Speech by President Javier Milei at the 138th inauguration of the La Rural exhibition

Good morning everyone. I want to thank the authorities of the Argentine Rural Society and, especially, its President, Nicolás Pino, for calling me once again to stand before you.

This is the third time that I have had to speak to you from this track, on which, for a century and a half, the best exponents of our livestock activity have paraded.

I also want to greet and express my admiration to all agricultural and livestock producers, large, medium and small, who go out to work the land every day and produce food for hundreds of millions of human beings.

You are the ones who, from Argentina and for Argentina, push the country's cart forward and, for that reason, without a doubt, you deserve to be called heroes.

Two years ago I stood before you for the first time and asked for your patience. I told them that we were coming to make a profound and sustainable change, that we were not going to rush demagogically, that we had to look at the film and not the photo.

Last year I returned and was able to demonstrate facts to them. We eliminated the exchange rate, the biggest theft that the market suffered, since it forced it to sell at an exchange rate lower than the market rate.

I tell you this: it is not a minor issue, because the damn stocks took away two-thirds of the farm's income. Wow, it's good to have eliminated the trap.

In addition, we lowered tariffs on inputs and machinery, opened markets and had undertaken the first permanent reductions in withholdings.

Today I return for the third time and this time I come to show you that the transition of the last two years is being consolidated. This time I come to tell you something that I want to be recorded on this day: a radically different field is coming from the one we knew.

But, before talking about the future, I want to stop at something deeper, because, to understand where we are going, we have to understand what the field really is.

The countryside is not just another sector of the economy. The countryside is, in the most literal sense, the origin of civilization. Let's go back to the beginning of our species. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings were a nomadic hunter-gatherer, living from day to day, without a future and without a destiny. Until, one day, someone understood that they could sow a seed in the ground and wait for the harvest.

That day, without knowing it, that man began everything we call civilization today. Because, to sow and harvest, you have to stay in one place. And, in the act of staying to take care of what one planted, the first property right in history is born. This land is mine, I worked it and, therefore, its harvest is mine.

Hence, for the first time, a surplus is born. And, when there was food left over for the first time, for the first time someone could do something other than getting their next meal.

This is how the potter appeared, who created devices for cooking; the blacksmith, who developed tools to work better; and the teacher, who transmitted this knowledge to new generations.

There was born the division of labor, which Adam Smith described three centuries later.

But the list does not end there. The surplus had to be saved, measured, recorded. From there numbers, accounting and writing itself were born. Not for nothing, the Uruk tablets, the oldest discovered by archaeologists, were inventories of grain.

And, under this new model of life, it was convenient to work more and more surface area with fewer hands, so that more and more people could dedicate themselves to different trades. From there the economies of scale were born, which we mention so much, that is, growing enterprises. It was necessary to anticipate the floods and the seasons to know when to plant. From there astronomy, the calendar and meteorology were born.

All that knowledge had to be transmitted to subsequent generations. Hence the need for education was born. And, when the surplus allowed thousands of people to live together without each having to produce their own food, the city was born.

And, as a corollary of all this, along with this incessant list, the passion was also born to defend what is one's own, to protect the land that one sweated, worked and in which he left part of his being, to take advantage of its fruits or bequeath it to his children.

It is no coincidence that the word civilization comes from civitas, the city, and that the word culture comes, precisely, from cultivating.

Everything we are: property, law, commerce, science, writing, school and the city, was born the day a human being decided to work the land, work the soil and domesticate the wild is nothing other than creating civilization. So, without working the land, we would not be very different from animals. In other words, domesticating the land is what allowed us to domesticate ourselves.

Therefore, when politics attacks the countryside, it does not attack a sector: it attacks the very foundation on which everything else was built, the basis of our Nation.

Because thanks to agricultural production, the New World was able to become independent from the Old, develop its own economic system and join the global economy as a fundamental actor.

This was also understood by Julio Argentino Roca, our great hero, father of modern Argentina, when he stated that livestock and agriculture are the two great sources of national wealth.

And the latter is something that politics has clearly never managed to understand over the last 100 years. Instead of paying the countryside fairly for what it had done for the country, it punished it with taxes, with stocks, with quotas, with export prohibitions, with maximum prices. They turned the country's most thriving sector into Argentina's payer of last resort. When there was a crisis, withholdings went up; when dollars were missing, they doubled the exchange rate; When there was inflation, they placed maximum prices on production. They dedicated themselves to slaughtering, year after year, the goose that laid the golden eggs. That is the field that was. That is the field squeezed, its hands tied, punished for the sin of being the most productive and disparagingly branded, under the lie that the field was about watching weeds grow. We are turning that dark page forever.

