TUCUMÁN
This Province is bounded on the North by the Province of Salta, on the West and South by the Province of Catamarca and on the East by the Province of Santiago del Estero.
It has the smallest superficial area of all the Argentine Provinces; being less than one-eleventh the size of Buenos Aires and less than one-fifth that of Santiago del Estero.
It, however, is a very important Province, because it produces over 90% of the whole sugar output of the Republic. It also grows an appreciable quantity of maize, but when, in Argentina, one says Tucumán one is almost invariably thought to be about to speak of sugar.
It always has been the sugar-producing area of the River Plate Territories; from the time of the Jesuit Missionaries, say, about the middle of the eighteenth century. The first modern sugar-manufacturing machinery was set up in Tucumán in 1879.
The whole matter of the Argentine Sugar industry was for long hedged about with fiscal and other questions and a great sensitiveness on the part of the growers and refiners in regard to their discussion. That a certain number of companies divided the whole of the industry between them was undoubted fact, as was the equally obvious one that they carried on business in accordance rather with their ideas of their own commercial interests than in any larger or more philanthropic spirit. Sugar is still much dearer for the Argentine consumer than there seems any good reason for. Special legislature has operated until recently as an exceptional protection to this industry, thus maintaining, as was vehemently urged in many quarters, a monopoly, to the extent of being relieved of any foreign competition, in the hands of the Tucumán Companies who conducted their affairs in a mutually friendly fashion.
Their opponents throughout the country said that Tucumán (the sugar interests there are still inseparably connected with Provincial politics and politicians) not only waxed fat at the public expense, but did so by means and methods opposed to the public interest. Certainly legislature offered temptation to artificial limitation of output, and it was chiefly in regard to this—burning of productive cane-fields and so forth—that the sugar companies long stood accused.
On whichever side the balance of the arguments for or against the doings of the Tucumán sugar industry may have lain it may be safely asserted that no political influence can nowadays continue to bolster up commercial malpractices of any magnitude in Argentina. The National Government has already seen and will see to it that no hole-in-the-corner Provincial politics shall interfere with the National welfare and credit. Influence, although still powerful in minor matters, can no longer suffice to avoid any matter of public importance being exposed to examination by the full light of day.
Tucumán is well aware of this, and therefore can be relied on, and indeed must be, to trim her sails to the healthy wind by which the course of the Republic is now determined.
It is only fair to add that the Tucumán Sugar Companies’ argument in their own defence to the suggestion of an inequitable monopoly exercised by them is, in effect, “Well, supposing that we have been making very large profits of late years, we have borne the brunt of hard times for many more, before the industry had developed to its present extent and before we were able to obtain assistance or even practical encouragement from the State. And besides, were we wrong in making hay whilst the sun shone? Any day may bring us competition in the shape of the rise of new cane-fields in other Northern districts of this fertile Republic.”