Financial Times
February 21, 2013
By Jude Webber
Argentina has an impressive ability, it seems, to bite the hand that feeds it: farming.
It’s an impression reinforced by Rabobank’s latest Argentine agribusiness outlook. Argentina’s farming sector, which makes up nearly 60 per cent of total exports ($47bn in 2012, and that was a bad year because of drought), is a key economic breadwinner, bringing home the dollars that are essential to an economically choppy country still with debt in default and cut off from international capital markets.
So you might be forgiven for thinking the government would pull out all the stops to help the sector. Yet besides the weather, farmers must grapple with home-made economic problems that can make life especially hard for exporters.
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