Because today, after just two years of traveling this deregulatory path, I can stand here and show you, with numbers, that the transition is no longer a promise and is a reality.

Let's start with the surface. In the 2025-2026 campaign, a record of 40 million hectares were planted, the largest area in our history. But that's just a small part of the equation. Because, although the area grew by just 3%, production jumped by 22%, to a historical record harvest of more than 164 million tons of grains, 30% above the average of the last ten campaigns.

We are at the dawn of a revolution, both expansive and intensive, in planting, which will give us back all the ground lost to our competitors. Corn set its historical record with 71 and a half million tons; wheat, another record, with almost 28 million; the sunflower, another record.

In economic jargon, producing more with the same is what is known as increasing performance and is the piece that unlocks economic growth.

And all this is transformed into dollars for Argentina, which translates into stability for the entire rest of the economy, an increase in credit and a fall in inflation.

In 2025, agroindustrial exports set a historical record: more than 115 million tons, which means an income of more than 152 billion dollars, with 132 products reaching their maximum exported volume in at least seven years, reaching more than 150 destinations in the world.

The first half of this year has already broken that record, with 15% more volume and 17% more value than last year. Sunflower exports grew by 142%, wheat exports by 64% and, for the first time in history, we sold Argentine wheat and corn in China.

Going to the meat industry, beef is experiencing a historic moment. In the first five months of the year, exports grew by 46% in value. The United States market, which for years had been closed to us, is today a record-breaking machine. Thanks to the sensational work of our ministers, we managed to triple the export quota to this country and, in just six months of this year, we have already sold them more meat than in all of last year, with a value of 800 million dollars.

What's more, just what we sold to that market in half a year is equivalent to the entire Hilton share with Europe.

For this reason, I also want to congratulate all the cabañeros, breeders, geneticists and all those who are part of the chain. Much of this miracle begins in genetics. The work of generations of Argentine cattle ranchers and breeders became a precious commodity, which is now in demand in all cattle-raising countries in the world.

Each animal that parades through this arena is the result of decades of selection, patience and love for the craft, which puts us at the forefront of the world.

On the other hand, I would like to take advantage of today to remind all of us Argentines that we must never again allow someone to tell us that the countryside does not add value or generate employment.

If converting land into proteins with high nutritional value were not enough added value in itself, know that the agroindustrial sector explains about a quarter of formal employment in the entire country.

Behind each producer there are veterinarians, millers, engineers, biotechnologists, rubber farmers, geneticists, grocers, oil workers, foragers and service station workers.

In 2025, soybean crushing was the second highest in our entire history; sunflower and peanut, the largest in 25 years; wheat, among the best in 15. So, in addition to selling beans, we sell oil, flour and even biodiesel. Each ton includes layers and layers of labor.

Therefore, when the field does well, the entire interior does well and Argentina does well.

And each of these achievements was achieved thanks to a magic word that the left tried to demonize whenever it had the opportunity: profitability. Only due to the reduction in withholdings, the relationship between our prices in Rosario and those in Chicago improved up to 19% in corn and 12% in soybeans. Between 2019 and 2023, the producer who sold soybeans received around 65% of the international price, while the State kept the rest along the way. Today you receive 75% and it will continue to rise until, tomorrow, you receive the full price of 100% of what your effort generates.

And, if all this were not enough, the course broke all these records while still carrying the weight of withholdings. Everything I just listed was accomplished with one hand tied behind their back. In December 2023 they were tied up completely and today we are on our way to completely freeing them. What we are seeing is a small sample of what the Argentine countryside can achieve. It is just the starting point. Argentina once again became the second net exporter of food in the world. The countryside generates 60% of the country's foreign exchange and, year after year, it generated almost all of the net foreign exchange. The transition is being consolidated and each new step that the sector takes is faster than the previous one. Today energy and mining are rapidly accompanying the country's export takeoff. To those who see them as a risk, we want to point out that they represent, above all, an opportunity. The growth of these sectors, which previously produced nothing, is what will finance the removal of withholdings and the true empowerment of the thriving field in the coming decades.

That's why I also want to be clear: you are the protagonists of this change. Our only job in all of this is to get the boot off their necks as quickly as possible.

Everything I mentioned was the result of removing from the countryside, one by one, the layers of statism that had been placed on it for 100 years.

