Barely a few weeks have passed since the appeal by slaughterhouses in the province of Santa Fe, but Milei’s government decided to leverage the opening and announced the cancellation of duties on the export of tanning raw material. With a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger, the Casa Rosada is set to resolve a form of state control “that has devastated the potential of a premium export sector in the country”.
Cancels duties on leather
The premises, summarizes the minister himself, are part of a system devised in the 1990s to formally open up previously prohibited exports, but which in fact made the price of Argentina’s tanning raw material too high for international players. Now that the system is being dismantled, reactions to the various steps in the meat-hide supply chain are mixed. Sergio Pedace, vice president of CAMyA (an association of slaughterhouses and suppliers) rejoices.
“It ends a market distortion”, he comments to the local press, which not only complicated life for farmers, but increased their operating costs and ended in the nonsense of “having to destroy unsold hides”. A breath of fresh air in this economic phase, he notes, when slaughtering more units will be needed to meet the growing domestic and foreign demand for meat. Yet, the mood is quite different among Argentine tanners, as they used to benefit from the protection system. Marcos Galperin, of the Sadesa tanning group, complains that the sector is now exposed to new pressures. While liberalist Milei responds with a quote from the anarcho-capitalist Murray Newton Rothbard: “It’s easy to be empathetic when others pay the costs”.
Photo from Shutterstock
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