Food! ...it's what for dinner!

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the subject of food can arouse passions. A tremendous asado, delicate young spring greens, fine old cheese, a heady new malbec can bring strong men to tears. People get passionate about what they put in their mouths. Nothing new there.

The surprising/sudden aspect of these recent passions is that they are expressed regarding a shortage of food. Ever since the "Green Revolution" cheap food has been common and famine more a problem of logistics than the old specters of drought and pests.

But now there's a shortage of food ...not in Argentina! ...but there is a worldwide dwindling of the most basic, low-on-the-foodchain, stuffs that feed us and feed the animals that feed us.

In countries that now have little or none of the stuff that keeps us alive there is already major unrest. Here in one of the world's great breadbaskets we have unrest as well. There is no contradiction in that.

The challenge is the allocation of this short supply of food, the protection of our current blessings, and the protection of our production.

I believe it unfair for other nations to suck all the beef out of Argentina simply because their currency is currently stronger than the Argentine peso. I have said that here and in public whenever I meet people that are opposed to any sort of government price controls or export restrictions or have some neo-conservative delusion regarding "free-trade" (which is really not anything of the sort but more like labor-arbitrage.)

I have been happy and proud to accept less for my cows in the knowledge that not only am I part of a community that helps feed the world but also helps maintain the culture of the country that so generously adopted me.

There is a certain pride as well that I feel sometimes when I stop to consider that agriculture has played such a strong roll in helping Argentina recover from the crisis of 2002, helped the government increase public spending while gathering great stores of foreign exchange, and generally govern from a position of strength here and abroad.

Nothing surprised me when, because of these restrictions on agriculture, I saw the men and women of the campo adapt and increase their efficiency, abandoning many of the old ways and adopting the latest thinking and techinques developed both here and abroad.

As worldwide prices for foodstuffs increased tremendously, we in the countryside felt that not only would we continue to contribute to the equally tremendous recovery of the Argentine economy ...but that we would also be able to partake in the world markets along side the other great producers of food.

Not all of my fellow campo-capitalistas felt so altruistic ...but in light of the coming high prices, past offenses were quickly becoming forgotten.

High expectations. When high expectations are crushed it always feels worse than when hopes were not so heady.

The government's tax increases are not draconian. They are incremental and progress on a sliding scale and take into consideration the prices established in that big art deco building at the foot of far-away La Salle Street ...you know, the one with the giant aluminum statue of the Goddess of Grain on top.

The timing of the export tax increases appeared to be almost designed to be incendiary.

The new tax was announced/imposed at harvest... ostensibly to impress upon farmers and ranchers that they should diversify their production so that all of us in Argentina can have something besides Cargill Soyburgers and Archer Daniels Midland Vodka for dinner (Something I've lamented in these pages, too!)

But farmers and ranchers knew that export taxes could not possibly change plants that were already ready to be harvested. These "reasonable" export tax increases could have been instituted after harvest if their purpose was to influence a diversity of production.

This sudden shock to the high expectations of producers here not only crushed their plans for more investment in their fields (and, yes, a bit of a higher standard of living, too) but felt punitive. The timing made them feel they were being punished ...not being influenced to produce a wider variety of foods. The tax felt confiscatory in light of the timing and the first high prices on the international market in decades.

The lack of psychology in this land of psychiatry was what astounded me.

Almost forgotten complaints about the heavy hand toward agriculture were suddenly remembered ...and any feeling of having been a partner in the recovery of the Argentine economy were dashed.

Apparently, to those producers, they were going to be treated as a cash-cow ...never to be allowed to enjoy a windfall of foreign money like so many other industries.

Flooding back to mind came the treatment of beef producers with the price controls and export restrictions that (until this week!) made beef cheaper than even chicken ...and forced pastureland into corn, soy, and sunflower for cooking oil.

The condition of dairymen, a great number of them now soybean farmers, was remembered again and how the government used the few big milk buyers to enforce price controls that forced them out of the business and sent the price of butter in France thru the ceiling (manteca a través el techo!)

They saw how the Truck Drivers' Union was being used as a de facto police force to clear the roads blocked by their protests ...until the drivers themselves saw the injustice of it.

Last night, on television, they saw the sudden arrival of the closely aligned piqueteros (who could have predicted!) to clear the Plaza de Mayo of ordinary working families with children with threats of violence in lieu of using the police.

Now what do we have?

We have producers even more determined to keep their products from market and even less of an integrated agricultural policy that helps the market make good decisions for the nation and keeps them from overproducing in any one area. Roadblock protests may no longer be necessary as the feeling of solidarity among them has increased dramatically. (Beef producers may not be in as good condition to cooperate: their calves are ready for sale and they have no excess feed to keep them on the ranch.)

We have farmers who might be lured back into some other production exempt from the new export taxes ...but very suspicious that whatever they produce will be subject to a sudden new decree that they are harvesting something that need to be suppressed by a new tax.

We have farmers and ranchers that simply must invest in their own lands in order to meet the growing demands of Argentina and the world ...but now will not.

Nothing anyone can do will turn my neighbors in the campo into a Socialist like me.

But our center-left government with close ties to Hugo Chavez, whom I admire very much, seems to have forgotten a saying attributed to Lenin, "A capitalist will sell his very hangman a rope."

With a little foresight, and a little cajoling, and at least some recognition that there is no replacement for food (and a big variety of it!) ...a government can easily make farmers and ranchers do/plant/raise anything they want.

In the big building on La Salle Street, they have another saying, "high prices cure high prices ...and low prices cure low prices."

Farmers and ranchers, if they feel that they are making their own decisions, will produce so much of a variety foods that they'll eventually go bankrupt (the sad history of agriculture here and everywhere.)

However, if they feel that no matter what they do, they will hit an artificial barrier ...not during the planning/planting stage ...but during their harvest, they will not invest in the production that is necessary and can come from no one else other than themselves.

Argentina has fed itself and the world for more than a century. Argentina and the world needs agriculture more than ever.

The world needs Argentina more than ever.