We eliminated the exchange rate and the PAIS Tax, returning profitability to the sector. We lower tariffs on fertilizers, herbicides and machinery. We eliminated the CIBU to once again allow the export of used machinery, reducing its cost by up to 50%.

With the RIMI we gave the field a special regime, with no minimum investment amount, so that it could buy irrigation equipment, an anti-hail mesh or energy efficiency infrastructure, and it was amortized in a single year, with the VAT on those investments returned after three months and not in five years, as it was before.

That is, we allow working capital to quickly return to the producer's pocket to continue investing. Facilitating irrigation is not only essential for regional economies, but it significantly reduces risks in the Pampa Húmeda itself and could be, in northern Patagonia, a new agricultural frontier.

With the labor modernization law we lower the cost of hiring and providing registered work for the sector. We digitalize labor procedures, we equate the family allowances of workers in the agricultural work regime with those of the rest of Argentines and we raise the VAT on electricity and irrigation systems to 10.5% to lower the cost of production. And, furthermore, we deregulate, as has never been done in Argentine history. We removed SENASA from the production function to cut the ridiculousness of an official telling a producer how much to harvest and we applied the same logic in bovine production.

We eliminate the minimum weight of the task. We let the ban on exporting certain beef cuts expire. We lifted the ban on exporting live cattle, which left us out of a market of millions of head annually that was capitalized by our neighbors.

We retired the physical meat movement book, which had been around for more than 40 years. We replaced it with a digital system and canceled the RUCA to remove bureaucracy from the grain trade.

Logistically, we extended the circulation of bitrenes to an entire national network. Each bittrain carries up to 75% more cargo than a conventional truck, which also means fewer trucks on the roads and greater road safety.

We are putting out to tender to the private sector the trunk road network through which 80% of the country's traffic passes, so that our routes are up to what Argentines deserve.

In addition, we took one of the most important steps in our infrastructure: the privatization of Belgrano Cargas, which will greatly reduce the logistical cost of the field and, in addition, makes mining and energy, which require moving large materials, more viable.

In terms of health, the new vaccination plan against foot and mouth disease will save producers about 25 million dollars without giving up a single gram of our health status.

In short, of the more than 16,000 reforms that we have carried out, more than 1,000 were to liberate the countryside specifically. It is not for nothing that the Ministry of Deregulation has the internal name of the Ministry of Increasing Returns. But not only did we lower costs and bureaucracy, we also gave producers the tools to finance themselves and grow. We liberated the capital market for the agricultural sector. Now producers are not tied only to bank credit or their suppliers to finance themselves. The new flexibility in the market facilitates the issuance of debt and shares for amounts less than 130 million dollars. Perhaps the results of these changes will not be seen instantly, but they are windows that will open new financing opportunities.

Take, for example, the warrants market. After 110 years without changes, we deregulated the warrants market, lowering its costs from 3.5% to 1% and allowing the producer to issue their own warrants to make their stocks liquid. It took a couple of years, but today it is a vibrant market that allows producers, across the country, to obtain affordable financing using what were previously stranded assets.

In addition, we launched the merchandise promissory note, an old claim of the sector that is already being used, mainly, to buy machinery.

I always had a big question as to why producers financed themselves exclusively with debt, with the burden and risk that this implies, instead of looking for new partners for their ventures. This would allow them to obtain financial resources, but without the commitment to pay, except when there are profits.

My suspicion was always that it was the fault of bureaucratic obstacles, which now we will be able to see if I was right.

And, if it is about deregulation, we could see the greatest impact with the arrival of Starlink. Today, any producer can access the highest quality internet to the last corner of the country.

Now it seems like something everyday to us, but, in a vast majority of cases, we went from not even having the old telephone line to having high-speed internet overnight. And, with this, for the first time the possibility of incorporating wireless technology to crops and being able to monitor them from anywhere on the planet appeared. Thanks to this democratization of Internet access, today there are almost three million users of this service. And the only thing that was needed to achieve it was political will.

And to these 3,000,000 users, now, thanks to an initiative promoted by ENACOM and Starlink itself, there will be added 6,000 rural schools that, until today, had a poor internet connection or, at all, no connectivity at all.

In fact, Starlink committed to donating 6,000 satellite devices along with 24 months of its highest internet services, which include priority access for up to 5 terabytes per month.

Thanks, Elon. Yes, it's a lot. Well, it will be available later for you to use however you want.

