ARGENTINA

On October 20, the Executive Branch established the temporary fixing of maximum sales prices to the final consumer, for all producers, marketers and distributors of 1432 mass consumption products throughout the national territory. The measure, in turn, backdated the prices of these products to October 1 and will be maintained until January 7, 2022.  You may access the list of products and maximum sales prices to the final consumer by clicking here.

This measure was announced after the Secretary of Domestic Trade, Roberto Feletti, met with representatives of the Argentine Food Products Industries Coordinator (Copal in Spanish) and failed to reach an agreement. However, Faletti remarked that “we noticed quite a lot of consensus in the meeting” and expressed that from the list of products “there are only 139 observations and 68 belong to only one company”. Likewise, he pointed out that for the companies “it does not seem a great effort to maintain the prices of 1,500 products for 90 days”.

The Secretary of Commerce mentioned that this measure “is a much broader Cared Prices program, with more than double the number of products”. And he remarked that the prices must be reflected on the shelves from the moment the measure is made official.

For its part, COPAL issued a statement in which it expressed that despite the “effort made by the companies in sending their participation proposals, they were not taken into account”. At the same time, it remarked that the food and beverage industry “is not the cause of inflation but suffers its consequences”.