Alberto Fernandez will meet with Biden in search of support to make the agreement with the IMF more flexible

Affected by a historic drought, Argentina needs to postpone debt payments due to the low collection of dollars in a key election year for the government.

The president of Argentina, Alberto Fernandez, will meet this Wednesday with his American counterpart Joe Biden in Washington, in the first bilateral summit held by both leaders.

According to sources from the Casa Rosada, it will be a meeting, scheduled for the afternoon in Washington, with an “open agenda” and an estimated duration of 90 minutes. At the end, a joint communique will be issued, reported the state agency Telam.

For its part, the White House explained that on Wednesday Fernandez and Biden “they will celebrate 200 years of bilateral relations” and “reaffirm the strength of the US-Argentina partnership” by examining an agenda focused on how to “continue to work together to address global challenges.”

Topics under discussion include “critical minerals, climate change, space and technology,” as well as “economic cooperation” and the “shared values ​​of inclusion, democracy and protection of human rights”.

President Alberto Fernandez arrived in New York last Sunday after passing through the Dominican Republic, where he participated in the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government. There, in his speech, the Argentine president seemed to wink at his colleague Biden, since he dedicated a few lines to question the government of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

According to Fernandez, during the Trump administration, the region – which he called “our America” ​​– suffered “a process of tremendous regional disintegration”. In this sense, he held the ex-president responsible for the disarmament of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), since, according to him, the bloc “was fading as its members disassociated themselves fulfilling mandates imposed by that republican government“.

He also affirmed that the Organization of American States (OAS) “remained at the service of that disintegrative objective, validating a coup in Bolivia”.

On Monday, the president began his official agenda in the North American country at the Summit of the Americas, where he shared a dinner with some 30 investors.

That same day, the Argentine Economy Minister, Sergio Massa, traveled to the US to meet on Thursday with the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, with whom he will discuss matters related to the agreement that the South American country has with the organization, for the debt of 44,000 million dollars.

The Argentine press speculated on the possibility that the minister could join the presidential entourage that will meet with Biden. In an electoral year, Peronism tries to position the figure of Massa, one of the main pre-candidates of the ruling party for the October elections.

Drought and the IMF

Argentina will ask the US government, one of the most important partners in the IMF, that this year will be dramatic for the country in terms of revenue from agricultural exports, affected by a historic drought. This limited access to the dollars that the government needs to raise to meet debt payments.

Under this argument, he will try to seek support from the White House to continue postponing compliance that would otherwise leave the Fernandez administration with no room for maneuver in an election year.

Already last week, the Fund reached a new agreement with the Argentine government to modify the agreement signed in 2022 and renegotiate the record debt contracted by former President Mauricio Macri, who has just confirmed that he will not be a candidate.

One of the changes concerns the reserve accumulation target for this year and intends to respond with “realistic” criteria to the losses caused by the drought and the conflict in Ukraine.

While the deal is subject to approval by the Fund’s Board of Executive Directors, which is expected to meet in the coming weeks, the deal involves a reduction of almost 2,000 million dollars in the goal of accumulation of international reserves for 2023.