With the Rural Society’s Palermo Farm Show in town and with the government set to lose its powers over grain export duties next month, agricultural issues have been recovering some of their 2008 protagonism with the attention naturally centring on the future of the export duties. Within this cluster of issues perhaps the most interesting is the so-called segmentation of export duties on behalf of smaller farmers — no less of a debate because of the apparent consensus in its favour among the four main farming organizations since there are serious doubts about the practicability of this discrimination to benefit smallholders, reported "Kazakh-Zerno" IA with reference to the "Meat Trade News Daily".
This segmentation chiefly applies to soy as the only crop where the farmers are not demanding an immediate elimination of export duties (although the use of maize as animal feed and its biofuel potential complicates the question slightly with this crop). Everybody agrees that the elimination of export duties should be immediate even for soy in the cases of small and medium-sized farmers but there are at least two problems here. One is the danger that the beneficiaries of such an arrangement fall victim to the same government foot-dragging which plagues all tax and other reimbursements, especially on exports. Another is that this system could give rise to abuses which would justify such foot-dragging. Agriculture has changed so drastically in recent decades that while the traditional pattern of wealthy landlords and poor tenants still often prevails (thus FAA smallholders leader Eduardo Buzzi reveals that he has lost his land over the past year because a giant pool offered the owner double the rent), sometimes it is the other way around with minor smallholders as the landlords renting out their land to gigantic pools — in such cases there would be a danger of a clause designed to benefit small farmers giving an unwarranted tax break to some of the wealthiest companies in the country (windfall taxation in reverse).
Beyond such practical difficulties, there is the principle that taxes are either good or bad and if export duties are bad (all farmers seem to agree that they are confiscatory and unconstitutional), then they should be abolished in their entirety with any doubts on that point only favouring the administration imposing such arbitrary levies. And yet segmentation on behalf of small farms is eminently fair in principle and commands a broad consensus in practice. Not as easy an issue to resolve as it might seem.