In turn, ENACOM undertakes to finance one more year of the service, after the period donated by Starlink itself. Many thanks to everyone involved for making this project a reality. Furthermore, thanks to the excellent joint work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Economy and Agriculture, we opened the world to our products. After 25 years of obstacles, we signed the agreement with the European Union and, in that context, our producers of honey, eggs and rice filled the tariff-free quota in the first days. A great example of what our private sector can achieve when the shackles are removed. We also signed an agreement with EFTA, we are negotiating another with Singapore, we advanced in the relationship with the United States, which tripled its quota of Argentine meat, and with markets with enormous potential such as Japan, India, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. We also presented the request to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership and thus integrate dynamic commercial networks, where demographic scale, economic growth and sustained demand for higher value foods are combined. When We assume, Argentine trade agreements reached around 20% of the world product. That was the visible face of decades of isolation and wasted opportunities. Our goal is to take it to 60% of the world's product and continue advancing from there to cover the entire globe, so that our producers have access to a market of more than 8,000 million human beings. Along these lines, in the first half of this year alone we opened and reopened more than 290 markets in the world for our products, from bone-in beef to Paraguay to citrus fruits to El Salvador and bovine embryos to the Philippines. And we have had more than 500 open and reopened markets since the beginning of our management.

Just a few days ago we took another historic step, opening the Indonesian market for beef and the Argentine dairy industry. We are talking about a country with more than 280 million inhabitants, with a growing demand for food and with enormous strategic importance for the future of Asia.

Thus, with each new authorization, we expand our export capacity, incorporate more provinces into international trade and confirm the confidence of the most important markets in the world in our production and its quality. And, in addition to all this, we continue to make progress on the most pressing problem of the sector: the heaviest yoke of all, withholdings.

And I want to go over, one by one, what we've already done, so that we don't forget where we come from.

We eliminated withholdings completely from dairy products, regional economies, processed meats, pork products and various categories of beef, and today they are at zero.

We lowered soybeans from 33 to 24% and we are going to steadily lower it until reaching 15% in December 2028; to its derivatives, flour and oil, from 31 to 22.5%, on the way to 14%; for corn, from 12 to 8.5% and will reach 5.5%; and we have already lowered wheat and barley from 12 to 5.5%.

For the first time in national history, the producer has a schedule, he knows how much he pays today and how much he will pay tomorrow. It finally has predictability and, above all, more freedom and fewer taxes.

And everything is possible only thanks to the fiscal surplus, because the surplus is the engine that is taking us to the future and there is no tax reduction possible without a sustained fiscal surplus. And here it is worth clarifying something obvious: the only alternative to a surplus is a deficit, and with the deficit the ten plagues of Egypt that we did so much to leave behind return.

The surplus, which is neither more nor less than the firm ground on which we are planting the Argentina of the future, is the economic, political and stability condition on this path, and that is why we take care of it like water in the desert.

And what is coming is a change of era. We are currently discussing in Congress a project that we have called the inviolability of private property. This project not only protects our producers from possible expropriations, a traumatic experience that this sector has experienced, but also enables capital investment in our agricultural sector.

There are hundreds of businesses that require large-scale land purchases, and that want to come to invest in our country. I'm talking about the forestry industry, the dairy industry, certain regional economies and irrigation to make crops viable in arid areas, to name a few.

Given our current restrictions, they are sectors that are underexploited. With the approval of the law we estimate an investment of 15,000 million dollars in these industries.

Furthermore, in recent weeks news of vital importance for the sector emerged, which changes the equation for the coming decades. Thanks to the gas boom, an investment of $2.7 billion was announced for the construction of a granulated urea plant with a capacity of 2.1 million tons per year starting in 2029.

With this plant, Argentina stops depending on the mood of the world to produce one of the most critical inputs in the field, and we do it with our own gas, which until recently we imported, thanks to our mania for not exploiting our resources.

This is what happens when a country stops antagonizing its own wealth and starts taking advantage of it. And, thanks to this change in mentality, we are seeing a constant reduction in costs for Argentine producers.

For years, the Argentine producer was at the mercy of the will and global volatility in fertilizer prices, importing what we could perfectly produce here. That is on its way to ending once and for all.

Finally, I would like to tell you that we are sending to Congress a law that modifies the navigation regime of our country, an old claim of the northern provinces. Argentina is a country blessed by its rivers and the Constitution of 1853 already guaranteed free navigation of the rivers, which was one of the pillars of prosperity. For decades we wasted that blessing.

