[Click to view larger image.]

The elimination of foreign wines and sugar and the development of Mendoza and Tucumán were facilitated by a Protectionist tariff. The details of this are very curious, as they had to be adjusted to the natural conditions. The need of protection is chiefly due to the distance of the market from the productive centres. Mendoza is 650 miles from Buenos Aires, Tucumán more than 750 miles. Freightage on the railways is dear. It is thirty-five piastres a ton for wine between Mendoza and Buenos Aires, or nearly double the normal maritime freight for the European wines sent from Bordeaux or Genoa. The charge for sugar is about thirty piastres a ton between Tucumán and Buenos Aires. Thus the cost of transport is nearly one sixth the entire cost of production. In spite of this common burden, the need of protection is not at all the same in Mendoza and Tucumán. The climate of Mendoza is excellent for the vine. The dryness of the atmosphere keeps down cryptogamic diseases, and the risks of cultivation are slight. The crop is abundant, the frosts late, and not serious. Hail is frequent, it is true, at the mouths of the Cordillera valleys, but it is never general; it affects only a small part of the harvest. The curve of production is very regular. It rises every year very gradually, and in proportion to the increase of the cultivated area. As a result of all this, the wine market has a stability which the vine-growing countries of Europe, with their less reliable climate, do not enjoy. The protective tariff, therefore, remains fixed. The duty on foreign wines in the cask—eight centimes (gold) per litre—has not been altered since the introduction into Argentina of the wine-industry on a large scale.[42]

The curve of sugar-production is just as irregular as that of wine-production is regular. From one year to another the output may vary by as much as 100 per cent., and the changes cannot be predicted: 147,000 tons in 1912, 335,000 tons in 1914, 150,000 tons in 1915. The reason is that the sugar output depends upon the season. Canes which have been touched by frost go sour and ferment in the ground. They have to be milled quickly, and the harvest must not be prolonged. Even in good years the costly equipment of the works is active during only three months (July to September, but at Jujuy, July to October).

This irregularity of production, which makes protection inevitable, also complicates it infinitely in practice. Sometimes the harvest is not large enough to meet home demands, and imports have to be permitted. Sometimes production is far beyond the home demand, and the sugar-manufacturers have to export the surplus so as to prevent a slump in prices on the overloaded home market. In order to meet these very different situations, the protecting tariff has had to be repeatedly modified and complicated. But it is impossible for us to give the history of it in detail here. The duties on foreign sugar were fixed, in successive instalments, between 1883 and 1891; and special protective measures were taken in the interest of the refiners in 1888. Over-production appeared for the first time in 1895. Export at a loss, to relieve the home market, was at first organized by an association of the producers themselves (in 1896). But in 1897 the Government developed it by putting a premium on export. The export period lasted from 1897 to 1904. The law of 1912, which gives its latest form to the Protectionist regime, gives the Government the right to suspend for a time the duties on imports and allow foreign sugar to come in. As at Mendoza, the provincial Government intervenes as well as the national. The alternation of bad and exceptionally good harvests leads to the appearance of all sorts of unforeseen laws, modifying the bases of taxation, regulating production in the works, and restricting the acreage of cultivation.[43] Thus Tucumán has lived in an atmosphere of storm and uncertainty and unceasing discussion, of discouragement and insecurity; the price of its geographical position at the extreme limit of the area in which cane can be grown.

[CHAPTER IV]
THE EXPLOITATION OF THE FORESTS

Manual labour on the obrajes—The land of the bañados and the agricultural cantons of Corrientes—The timber-yards of the Chaco and the tannic-acid works of the Paraná—The exploitation of the maté—The forestry industry and colonization.