The establishment of Profertil in White Bay this was santafesino’s great failure in pursuing the deposit investments of the last 40 years. With Charles Reutemann in government and Arturo DiPietro as minister of General engine production decided in 1995 to settle rosary with an investment of 350 million dollars and which placed the province on the world map of productive investments. A year later and when the Chevy complex was still under construction, the Canadian firm Agrium announced with the governor George Obeid and his Minister of Production, Omar Perottithe largest investment in the history of Santa Fe -about 570 million US dollars- to produce nitrogen fertilizers in the far north of Gran Rosario.

It was an announcement made with great fanfare, with all the data on the table, but nothing came of it and the leaders of Agrium ended up leaving with their project in the south of the country. As reported in Diario Clarín on December 13, 1996, the Obeid government “available to business the current provincial industrial promotion scheme, while area municipalities have joined with attractive tax exemptions to support the largest private investment in Santa Fe”.

The person in charge of carrying out the task was Perotti, who had come to Obeid’s cabinet after a promising management at the head of the Rafaela administration, with a strong productive situation. But when it came time to move from promises to action, the current governor of Santa Fe let the turtle slip away. It is true that conducting formal negotiations is not an easy task, both because of bureaucracy and because of conflicting political interests. Di Pietro knew it well, who had to convince the Americans of GM that the project was going to be able to be mounted in the Gran Rosario – as they had planned – and not in the ex-Fiat of Sauce Viejo, as they were trying to impose of the power of the capital.

What is striking in this case is that the blockade came from the communal head of a town at that time very small like Timbúes and he was a politician of the same costume. The local official became involved in collecting one of the many misleading contributions that exist in Argentina and attempted to collect the 11% gas rate, -which, without logical explanation, applied to residential, commercial users and even industrial – but for a company that uses gas as a raw material. To get an idea, Profertil, the company born from the association between Agrium and YPF, consumed some 2,500,000 m3 per day in 2019.

Unlike his predecessor Di Pietro, Perotti was unable to resolve the controversy and the Canadians fled Santa Fe to develop a business that has already invested US$900 million and is close to finalizing a new payout of 1,500 million US dollars, provides 360 direct jobs and another 1,500 per year indirectly. Incidentally, the official gaffe had no political consequences for its main actors: the mayor of Timbúes does not even appear in Google but could be re-elected in his municipality, while Perotti is still in the running.

It’s over, now maybe the rafaelino can get a chance for revenge. Like Punto biz account, Profertil, the current partnership between Nutrien (formerly Agrium) and YPF, is already planning to develop a new center in Gran Rosario. Since 2011, they have occupied half of the land that Agrium bought in the last century and set up a packaging and distribution center there. But now they plan to go further, for the same reasons they intended to do at the end of the last century: the proximity of the productive agricultural core of Argentina and the ease of supplying other Southern Cone countries through the waterway. Fortunately, the news came out early enough to take the precautions of the case. And maybe it’s possible not to trip over the same stone twice.