With the new tender, expansion of the waterway and the creation of new private ports throughout the country, we are going to drastically reduce the cost of freight, especially for producers in the north, who are the furthest away and pay the most to transport their production. To put in context the meaning of something like this for a northern producer, this reduction in logistics costs is equivalent to a reduction of approximately 8 points in withholdings. And the savings are much greater for producers near the Paraná, Paraguay and Uruguay rivers. For the forestry industry it is also equivalent to a reduction in total costs of 8%.

When we observe all these things, it is clear that the Northern provinces were not relegated by the chance of nature, but by the political will of a system at odds with development and in love with deciding winners and losers from a desk in Buenos Aires.

But there is something else that is as important as the cost: this federalizes trade. The Argentina that depended exclusively on everything passing through the port of Buenos Aires or Rosario is over.

The productive interior will finally have its own outlet into the world. This is neither more nor less than a constitutional mandate and a historical reparation for an injustice that had been in force for too long.

In fact, under the RIGI, the construction of a new multipurpose port in Timbúes, on the Paraná, has already been approved, with an investment of 277 million dollars. And, in recent days, the evaluation of a project to develop a new waterway to the center of Neuquén was in the news, which will also benefit regional agro-export economies, such as wine and fruit.

Perhaps, as I argued before, the development of energy also releases the productive forces of agriculture. Because that is the big difference between the field that was and the one that is coming. The field that was was a brilliant sector, shackled with insane regulatory and tax chains that, even with a tax overload never seen in the history of humanity, remained competitive at a global level. That he survived was nothing short of a miracle. But now it is time for the real miracle: its new century of limitless growth.

The coming field is going to produce record after record, thanks to the fact that the State, finally, got out of the way.

We have the conditions to produce 300 million tons of grain, to double current production.

We are going to give a property rights regime to seed innovators, so that Argentine technology, made by Argentines, can be sold here and enhance our yields, instead of only enhancing the yields of other countries.

We are also going to see, as Minister Sturzenegger says, a green Patagonia due to access to irrigation. In fact, we are already beginning to see it in corn producers in Añelo, who are achieving yields of up to 12 tons per hectare. And the world is already betting on this change of the future. One of the largest companies in the world in the sector announced the construction, in our country, of the largest soybean and sunflower processing plant in the world, with an investment of more than 400 million dollars. As the great Milton Friedman said, based on Charles Tibu, the first vote, and the most important of all, is the one that happens with the feet, with our daily decisions. And today, after so many decades of fleeing in terror, global capital is voting again for Argentina. Thus we are going to see agriculture finally free, because for the first time other sectors, such as energy and mining, are growing with the same force and the countryside is ceasing to be the payer of last resort for all. The ceiling that politics placed on the countryside for 100 years is being lifted and, when we manage to finish eliminating it, this sector is going to fly like it never did before in its history. history. We and you want exactly the same thing: we want to return to the country that, when it gave freedom to the countryside, became the breadbasket of the world and one of the richest nations on the planet.

You, who are used to thinking in generations, understand better than anyone what what we are building means.

Argentina finally woke up from a century of lethargy and the world is watching us. There are those who want to take us as an example and there are those who want to defend the status quo tooth and nail.

The triumph of the liberal model in Argentina can change the course of many countries, and the enemies of freedom, scattered around the globe, cannot afford to lose the privileges they built for decades.

It is no coincidence that, in recent days, we have seen an international media campaign trying to lower the price with any type of lie to demonize our patriotic feelings.

Today it is clearer than ever that there are those who seek to prevent Argentina from recovering its sense of greatness, but we are not going to give them the pleasure. We are going to make Argentina great again.

In Argentina we believe in the freedom of the individual and his ability to obtain the fruit of his work, in all the excellences of life of which he is capable. And we believe that our countryside, the Argentine countryside, is the best example of this, because you were the ones who made this hostile, indomitable and inhospitable land a paradise for those who were willing to work it.

Therefore, let's go together hand in hand and take advantage of this historic opportunity. Let's take the bull by the horns and bet on Argentina, because we have the possibility of leaving behind forever the century of humiliation and inaugurating a new golden century for the Nation.

Let's continue cultivating our soil, let's continue serving our country and let's continue making Argentina great. Without further ado, and with great enthusiasm and gratitude, I officially inaugurate the 138th Argentine Rural Exhibition.

May God bless you, may the Forces of Heaven be with you and long live freedom, damn it! Long live freedom, damn it! Long live freedom, damn it! Thank you very much.