An Economy Ministry taskforce will travel to Washington D.C. later this week to meet with International Monetary Fund (IMF) authorities to continue negotiations over the redefinition of the agreement the country signed with the lending institution in March 2022, sources within the ministry have told the Herald. 

The group will be led by Economy Minister Sergio Massa’s chief advisor Leonardo Madcur and Vice Minister Gabriel Rubinstein. 

In 2022, the government and the IMF signed an Extended Fund Facility agreement after renegotiating the US$44 billion debt former President Mauricio Macri acquired in 2018. The deal included an economic program that Argentina must comply with in order to receive disbursements every three months, which are used to pay for the previous debt with the IMF.

However, the government has been speaking to authorities at the IMF and the United States government to gain support to revise the goals and payments in the agreement. The focal point of renegotiation is the critical drought that is affecting Argentina’s trade balance and cutting fiscal income.  

The drought, the worst to hit the country in around a century, has devastated the harvests of key crops such as soybeans and corn, slashing the country’s inflow of dollars and complicating its attempts to accumulate international reserves. The goals established in the 2022 agreement include international reserve targets, which the Executive Board of the IMF relaxed by US$1.8 billion at the beginning of April.

Sources have also said that Massa expects to receive payments from other multilateral organisms in the upcoming months, in order to increase the Central Bank reserves. Payments of US$380 million are expected to arrive on Tuesday, and Massa will travel to Uruguay on Thursday to sign an agreement for US$680 million with the Latin American Development Bank (CAF, by its Spanish initials), with disbursements to be paid by June 30.