandro of The Times' Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.

El Sitio de la Nada

I cribbed a terrific line from a local blogger to commemorate the reopening of the Britanico that included a quote from the great Argentine musician Spinetta.

While I linked to his post, I didn't mention his blog: El Sitio de la Nada.

For that, I'd like to make amends. Fero has a way with words. ¡El sitio es una excusa bárbara para practicar tu castellano!

Whaddam I gonna do with all this beef?

In case you were wondering what I was talking about in my most recent post to mention beef, you can read a little from the cattlenetwork.com (yes, darling. There IS a cattlenetwork.com) which puts up a wire from Dow Jones on the sad state of the beef producer in La Argentina.

The average Argentine eats about 66 kilograms of beef, the highest rate of consumption in the world. In March, President Nestor Kirchner banned all beef exports to prevent soaring domestic and international demand from pushing beef prices up. The restrictions were progressively eased and now exports are limited to about 70% of 2005 levels. In addition, the government has been circulating a list of reference prices for certain cuts, which vendors at the nation's principal slaughterhouse, Liniers, are "recommended" to honor.

However, volumes at Liniers have plunged, as farmers turn to smaller regional markets or are withholding stocks due to the price controls.

In January, just 85,698 cattle were processed at Liniers, compared to 151,579 during the same period last year, according to the Agriculture Secretariat.

Those last two figures should give you an idea of how bad it's gotten. We're doing the same thing...withholding animals from sale and selling at more local auctions rather than send them to the tremendous old Mercado de Liniers up in the Buenos Aires barrio de Mataderos.

If I was K, I might be doing something along the same lines... hoping that maybe the ranches will eventually fill up with so many cows that there will be enough to both export and keep local prices low.

But I can't help but think that this will hurt the industry in the long run. If the day comes when the Aussies take the title of world's biggest beef eaters (they already are the world's biggest meat eaters) I can't help but think that the current policy won't be considered to have backfired.

I have no idea if it's related or not but I have not been able to buy a fine bife de chorizo in my cheto supermarket for the last few days.

Argentina's beef producers reduced investment by $300 million in 2006, down 33% from a year earlier, according to the Argentine Rural Society, or SRA.

Beef producers have cut investment in infrastructure, pastures, genetics, fertilizers and other inputs in response to the government measures, according to the SRA.

Anybody wanna buy a cow?

Bar Britanico is Back

Buenos Aires (soul of stone, said Spinetta) today closed a wound. As of today, the "lady" with the golden heart is back...albeit without the old gallegos. The monkey-bidness had crossed a line with the old guys, I'm guessing... so they crossed their's... back to the old country.

¡Free coffee today! Wanna go?

Coffee in Buenos Aires

The latest in what should be a regular series here: Coffee in Buenos Aires.

Bill Soukoreff weighs in with a critical tongue on a happy experience at Café Martinez... the first post I've seen in a long time that actually makes an attempt at identifying the best cup in town. I gave it a shot back in September but mostly from a "home-brew" perspective.

I hope that we've all simply been lulled into the fine porteño attitude that coffee is something to chat over with a dear friend and that's it's rarely bad and almost always tasty... especially when the friend is dear and it's served with the usual care by a pro waiter with tray and towel and a little soda and some tasty masitas. Not to even mention how much more relaxed the experience is without being seated across from a line of impatients waiting to get their jolt in a paper cup so that they can get back to running.

However, there has to be a certain contingent of expats here that haven't given up their demanding aficionado ways as regards what's actually in the cup!

Meself, I admit to being at a cozy state with what must be one of the better coffee cities that the planet has to offer... if the java pulls up a little lame, well, that's ok... if nothing else I can reach over the tasa and pat myself on the back that we live in the last remaining megapolis not to sport a major paper-cup outlet. (Contrary to popular belief, the Seattle chain is all over South America... just not here, yet.)

But as most folks know, when the stuff is sublime... it's SUBLIME.

So, if you feel like sharing your favorite joint and why you regard it so highly, please chime in.

Don't forget to include some places that have deteriorated (my nominee would have to be the Café de París, where Avenida Santa Fe loses it's name at Plaza San Martín... qué vergüenza, they even have a neon sign in the window now that says, "open".)

