The rural fires and the extreme drought in Corrientes have caused losses of more than 26,000 million pesos in the productive system of the province, and the national government defines a set of support measures for producers.
Forest producers, ranchers, herbalists, rice growers, citrus growers, beekeepers, large, medium, small and family farmers, summarize the passage of the fire that has already devastated almost 800 thousand hectares, with the same words: “catastrophe”, “tragedy”, “pain”, “impotence” and “hopelessness”.
“It’s a natural catastrophe, I don’t know if people can take it into account. The estuaries are burning, there are evacuations, a lot of damage to production, sadness and despair,” expressed to Télam Pablo Sánchez, president of the Association of Rural Societies of Corrientes.
The Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Julián Domínguez, and the Deputy Chief of Staff, Jorge Neme, traveled today to Corrientes to “strengthen the actions of the national government and articulate, together with the provincial authorities, the response to the emergency caused by forest fires. “, indicated official sources.
The national government, in coordination with provincial authorities, plans to announce “a series of measures to respond to the emergency caused by the advance of the fire in the province, through the sending brigade members, heavy machinery, helicopters and hydrant planes, which seek to contain forest fires and extinguish them”.
The measures that the Government is analyzing, advanced Télam official sources, They contemplate an expansion of the emergency by disaster zone, financial assistance and special credit lines for producers.
It is also planned that the province be given a Drilling truck for water supply in the areas most compromised by the emergency.
The entity that brings together ruralists from Corrientes prepared a survey that includes a count of losses in forestry, livestock, citrus, yerba mate and rice production, calculating a total balance of more than 26,000 million pesos and estimating that the majority of affected producers It will take between five and ten years to begin to recover, as the harsh balance of an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.
In the face of emergency, Sánchez urged “coordinate efforts, urgently” and remarked that “30,000 hectares per day are being burned, there must be solidarity and empathy in the face of this situation, which is a tragedy.”
“The fire is destroying our resources and people are losing everything,” he lamented, calling for “extraordinary measures to deal with the situation, considering each link in the chain, with a different type of assistance.”
The association he chairs announced that the losses in the livestock sector would exceed 5,200 million pesos and Sánchez added “that today the urgency is the animals, because they are without food.”
On the other hand, regarding the impact on afforestation, the latest report from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), mentions that 31,265 hectares of cultivated forests were burned and the vice president of the Association of the Strategic Forestry Plan, Juan Ramón Sotelo, assured to Télam that the losses are “multimillionaires”.
“There are producers who saw how their plantations were consumed by fire in a few hours”expressed the tree and added that “reforesting will take us a decade, at least.”
Raymundo Meabe, president of the Argentine Forestry Association (AFOA) expressed himself in a similar vein and pointed out that the losses in the sector exceed 10 billion pesos.
“We must determine long-term planning, which includes the national and provincial governments, define a comprehensive forestry policy and start with environmental education at all levels,” he proposed.
And, in another order, he pointed out that “in December it was warned that this could happen, we must make a mea culpa for everything that is happening, both the private and public sectors.”
The herbal sector concentrated in the northern part of the province was also hit hard by thedrought “never seen” and some producers also suffered the ravages of the fire.
“The effects of the lack of water in the yerbatales caused the loss of 50 percent of production,” Gustavo Quatrín, manager of the Colonia Liebig agricultural cooperative, told Télam.
In economic terms, the cooperative member pointed out that the damage “amounts to about 2,700 million pesos, in addition to the damage it will cause to direct labor, which works in harvesting and drying.”
“There are producers who lost 30 percent of their plantations, others 50 and some who have lost everything,” lamented Quatrín, about the effects of the lack of rain.
He said that the absence of humidity means that “the plants of six, seven and even ten years are dying, which are the ones with the highest yield”, added to the fact that “there were no sprouts that the plants should have given in January and February” .
“We have never seen such a drought, there is no record of something similar in the last 80 years,” assured the manager of the Corrientes cooperative that produces Playadito yerba, adding that “tea plantations are going through a similar situation.”
In this sense, on the expectations of recovery after the serious consequences suffered, he maintained that “the renewal of the yerba plantation will take at least five years and a significant investment.”
The total production of yerba mate leaf was 882 million kilos in Corrientes in 2021, a year that Quatrín described as a “record”, which is why “there are still no effects for the consumer, shipments are normal and there is no impact in prices.”
In addition to having the largest forested area in the country, exceeding half a million hectares, Corrientes is the largest producer of rice, with a coverage of between 93,000 and 100,000 hectares, the president of the Corrientes Association of Rice Planters told Télam. Rice, Christian Jetter.
The extraordinary drought also generated important losses in the productive capacity of this grain. and so far “about 20,000 hectares are affected in total, of which 5,000 belong to small rice producers.”
“A total of 30 percent of the volume of rice produced in the province was lost, 200 tons, and the loss amounts to 5,000 million pesos,” he explained.
The representative of the rice sector also assured that due to the extensive drought, “100 percent of the rice producers were affected, because to a greater or lesser extent, they all lost something.”
In the detail of losses, Jetter also said that some 12,000 hectares with rice plantations were abandoned, because they cannot be irrigated, the dams do not have the volume of water to do so, and the reservoir was finished.
“This is totally unprecedented, it has never happened before, we are facing the biggest crisis in the history of rice production,” the president of the Correntina Association of Rice Planters concluded in a dialogue with Télam.
INTA’s Corrientes Experimental Station reported that rural fires have already destroyed more than 785,000 hectares, which constitutes nine percent of the surface of the provincial territory, and noted that the fire reaches 30,000 hectares per day.
