IN THE ARGENTINE.

Franklin Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 38, 3 April 1933, Page 7

IN THE ARGENTINE.

FACING HARD TIMES. Argentina covers rather more than a million square miles, being four times as big as France and Germany combined. It stretches over 2000 miles from tropical Brazil in the north to icy Tierra del Fuego in the south, and nearly 1000 miles across from the Atlantic seaboard in the east to the Andes in the west. The population is about 12,000,000, of which number over 2,000,000 occupy Buenos Aires, the capital city.

The country is going through a bad time; everyone assured me of that, writes Sir Montague Barlow in the London Daily Telegraph. There is difficulty in balancing the Budget; the exchange has to be kept up by refusing to part with gold; and prosperous families have to throw up their chateaux in France or their holidays in England and return to Argentina.

Struggle Over Finance.

The control of the exchange I found a hotly-contested issue. The able and clear-sighted Finance Minister, Dr. Alberto Hueyo, has, with the support of the Government, so far successfully resisted all efforts to relax control; he is determined to maintain the credit of the country unimpaired. It is difficult not to sympathise with this determination, though in fact the restrictions undoubtedly press "hardly on some investors, who cannot get any money at all out of the country. I heard the Finance Minister accused of sacrificing the interests of agriculture to the foreigner. His answer would be that agriculture and the country generally would be the .first to suffer if Argentina defaulted on the service of her foreign loans.

I gathered that the Minister of Finance was determined to maintain the punctual service of both interest and sinking fund on the national debt so long as it is physically possible to do so.

Assuming the foreign exchange market had to be controlled, it is certain that the control could not have been exercised with greater honesty, efficiency and tact. Effect of Ottawa. I was in the country both before and after the Ottawa decisions were made public. Before publication the current impression seemed to be that England must always take Argentine beef and mutton. Our working classes demanded it, and would have it. After Ottawa the cry was that England's very tentative experiments in restriction for their meat imports would, it was feared, probably spell ruin for Argentina. On landing I had tried to persuade Argentine friends to take Ottawa seriously. England may be deliberate in her decisions, but when she does act she acts effectively, and Ottawa and the swing over to protection was the culmination of a 30 years' struggle, and would mark a decisive change of national policy.^ It was a thousand pities, in their own interests, that Argentine Governments had paid so little practical I attention to the report of the i D'Abernon Commission of 1929, and had not adopted the reasonable proposals for trade co-operation put fori ward at the time.