Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Argentina farmers struggle as drought decimates crops
URQUIZA, Argentina — The ground crackles as Guillermo Cuitino walks across dry farmland that should be green and lush this time of year. He grabs a soy plant and easily disintegrates its leaves with his hands.
“This year’s drought was extreme,” the agricultural engineer said this week at the farm where he works in Urquiza, a town about 140 miles from Argentina’s capital.
That scene is repeated in farms across Argentina, where months of dry weather have ruined harvests. Farmers are scrambling to make ends meet, and a sharp drop in expected revenue from exported farm products will deal a severe blow to Argentina’s shaky economy.
“This drought is unprecedented,” farmer Martin Sturla said, standing in his dusty fields in nearby San Antonio de Areco. “It’s Dante-esque.”
The situation is particularly dire because Argentina had already been suffering two years of unusually dry weather.
“The last two years were bad, but we always had some rain events that allowed us to get by,” Cuitino said.
Even experts are having trouble coming to terms with the crisis.
“There are no words to describe the impact of a campaign marked by all-time historical records: a deficit of rainfall for the third consecutive year in the summer, persistent heat waves until well into March, and agricultural frosts as late as October 2022 and as early as February 2023,” said a recent report by the Rosario Board of Trade that has sharply cut estimates for this year’s harvest.
“Crops, animals and natural resources have seen their conditions deteriorate week by week, leaving us on the eve of winter with a storm of losses,” it said.
In its latest weekly report, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange said this year’s soybean production would be around 25 million tons, down 44% from the average for the last five cycles. Total wheat production, meanwhile, is forecast at 36 million tons, a 31% drop from the previous year.
Taking into account the soybean, wheat and corn harvests, which make up 87% of Argentina’s grain production, losses will reach an estimated $14.14 billion, according to the Rosario Board of Trade. The Regional Consortium of Agricultural Experimentation said in a recent report that current conditions will lead to almost $20.5 billion in export losses.
Although many have been quick to attribute the drought to global warming, experts said it was not so simple.
“We have no evidence that it’s climate change for now,” said Anna Sorensson, a climate change researcher at the publicly funded CONICET research institute. “On the contrary, we see that precipitation has increased due to climate change.”
She added that there is “great certainty” the current drought was generated by La Nina, which involves a cooling of the central Pacific that leads to changes in weather around the world. The phenomenon lasted much longer than normal this time.