Content area
Abstract
The dissertation undertakes a comparison of tax and regulatory policies on the soy sector in Argentina and Brazil. The study includes the Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) and Cristina Fernandez (2007-2011) administrations in Argentina, and the PT administrations led by Lula Da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rouseff in Brazil (2011-2014). Brazil and Argentina are the second and third world soy exporters respectively. They were governed by left-of-the-center governments for more than a decade and experienced an exogenous boom in agricultural exports during the same period. In spite of these commonalities, tax and regulatory policies affecting soy producers and the export agriculture more broadly differed remarkably between the two countries. In a nutshell: while Argentina implemented a 35% tax on soy exports and maintained it against extensive mobilization by agricultural producers, Brazil did not implement any equivalent measure. On the contrary, in Brazil agricultural interests were able to contest several governmental regulatory initiatives to bring them closer to their preferences.
The main argument I develop is that these divergent policy outcomes crucially depended on how agricultural producers were represented in the political arena and the mechanisms that sustained that presence over time. Given that agricultural production is geographically concentrated, what decisively mattered was whether territorially anchored agricultural producers could use institutional and partisan levers to gain influence in the national legislative arena as to contest potentially hostile policies. Because agricultural productions is geographically concentrated and territorially anchored, federal institutions and partisan dynamics were at the center of the politics of agricultural policies in both countries. The dissertation advances fine-grained arguments on the geographical, institutional and partisan determinants of agricultural producers' political representation in each case. These arguments are supported by qualitative evidence obtained in several months of fieldwork in each country as well as by econometric evidence on agricultural production and patterns of political representation in the national legislature for each country.
