President Alberto Fernández assured that he will not devalue the peso because “that would impoverish people,” and pointed out that the tool devised by the Central Bank to promote the sale of grains is “aimed directly at producers.”
Fernández, said -in a contact with C5N- that the Central Bank’s measure “is not aimed at the cereal companies” but “directly at the producers”, after which he stated that “it is the first time in history that we do not negotiate with the cereal companies and we go directly to the producers”.
As detailed by the President, the mechanism established by the Central establishes that “when (the producers) sell grains abroad, we are going to charge them the withholdings that exist, of 33% on soybeans” and that the pesos they receive “70% are paid in the official dollar and 30% of what they have sold as an export, I pay it to the solidarity dollar”.
In this way, the producers “can get solidarity dollars, that is, they can buy solidarity dollar bills with that 30%,” although “they are obliged to go to a checking account, a savings bank or a term of the financial system”.
The dollars that they can buy at the “solidarity” exchange rate -that is, at the official exchange rate plus 30% of the PAIS tax and the 35% Income Tax withholding by the AFIP-, “they cannot get them out of the financial system” and that “if they want to sell them, they are obliged to sell them in the MEP dollar, which is also in an official dollar.”
The objective, explained the president, is that if they sell those dollars in the financial market “there is more supply of dollars in the MEP dollar, the price of the MEP dollar goes down and the gap gets closer.”
“The idea is precisely that everything we did does not imply any devaluation, we move with the dollars that exist,” said Fernández.
And he added: “No presidential decree was necessary, it was resolved with a Central Bank Resolution, we left out the cereal companies, we went directly in favor of the producers, it is a measure that only lasts 30 days,” the president completed.
Lastly, he maintained that the exchange rate dynamics of recent weeks “is a push to see if we are going to devalue or not, and we are not going to devalue, because devaluing is impoverishing people.”
“That’s what we don’t want to do, so we’ll keep fighting until they understand that once they have to think about the people,” he concluded.
