IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVE. The shares of the industrial sugar bowls aim to reach a price of $70 per 50 kilos bag.Â

In the tucumano sugar sector two realities cohabit. On one hand, the industrials complains because the price of the sugar doesn’t allow them to obtain profitability, in spite of the measures that were adopted so that through banks the financing of what was left of the harvest 2008 was done, in order to level the offer and demand of the product in the internal market. On the other hand, relating of the industry get ready with strong investments to participate in the business of the electric power cogeneration and of the biofuels production. Â

“This is more than to find petroleum”. With this sentence, the governor, José Alperovich, drew the importance that the alcohol production had for the province, in reference to the commercial agreement that the sugar company Los Balcanes has just reached with a company of Chile to provide it of 3,5 million tons of anhydrous alcohol. The leader also manifested his optimism on the evolution of the price of the 50 kilos sugar bag. He pondered the fact that in the last weeks the product went from $53 the bag to $66, and expressed his trust that in little time $70 per bag will be reached.

The industrial Jorge Rocchia Ferro, proprietor of Los Balcanes, confirmed that besides the commercial arrangement achieved with a chilean company, another agreement to sell 2,5 million alcohol liters to an european multinational was also reached . He revealed that in La Florida plantation the daily production of alcohol reaches the 280.000 liters, volume that – he estimates – will get to 340.000 in 2009 and to 500.000 liters per day starting from 2010.

The future

“We are adapting to adhere to the obligatory cut of 5% of alcohol for naphthas starting from 2010. We believe that the sugar-cane plantations are renewable oil wells and that the future of the plantations will be closely linked with the energy cogeneration and the biofuels production”, underlined Rocchia Ferro. He said that once all the sugar plantations sink to the processes of electricity cogeneration and biofuels, the sugar activity will generate incomes during the whole year and not only in the months that the harvest lasts. “With these business one will be able to replace the sugar exports at low prices”, he advanced.

He highlighted that the sector works in actions tending to reduce the environmental impact of the industrial processes. “The emission of particles is practically decreasing to zero, and the treatment of the vinaza is being worked, through the fertirigation or of the incineration of this effluent”, he commented.

He advanced that the National Government has just authorized an increase of 2% of the sugar price in shelves, and he revealed that the futures of the sugar in the external market are ascending. “There are good perspectives in future”, the manager highlighted.

By Franco Vera

Source: La Gaceta

Interview with Carlos Pedro Blaquier, president of Ledesma

Affirms that the exchange rate is low and that it subtracts competitiveness to the industry; he believes it necessary to rethink the retentions.Â

In the Argentina of the economic shocks, to turn 100 years is not little thing. Ledesma industry, the company that Carlos Pedro Blaquier directs, is one of the few cases that arrived to the three figures without being never sold to a foreign group. Ledesma has become a company that passed over the limits of industry and has become a true economic group. Blaquier that directs the company since 1970, accepted an interview with LA NACION to summarize the history of the centennial company.Â

-Which was the biggest difficulty and which the biggest success that Ledesma faced?Â

-The biggest difficulty was the economic problems of the beginnings, during Enrique Wollmann’s presidency. The biggest success was that all the conductions of the company were very insistent after the achievement of the proposed objectives.Â

-What meaning does that have for the Argentinean economy?Â

-Being a manager in the Argentina is a task that has had many difficult moments, and for that reason many Argentinean managers opted to sell their companies to the exterior. Brazil, on the contrary, always fomented the national industry, and today has a very superior industrial park to that of the Argentina and basically in national managers’ hands.

I don’t have anything against the foreign industry, but I recognize that their big decisions are taken outside of our country and that the dividends are taken abroad. Â

A common place exists about that one of the evils of the country is the lack of an autonomous management, with conscience of the system and political strategy, and that that is a main factor of the inability of the Argentinean society to preserve consents in the long term.Â

-What do you think of that thesis?Â

-I think that the inability of the Argentinean society of preserving consents in the long term is a political problem caused by the fact that government’s changes usually produce very deep changes in the economic policies of the country.Â

-How do you see the perspectives of the country?Â

-I believe that the perspectives are very good, but it is necessary to know how to take advantage of them, and that is another matter.Â

-What do you think of the new legislation on biofuels?Â

-The energy problem is a very complicated world problem. The national government has adopted very good measures regarding biofuels, and that will help us be a little independent of the fossil fuels. Ledesma will soon build a biofuels plant starting from the sugarcane.Â

-At some time you wrote that “there is no political federalism without economic federalism….”Â

