Far from being resolved, the corn problem gives new signs every day of a dangerous ignorance of the nature of the grain and its use in the production of pig and poultry farming in the country.
The national authorities insist on their threat to criminally denounce producers who presumably carry out an irregular collection of grain. They said that there are four businessmen who would be hiding the product, but they did not give names.
Convinced of this alleged concealment, the Vice Ministry of Defense of User and Consumer Rights carried out inspections in some environments where corn is concentrated for sale and found the grain stored legally and for productive purposes. That is to say, there was neither the concealment nor the agio that they hoped to discover, which is what they were denouncing from La Paz, without greater real knowledge of the events in the city of Santa Cruz.
Naturally, during the inspections they observed that the corn is stored in small sheds, either for sale or for use in pig farming or poultry farming mainly, but that does not mean that the product is being illegally “accumulated”.
The authorities of the sector, who have been demonstrating a profound ignorance of the nature of the use of corn in livestock and chicken farming, perhaps do not know that corn for pigs and chickens is not bought at the ‘sale’ every morning to the day, but is purchased in large quantities for use in one, two or three months.
Under these conditions, naturally the farms of producers have corn accumulated for the consumption of the animals, and not for speculative purposes.
With this verification of its own eyes, the Government had to lower the tone of its threats and admit that the storage of corn that they saw is carried out legally and its purpose is the production of animals that are later consumed as protein on the tables of the Bolivians.
Deputy Minister Jorge Silva, of the Consumer Defense portfolio, admitted that the four warehouses that were inspected in the company of the Special Force to Fight Crime (Felcc) only had the irregularity of the lack of papers in order.
In other places, they found a normal and legal collection of corn, citing as an example a company that produces pork and chicken that has accumulated 12,000 tons of corn, an amount that will allow them to cover the demand for their animals in the next three months. . That is, nothing new and everything normal up to that point.
That change of speech demonstrates the great virtue of arriving at the scene and verifying with one’s own eyes that what was perceived from a distance as speculation, concealment or hoax, was far from being such a thing. It is one thing to raise an accusing finger from the desks of the ministries in La Paz, and quite another to land in Viru Viru, go out into the field and cross the heavy doors of the sheds to judge what you see.
What the government has not yet convinced itself of is that there is still a lack of corn in the country and that there is a shortage that it will have to deal with in some practical way and not with accusatory speeches.
