June 18, 2008 (LPAC)--It should surprise no one that British agent George Soros is right in the thick of efforts to overthrow Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, on behalf of British and other foreign financier interests, displeased that the Argentine leader has dared to assert the State's sovereign right to act on behalf of the general welfare. With local allies, these financier interests used the government's March 11 decree, raising export taxes on soybeans and sunflower seeds, as the pretext for launching a phony "people's" movement that denounces Fernandez de Kirchner as an "authoritarian tyrant."

How does Soros fit in here? Through his company Adecoagro, Soros controls one of Argentina's three largest "sowing pools" -- speculative investment funds -- that have made a financial killing in the soybean business that has expanded so much in recent years that it now accounts for 54% of all Argentine grain production. In several speeches made since agricultural producers launched a strike to protest the government's March 11 decree, Cristina Fernandez and her closest advisers have repeatedly identified the "sowing pools" as the financial interests driving the strike.

The sowing pools are predators, whose only objective is large profits. Investments in soybeans today yields a net profit of approximately $2.15 for every $1.00 invested, as compared to corn, which yields $0.45 for every $1.00 invested. These speculators find foreigners to invest in soybeans in return for a percentage share in the profits, which they promise will be higher than those offered by other financial options. With a large amount of money to throw around, and control over large planting areas and production volumes, these pools negotiate better prices for land rentals, agricultural machinery and inputs, and other "services," so as to maximize their profits. Argentine government statistics reveal that the sowing pools are likely to hold over 80% of the soy markets share.

Their treatment of small farmers engaged in subsistence agriculture is brutal: they have literally forced them out of their communities as the soybean "frontier" expanded, driving them into urban slums where no jobs are available. Argentine agronomist Alberto Lapolla, who signed Helga Zepp-LaRouche's statement calling for doubling world food production, noted in a June 17 article that those rural workers who end up working for soybean producers constitute "semi-slave labor, two thirds of which work off the books" in the informal economy. What the soybean producers are disputing are not one or two points in export taxes, Lapolla states, but rather "the State's right to intervene in the economy to modify the distribution of national revenue."