An eight-day national transport strike called by medium- and long-distance operators is hitting lemon production hard. Not only are producers running short of diesel for farm machinery because of disruption to deliveries, transport of vital inputs and most importantly harvest labourers have been halted.

The lemon harvest, which has only just begun and was disrupted for climatic reasons, ground to a halt on Saturday as workers were left stranded. Fruit that has already been harvested has been subject to delays as it cannot be transported to packhouses.

It is now feared that the strike, which started on April 20, will go on beyond the eight-day period. 'We cannot tolerate this situation,' Tucumán agriculture leader Roberto Martínez Zavalía, president of the Sociedad Rural de Tucumán was reported. He hinted at strike action by the agriculture sector itself. 'The outcome will most likely be a surprise and indefinite strike,' he was reported. Farmer and grower groups are involved in talks at national level on the issue of strike action to express their dissatisfaction with changing government policy on export taxes as the Argentinean economic crisis deepens.

Diesel suppliers are not supplying to transport companies or growers in the face of dwindling supplies from the oil companies themselves. The strike may become indefinite until the national government reaches an agreement with the oil companies, which are state-owned in Argentina, on a reasonable price for diesel fuel.

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