Rachel Laudan

More on Grain and Argentina

Here’s the Financial Times on grain prices world wide and the likelihood that Argentine farmers will throttle back on soy production. Thanks to Kelly O´Leary for the reference.

And here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal. What I thought was interesting and little remarked on is how South American countries are the major winners in the changing economy of grain.

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2 thoughts on “More on Grain and Argentina

  1. Kay Curtis

    Hi Rachel I read this link (South American countries are the major winners in the changing economy of grain) and found nothing about the problems in SA or the benefits. I wonder if it is a case of many of the people who adhere to the WSJ being the top of the pile who benefits from everything, even in the USA where the median adjusted income has been dropping steadily for years. It seems they would also be the ones most in touch with and most sympathetic to their counter parts in SA who are getting richer and richer as increasing numbers of their fellow citizens come closer and closer to starvation.

  2. Rachel Laudan

    Kay, I assume by SA you mean South America not South Africa. And I’m not sure you can generalize about the whole continent. What struck me about the top left hand graph at the bottom of the page is that it actually gave some information instead of simply talking about riots. And it seemed strange to me that neither the article nor other commentaries I have read mentioned the fact that four of the five countries whose GDPs are increasing most, presumably as a result of the export of grain, are in South America. I don’t know enough about the internal politics of Guayana, Paraguay or Bolivia to comment on what’s happening there. But it does seem that the economic recovery of Argentina since the default of 2002 has been largely fueled by export agriculture and the effects have been very widely felt in the country.

I'd love to know your thoughts