06/10/2014 |
Government and Congress for the first time openly support a deputy’s initiative aimed at fostering national-flagged vessels to capture about US$7B in freights
The administration of Peronist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Congress leaders for the first time threw their full public support behind a bill aimed at making Argentina recover the powerful national merchant shipping fleet and ship-building industry that were destroyed when the country went neo-conservative in the 1990s.
The initiative fostered by Gastón Harispe, a deputy for the Victory Front (FpV) ruling coalition and vice-chairman of the Lower House’s Maritime, Fluvial, Ports and Fishing Affairs Committee, was hailed for “defending sovereignty” by Vice President Amado Boudou, Under-Secretary for Ports and Navigable Ways Horacio Tettamanti, Lower House Speaker Julián Domínguez, officials — including Defence Minister Agustín Rossi — legislators, unions and experts.
They expressed their support during a seminar on “Maritime and Fluvial Industry and Logistics for the National Production” held on Tuesday at the Lower House of Congress. The seminar was closed by Tettamanti and Harispe, the latter praising Tettamanti as one of the leading architects of the bill which is under the consideration of Lower House committees.
Fernández de Kirchner last month said, “We have to recover a maritime company such as ELMA, an example for the world. If we could have a merchant fleet we would reap a lot of benefits as maritime logistics transport costs are infinitely lower and infinitely more competitive than land transport."
Tuesday’s was the first open show of specific support for Harispe’s initiative.
ELMA was founded in 1960 but its foundations were laid by Juan Domingo Perón during his first two presidencies (1946-52 and 1952-55) and reinforced during his third one (1973-74). Perón, who died in 1974, was the founder of Fernández de Kirchner’s Justicialist Party.
Remarkably, ELMA was dismantled by President Carlos Menem (1989-1999), a neo-conservative who also belongs to the Peronist party.
In its golden age, Argentina had several state fleets which, together with privately-owned vessels, totalled 204 sea-faring ships of over 1,000 tonnes, many of them made at local shipyards, according to expert Horacio Guillermo Vázquez Rivarola.
Today, Argentina — one of the world’s largest food exporters — does not have a single national-flagged merchant ship. Harispe’s bill is aimed at redressing this and fostering the local shipbuilding industry.
He and many experts say that Argentina is losing US$7 billion a year in freight although other pundits claim that the real figure is far lower considering that most exports are FOB and are paid by cargo purchasers.
Addressing the forum, Boudou praised the bill, saying that it is crucial that Argentine products be increasingly transported by a local fleet, with local jobs and locally designed and built ships.
Lower House Speaker Domínguez said, "We want our natural resources to be exported via Argentine vessels and for Argentine hands to capture that freight business of nearly US$6 billion.
“Some even speak of US$7 billion. This is nearly eight percent of our total exports. This is the mother of all battles. This is not about trade, but a sovereignty issue," he added.
Nearly each and every speaker mentioned Fernández de Kirchner’s fight against debt restructuring holdouts, whom she describes as ’vulture funds’. Speakers also mentioned the Vuelta de Obligado battle when Argentina, in 1845, resisted an Anglo-French fleet which sought to force its way to foster "free trade" along Argentina’s Paraná River. There were also many mentions about Argentina’s sovereignty claims over a Southern Atlantic archipelago which it calls Malvinas and the British, who control them, call Falklands, and over which they went to war in 1982.
Harispe quoted Manuel Belgrano, one of the country’s father founders, as saying that no nation can call itself a nation if it doesn’t have its own ships and ports.
Harispe was scheduled to close the forum but he chose to let Tettamanti do that, saying, "It is only fair that this seminar should be closed by Tettamanti, because he is one of the leading architects of this bill, and because he his the target of the attacks launched every Tuesday by the newspaper (La Nación) of the Mitre family, the newspaper of the oligarchy."
Fernández de Kirchner has for years been accusing La Nación and Clarín newspapers of seeking to destabilize her government.
Elections are due next year and, under the Constitution, she cannot seek a third term — she was elected in 2007 and reelected in 2011.
A tailor-made law
Tettamanti said, "I do want to respond to some charges that those of us who embrace a popular cause are always the target of. Of course, this is a tailor-made law. A law tailor made for the fatherland and the Argentine people. Some argue that there are tensions between this bill and several others. But the only tension here is between a law and no law.
"It was not just by chance that over the six years that this debate was absent there was no alternative bill and suddenly the concerns arise when there is an initiative like this one, with enough support to threaten the status quo of treason," he said.
"We are slaves to our voters and for all the wrath of some who are predicting an early end of this (government) cycle, let them know that there is a governing plan until December 10, 2015, a plan designed by the best Argentine President after Juan Perón."
Tettamanti was referring to Néstor Kirchner, who ruled the country between 2003 and 2007, when he was succeeded by his wife Fernández de Kirchner. Kirchner died in 2010.
"Kirchner used to say that one of his administration’s goals was to create a national fleet, with Argentine businessmen and capitals," Tettamanti said.
"Our defense of the Argentine presence in the bill is not just a whim. We are not ashamed of acknowledging it. The bill does not discriminate between national or foreign capitals. But it states that, if for some reason, some businessmen decided to internationalize their companies because they had no access to credit facilities. Then, it is true that this bill reserves Argentine loans for all those Argentine ship-owners and shipyards who suffered the consequences of the 1990s (Menemist deregulation) and did not lower the Argentine flag from the poop of their vessels and did not sell their facilities to foreign capitals."
The bill envisages the largest possible incorporation of locally-built vessels.
Tettamanti highlighted the importance of this clause, saying that there is ideological tension between the bill and those who consider a merchant fleet "a sheer economic or financial business, those who don’t care whether cargo is transported by locally- or foreign-made vessels, with a national or a foreign flag, or national or foreign crews."
The bill, he added, “embraces with enormous ideological loyalty" Fernández de Kirchner’s guidelines that national resources and infrastructure, seas and rivers must be at the service of the Argentine people to distribute the largest possible income ratio among them.
"Defending national ship-owners will surely mean freight’s hard currency income to remain in the fatherland unlike the steady flight of hard currency abroad that day after day is pushing us toward the abyss."
Tettamanti also said that, contrary to what some opposition leaders’ claims, the government is not ready to go back to Menem’s decrees 1772 and 817 that deregulated ports and "made them disappear from the Argentine map."
No opposition leaders were present at the seminar.
Source:
Buenos Aires Herald
