The Secretary of Agriculture, Juan José Bahillo, highlighted this Wednesday the space for dialogue reached between the national Government and the representatives of the Agricultural Liaison Table, referring to the package of measures announced this Tuesday to help rural producers affected by a “historic drought”.
Bahillo explained that the battery of measures includes the suspension of some tax advances; financial facilities and rapid approval of the declaration of an agricultural emergency, in response to proposals from the sector.
“We do not conceive of the public function if it is not through dialogue with the sectors; if one is willing to assume this responsibility, they have a duty to maintain dialogue with the areas, which is a necessary condition,” said the official in dialogue with Télam Radio.
In this sense, he pointed out that “dialogue is the responsibility of both parties, in this case with the entities that represent the productive sectors.”
Regarding the situation in the fields, Bahillo affirmed that there is a “historical drought” and “producer records, beyond the statistics kept by the Secretariat, show that this year is the year with the least rainfall in the last 70 years”.
To this -he added- “we must add that it is the third consecutive year of drought; it is not a specific window that for 90 days the rain withdrew, but we have a stress of lack of humidity that has been going on for almost three years and that worsened in the last three or four months, which is a major problem”.
Lastly, he explained that “the soybean planting window has run, prime corn did have serious drawbacks and a lot of late corn has been planted in January and even these days.”
“Although we are going to have a decrease in the first corn, later we will evaluate how the late corn and the soybean crop behaves,” concluded Bahillo.
