When the camp was about to complete a week, a particular group appeared, essential in a province like Misiones: the yerba mate producers, who are going through a crisis in which the consequences of national policies appear. All this despite going through a historic harvest season, after the drought.
But the DNU 70, which took away the power to regulate prices from the National Yerba Mate Institute, putting production in check. And something else: as soon as the harvest season began in March, The State opened imports. Now they must compete with what comes from Paraguay and Brazil where they pay less taxes.
“We have a very good production but if weed continues to come in from somewhere else, the producer is going to keep his weed on the farm,” warns from Misiones. Luis Grezak, president of the Aristóbulo del Valle herbal cooperative. The group waits in a state of permanent assembly for the provincial and national state to react, in the midst of the social outbreak.
Yerba, crisis and deregulation
The vast majority of missionary producers come from a family tradition of harvesting yerba mate along with other activities such as planting tea or raising sheep on small plots of one, five or ten hectares. Large producers who monopolize larger portions of land are the exception.
For this reason, the blow to the National Yerba Mate Institute, which remains headless and without activities, had a direct impact on their lives. «This deregulation causes us to enter a panorama of uncertainty where there is no pricing for raw materials, industries determine what price they want to pay and what terms they want to do so, and This has a direct impact on the family economy of the producers but also of the rural workers, there is a social impact«says agronomist Iván Sand, producer of the Yerbal Viejo cooperative in Colonia Guaraní.
In their case, they harvested the first months and now they stopped «because one works at a loss. “Activity in this way is unsustainable, what is sought with this is to move us.”
The National Yerba Mate Institute was created by law 20 years ago and established a dialogue table to set the price of the raw material. The role was not only intervention to regulate prices, also provided financing to producers for the purchase of machinery and equipment, generated training for producers, financed scientific research on the protection of soil and water; It made known the benefits of yerba mate, promoted the habit of its consumption in schools and guaranteed the quality of the yerba.
According to Sand, In 2023, $505 was requested for the green leaf “but as activity is deregulated, the industrial sectors are no longer obliged to form the table and sit down, so they began paying 370 in March (below the 2023 price) and on the day of Today they are paying approximately between 315 and 270 pesos. In parallel, equipment and supplies such as fertilizers did not stop increasing.
Sand warns about another consequence of the deregulation of the value of raw materials. «Industries do not come only for a cheap raw material, they come for an extremely important resource that producers have, which is the ownership of the land. When they defund the producer, he will have to abandon his farm and sell it. And who is able to buy it?«. One more example of what happens when the State moves away and the market concentrates. Meanwhile, Misiones burns.
