The substitution of fish imports and the development of commercial fishing in Argentina (1930-1965)

Abstract

The Argentine economy after 1930 has been the object of an extensive and rich historiographical production. We refer to it to configure the historical period and articulate it with the national industrial fishing development. The objective of the present work is to analyze the transformations that the fishing industry suffered in Argentina through three moments of the industrial process directed by the State. The first was of improvisations forced by the depression that followed the crisis of the years 1930. The second one, which began with the World War II, had a politics of State towards the home market, but it was crossed by an international unexpected demand of a species, the shark, and his components of vitamins and the arrival to the country of Belgian immigrants with new technologies for the fishing open sea. In the third, this form of fishing began to become hegemonic linked to a species, hake and essentially to the foreign market. In all cases, the port of Mar del Plata was, in the southeast of the province of Buenos Aires, the main concentrator of the extractive Argentine fishing activity and its processing for commercialization.