I'll kick things off by recommending la confitería Esmeralda at Juramento 2121/25 (4781-8866) Be careful, though; apparently "Esmeralda" is a common name for cafés. This one is in Belgrano not far from Chinatown. The place makes most of it's rev, I'm told, from catering. Maybe that's why it can keep the old storefront going in the fine style it's been accustomed to since the 30's.

All the accoutrement are there as well... especially the masitas, the little cookie-things that you invariably receive along with the coffee and water. I have no sweet tooth. However, Buenos Aires has sold me on the necessity of these lovely little things. Nobody does them better.

Furthermore, the coffee is so good that the Yanq forswears beer when there. Not such a tremendous oath, you might say. But get this: the masitas saladas, the salty ones, are the best on Earth. I believe that I've encountered their savory little bastards in the finest hotels in town.

WAIT! One more thing. I'm always curious about prices. A great cuppa in BsAs has always cost about a peso more than the so-so stuff. In the 3 years that I've been here, I've noticed the price of a the best dobles go from about $5 to $7 or more.

Rockefeller Center Program in Chile Closes

“There must have been something about Chile that I really liked,” he said.

But this semester, no Harvard students have chosen the same path.

The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), which since 2002 has placed dozens of Harvard undergraduates in Chile for its study abroad program, has decided to put the program on hold this semester due to a lack of applicants.

But undergraduates might apply to Argentina over Chile because Buenos Aires is a “more European city” than Santiago, said Kim.

“It’s known for its beef and leather and tango,” she said of Buenos Aires. “It’s just much more of a tourist destination than Santiago.”

Los Kirchner in the Yanqui Press Again

Nothing new in Salon's wire service page if you take a look at the local papers occasionally... but it was fun to discover just about anything about Argentina in the angloparlante media besides how people are moving to Buenos Aires.

"With both Kirchners doing well in the polls, they've been floating the idea that she should run to replace him while he's still in office....

...Why would Kirchner step aside as president at the height of his popularity?

One clue lies in Argentina's constitution: incumbents are barred from seeking consecutive re-election more than once, so if Cristina Kirchner wins the presidency, there's a possibility they can do this again -- handing the job back to him, and then maybe to her again, for a total of 16 years in power.

This would solve the lame-duck problem most second-term presidents face."

That I'm of two minds about K shouldn't surprise anyone, I guess.

Sitting here in Buenos Aires, I generally like his economic policies and consider his civil rights record and dealing with former represores to be damned impressive.

As a beef producer, on the other hand, my particular ox is gored. Personally, we are very lucky not to be damaged by the government's price controls, export restrictions, taxes on exported beef and slaughter weight rules.

It felt like insult to injury, however, when he decided to increase the export taxes on the soja boom...and redistribute the proceeds to every agricultural sector but cattle ranchers.

There is something of a general strike going on in the campo among the producers.

No Let-up on the Heat this Weekend

(El Clarín) "El Servicio Meteorológico Nacional estimates that today the temperature will climb to 36ºC/96.8ºF today and tomorrow's high will be 33ºC/91.4ºF. Any relief won't arrive until after Tuesday.

You'll have to get used to it. the exhausting heat in the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires will continue through the weekend. The SMN announced that it predicts the temperature will reach 36º. The service announced that as of tonight, the weather will be unstable, with winds out of the north. In any case, this air mass will not lower the temperature. Tomorrow will be variably cloudy with winds predominately from the north. Tomorrow's low will be around 25ºC/77ºF with high temperature of 33º. For Monday, SMN forecasts somewhat lower temperatures with at low of 22ºC/71.6ºF and a high of 30ºC/86ºF. Skies will be partly cloudy and will continue to be unstable. Tuesday's forecast calls for a low of 22º with a high temperature of 33º."

February is Democrats Abroad Month in Argentina

...I don't know how I forgot to mention that yesterday!

At any rate, as we're all back from las vacaciones and putting our schedules back together, please try to leave open a sunny afternoon or one of these lovely evenings to meet with me and and some other good people whose hearts are on the correct side.

If you haven't joined yet...it couldn't be easier. Just click here.

Once you've joined...it gets even easier! We need nothing more than your vote.

Curiously, Argentina has never been represented in the worldwide caucus of the Democratic Party which includes over 6 million US voters in 70 countries.

So we'll be making a bit of history...and leaving something behind.

Become a founding member. We need 50. Go to the form today! Yea!