President Fernandez de Kirchner:
Argentina Can Be a "Food Multinational" and Feed 400-500 Million people
On May 16 from Lima, Peru, at a gathering of
European Union and Ibero-American heads of state, Argentine
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner stated that her country
has the potential to become a "Food Multinational," with the
capability of feeding between 400-500 million people. The Argentine
President's speech comes less than three weeks
before the June 3-5 summit of the FAO, for which the LaRouche
movement has been organizing with Helga Zepp-LaRouche's call to
double world food production immediately. Argentine Congressman
Alberto Cantero, interviewed by the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM)
on May 15, had also strongly supported Zepp-LaRouche's call, arguing
that Argentina could easily produce enough food to feed 400-500 million people.
In addressing the panel on "Poverty, Inequality and
Inclusion," the Argentine President recalled that 100 years ago,
her country was a raw-materials exporter which achieved the
status of the world's seventh largest economy. Today, she said,
"we are in a privileged position," but added that Argentina isn't
interested in just being a commodities producer, whose economic
cycles "are very short." Rather, "this is an opportunity, for you
[Europe] as well as for us, because you can't produce food on the
scale that we can, but we need your technology and investment."
For example, she explained, "my country of 40 million
people, can produce food for 400 or 500 million people, but we
need to do it not just with raw materials, but with a strong
value-added, to become...a food multinational, because
geographical location, climate diversity, aptitude, and also
state-of-the art technology we've developed in agriculture, has
us well-situated." The European Union and Ibero-America should
form "strategic alliances," she said, "which are useful to us
both."
President Fernandez de Kirchner also slammed the rampant
speculation in commodities, which she blamed for rising food
prices. Isn't it strange, she said, that alongside the formal
financial system, where everything is supposed to be controlled,
"a system of [private] funds had sprung up, and no one knows
where they are or how they're being used, yet they've produced
one of the biggest crisis we can remember."
Fernandez de Kirchner charged that the causes of the food
crisis are those that have also produced poverty and indigence:
speculation taking precedence over production, and profit being
valued over productive labor. Now that the financial world no
longer yields the same profits, she noted, the speculators have
moved into the area of food, without governments or multilateral
agencies, "which should have been monitoring this," doing
anything. Nor were local elites innocent here, she said. Often
they were complicit in allowing these "bad financial and economic
policies" to be imposed, or in "not having a correct policy to
counter-attack those coming from abroad."
But the issue now is not to be a victim, President Fernandez
de Kirchner said. "What's important now is for us to determine
how we got into this situation...to be able to find the
instruments and policies to reverse it."
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