Norberto Yauhar

Norberto Gustavo Yauhar (born December 7, 1960) is an Argentine politician. He was designated Minister of Agriculture by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2011, serving in the post until 2013.

Life and times Yauhar was born in General Roca, Río Negro, in 1960. His family were cattle ranchers in rural Los Menucos, though he himself would spend much of his life in Trelew, in neighboring Chubut Province.

Yauhar's rapport with Das Neves deteriorated early in his second term, however. He was opposed to das Neves' break with Kirchnerism (with whose support the governor had been reelected), and in turn, earned the enmity of the governor's son, Pablo das Neves.

The largely autonomous Fisheries Secretariat became a part of the newly established Ministry of Agriculture in 2009. The fishing sector in Argentina had been declining for years as a result of overexploitation and high discard rates; the important Argentine hake catch in particular had declined by around 70% since the mid-1990s. Yauhar offered the commercial fishing lobby the lifting of a long-standing regulation requiring the use of special fishing nets designed to free juvenile hake, citing widespread non-compliance. This concession was granted in return for stricter catch share quotas and government monitoring of fishing vessels. The difficulty of monitoring vessel movements along the vast Argentine Sea made implementation of this latter policy unfeasible, however, and by April 2010, Yauhar admitted the failure of this new policy from the point of view of conservation; the lifting of special net requirement proved a boon to the hake fishing industry, however, which saw its catch double to around 800,000 tons in the interim. The Director of the Greenpeace Oceans Campaign, Milko Schvartzman, cited lax enforcement of the catch quotas as another factor. Following the election in October of Agriculture Minister Julián Domínguez to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies, Yauhar was designated to the post by President Cristina Kirchner.