‘I don’t know how I will eat.’ For the workers behind Argentina’s national drink, Milei’s reforms are turning sour

(CNN) — Sonia Lemos doesn’t know how she will put food on the table until the next harvest, two months from now.

Lemos, 42, is a seasonal worker from northern Argentina. Six months a year, she harvests yerba, the leaves of a native South American shrub that are the basis of Argentina’s national beverage, mate. 

Few other drinks permeate the Argentinian way of life as does mate, an infusion of dry yerba leaves that is meant to be drunk slowly and, most importantly, shared with friends or relatives. When Argentina’s national team traveled to the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar, The New York Times reported that they carried with them over 1,100 pounds of mate for the month-long tournament.

Both a social activity and a caffeine-fix, mate dates back to pre-Columbian times, when the leaves were hand-picked in the same manner as Lemos has been doing for the past 30 years.

“When I was a child, we were poor. My mom and dad were also farmworkers and I left school at 12 and joined them,” she told CNN, a common story in Misiones, where the vast majority of mate production takes place and one of Argentina’s poorest provinces.

It is hard work, but Lemos paints a positive picture of it. While her family has never grown rich, she dreamt of sending her four children to school to find a better life.

This year, though, her dreams have been punctured by a governmental about-face.

Argentina’s mate industry – a highly regulated business where the central government sets prices and subsidizes production – is one of several sectors bracing for a storm since the election of far-right president Javier Milei.

Milei’s proposal on the campaign trail was simple: Argentina is in a chronic economic crisis because of mismanagement and corruption, he said; take away state interference and let the market regulate itself. Since taking office in December, he has announced plans to privatize Argentina’s national airline, public broadcaster, and state-run oil company (though he has since backed away from this last proposal).

Milei has also announced reforms to weaken labor protections, allowing companies to hire and fire employees more quickly, and cut regulations and government subsidies. To add to the confusion, several of these reforms have already entered into use as government decrees even though Congress is yet to hold a formal vote, and local courts have accepted appeals against some aspects of the new regulations.

While Milei is tackling multiple fronts to try to change Argentina for good as soon as possible, for Lemos, the measures have brought an abrupt end to the intercosecha – the government’s financial support for seasonal workers when there’s no agricultural harvest. That reform comes at the same time as rising living costs have eaten away at Lemos’ modest savings, with Argentina facing the highest inflation rate in the world

“I received the intercosecha until December, 64,000 pesos ($78) a month. Then in January, I was told we wouldn’t get it,” she told CNN.

“The harvest will not start until March. Until then, I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how I will eat.”

Lemos is one of many Argentinians looking to the future with anxiety. Last week, she and tens of thousands of others took to the streets in Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities to protest a Milei-backed mega-bill of reforms known as the DNU (formally, the Decree of Urgency and Necessity). It was a historic demonstration – the first time a new president faced a general strike less than two months since taking office.

Another protester, Daniela Pantalone, a flight attendant at Aerolineas Argentinas and a 52-year-old mother of two, says Milei’s plans to privatize the carrier don’t seem to take into account the lives impacted by such sweeping change.

“We’ve been hearing all the plans for privatizations and liberalization of the market, and we still haven’t heard from the government what will become of us,” she told CNN.

She also points out that privatizing the national carrier could endanger its smaller routes, which keep the country connected but may not be profitable.

“There are routes in Argentina that don’t have enough passengers to be commercially viable because, simply put, there are not enough people there. But Argentina is a big country, and most of those places are days of driving away from Buenos Aires or another big city,” she said. “What would we do? Leave the provinces cut off from the center of the country?”

Popular for some

Still, Milei’s actions remain popular for many Argentinians. According to a recent poll by the Unversidad de San Andres in Buenos Aires, 42% of the population supports the reforms, while 51% opposes them.

The national airline and the mate industry in particular are often seen as inefficient and excessively bureaucratic. Until now, Argentina’s National Institute for Yerba Mate (INYM) regulated harvests, imports and exports, and set minimum prices for the dry leaf – unlike the prices of most other agricultural commodities such as sugar, soy or coffee, which are free to float. Among the reforms proposed by Milei were the suspension of the intercosecha, paid to seasonal workers registered with the INYM, which has already entered into effect; according to INYM, there are some 15,000 tareferos in Misiones who are eligible to receive the idle season benefit, although it is unclear how many have seen their benefit suspended. CNN asked the Argentine Labor Ministry about the intercosecha but hasn’t yet received a response. Milei also aims to strip the institute of the power to set mate prices – a move that has been temporarily halted after an appeal in court.

While the robust regulation in place until now protects small, artisanal farmers and guarantees them a minimum income every year — over half of the mate producers recognized by INYM have less than five hectares — it also means that production growth has stalled.

Milei’s allies, such as local politician Humberto Schiavoni, say slashing regulations on the mate market will increase production and allow producers to set the price they believe is most fair. Rather than setting prices, the INYM would become a lobbying group like other agricultural producers’ groups, such as the association of winemakers.

But INYM’s interim president Jonás Petterson argues that the de-regulation will only favour a handful of big corporations who will be able to push prices down to the detriment of small producers. In an interview with CNN, Petterson argued that without the Institute controls, seasonal workers like Lemos would stand alone negotiating their wages against the biggest producers, while a land reform proposed by Milei to favor foreign investment would only open rural production to international agro-industrial conglomerates.

“The institute guarantees the sustainability of the industry, while the DNU focuses on competitiveness and profitability,” Petterson told CNN. “But we don’t want to compete, we want to co-operate and be sustainable in the long term.”

On Wednesday, Milei’s reform package was presented to Congress for the first time, after a troublesome itinerary through various commissions. Of the original 664 articles the government presented, more than 140 have been chalked off.

Lemos believes, if passed, it will pave the way to a new Argentina that she would struggle to recognize: “In all honesty, I’d never thought that things were going to change… We always heard of things like this happening in other countries that were going through reform and I never thought it would come to us too. But this new president is upsetting a lot of things.”

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