- Of course that there is no political federalism without economic federalism. The Congress has a debt towards the country: to establish the system of copartnership of taxes, as it is established by the National Constitution, so that the counties stop depending on the good will of the nation.Â

-Three years ago you used to admit: “It is not right to complain about the retentions with such a high exchange rate”. Do you believe that that statement continues being valid? Â

-When the exchange rate was really high, what was taken away to the country by retentions was returned to it by the many pesos that the country received for each dollar that exported. But the things changed. Today the exchange rate is low and it takes away competitiveness to the local industry. I believe that in a situation like the current one we are forced to rethink the topic of the retentions. Brazil and Uruguay don’t have retentions.Â

-You belong to a social atmosphere very reluctant to the peronismo, but it conserves a control cane given by Perón and in the balance of your writings there is no absolute condemnation to the peronismo neither the caudillismo. Â

-The fact that I am not Peronist doesn’t mean that it is antiperonist. As for the caudillismo, I say in the last paragraph of the epilogue to my Manual of Argentinean history: “The Argentinean majorities have almost always responded to the conduction of a commander. It is the system preferred by most of the Argentinean people.”Â

The strategy of LedesmaÂ

-Why did you decide the professionalization of the conduction of the company?Â

-The self-critical reflection is very important. When the circumstances change, it is necessary to change direction in order to not crash.Â

-Why were you not tempted with the incursion in other sectors? Did you pay some cost for that decision? Â

-The world has specialized a lot and it is not easy to make diverse things efficiently. Ledesma has diversified, but in neighboring sectors, and every time that we made it we begun losing money. When we learned, we began to make money.Â

-What advice would you give to somebody that develops a family company?Â

-In all family company a moment arrives in that, for reasons of complexity, the professionalization of the managerial levels becomes indispensable.Â

-The sugar elite was always seen as the most conservative in the country. And the social organization of the industries, as a kind of a feudalism. In the 60´s, the engineer Arrieta was reproached of having a “socialist son-in-law”, by you…Â

-The engineer Arrieta liked to be told that, because he would have never accepted a “stay still” son-in-law. He had just one daughter, and he would have not allowed her to marry a man that was not able to be his successor. Arrieta changed many things of the times of Wollmann, his father-in-law, and I knew that I would have to do so to regarding  things of his to adapt Ledesma to the new circumstances. For that reason, something less than three years before dying, when he was already very sick, he named me vice-president, that is to say, his successor.Â

The vision of the sugar leadership as conservative and the social organization as feudal is a myth. If we want to qualify the sugar industry as feudal in its origins, we also have to qualify as feudal the farms of the humid pampas of that time.Â

-Apart from the engineer Arrieta and other speakers of Ledesma, is there somebody else that helped you think the managerial issues? Â

- I had the luck to have two big teachers. Chronologically, first, my father, Carlos Blaquier Alzaga that was agricultural engineer and an excellent country administrator; second, my father-in-law, Herminio Arrieta that was civil engineer and an outstanding administrator of industries.Â

-You are a lawyer, but also graduated in Philosophy. You have written about Philosophy and Theology. Several poems of yours are known of. How did that intellectual gymnastics influence in your businessman life? Â

- Being manager, feeling a great pleasure for the managing life, has not prevented me from developing my intellectual vocations for those that I have a great liking. Of young I was a questioner and that brought near me to the philosophy that later on helped me in the managing life because it made me sharpen the critical spirit. When I was a student of the school Champagnat, I had very good grades except in religion because I argued everything. The brother Sixto, a great teacher that was very religious and very tolerant, gave me a seat in his office and he lent me a book to read during what was left of the religion hour. Years later, with the brother Sixto moved away to the main house, near Lyon, I visited him because he had a terminal cancer. I will never forget that farewell.Â

-You are a great collector of works of art, silver, books…Â

-This vocation was inherited from my father that was a great collector. All authentic collector is a lover of the beauty.Â

-I would like you to say a word on the mansion The Torcaza.Â

-The Torcaza was built compactly with noble resistent materials to the deterioration. And, mainly, The Torcaza is an intent of surviving, in spite of my unavoidable death, by means of the beauty.Â

-I have seen several sculptures, some in wood that are attributed to you. Is it necessary to expect novelties in that sense?Â

-[Laughs] to write is as to sculpture ideas, and to make a sculpture is as to transform the material into an idea. I am a writer by vocation and a sculptor by entertainment. For that reason I don’t believe to be a good sculptor.Â

By Carlos Pagni for La Nación

Source: La Nación