The Argentine countryside dries up

Raúl Catta is 69 years old and owns a field in Arrecifes, in the most fertile area in the north of the province of Buenos Aires.

He plants there soybeans and also corn, which he uses to feed 600 dairy cows.

“Even those who are not believers pray here,” he says in the house that he has belonged to his family for more than 90 years.

The prayers ask for water.

The Argentine countryside is going through three consecutive years of drought as a result of La Niña, a climatic phenomenon that has caused millions in losses, withered fields and the death of thousands of head of cattle.

In Catta's field, the soybeans are dying and the corn forms tiny, disorderly grains.

On February 18, in the middle of summer, a frost affected the flowering of what little was left standing.

The last rain that irrigated the Catta fields fell on May 25 of last year, almost ten months ago.

The lack of water ruined the first planting and is close to doing the same with the second.

“I don't remember a similar situation”, says Catta, “I have experienced six-month droughts and a crop failure.

But that the two harvests have been lost I have never experienced it”.

The lack of rain and high temperatures have generated an explosive cocktail.

Enrique Erize, president of the consultancy Nóvitas, warns that "the impact will be dramatic in quantity and quality."

“Translated into numbers it is a loss of income for Argentina of between 13,000 and 15,000 million dollars.

Government collection will fall by 4,000 million ”, he says.

This is bad news for the Casa Rosada, which is struggling to accumulate international reserves at the Central Bank and juggling to maintain the value of the peso.

Without international credit, the income of foreign exchange depended for the most part on the products of the field.

Soybeans and corn alone account for almost 40% of all Argentine exports, according to INDEC data.

“This is an area where 1,100 millimeters of rain per year and last year 420 millimeters fell,” laments Sebastián Avagnina, an agronomist and producer in General Las Heras, an agricultural area an hour's drive from Buenos Aires.

"After three years in a row like this, as the crops continue to drink, the groundwater, which is two or three meters away, dries up," he says.

The water is getting deeper, and even the strongest crops, such as alfalfa, which sinks its roots up to seven meters, are dying of thirst.

Sebastián Avagnina, an agronomist, observes the corn affected by the drought in his field. Federico Rivas Molina

The lands affected by the drought add up to 172.5 million hectares, an area equivalent to almost the sum of the surfaces of Peru, Ecuador and Paraguay or more than three times that of Spain.

The lack of water is especially hard in the so-called core zone, the fertile vertex formed by Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Córdoba.

According to the January report of the National Directorate of Agricultural Emergency and Risk, there are more than eight million hectares whose crops are in a "critical period" and 21.7 million head of cattle at risk.

Ricardo Buzzi, president of the Rural Society of Las Heras, also believes, like Raúl Catta, that this drought is unprecedented.

“The family farm is already in its fifth generation.

The first of us arrived in 1887 and the well was used to provide water”, he says.

“That water right now is more than eight meters and less than 50 centimeters.

Mill shafts that are 100 years old have dried up, ”he laments.

About 120 kilometers from Buenos Aires is the city of Navarro.

It is an agricultural area that has a 175-hectare lagoon that attracts tourism.

Eduardo Caruso has dairy farms in Navarro and for the first time in his life he has seen the lagoon completely dry.

“The time it has been dry is unprecedented,” says Caruso, speaking, like his colleagues, of a perfect storm.

“The increase in cereals that we use to feed the farm has exceeded the value of a liter of milk.

Last year, 400 dairy farms were closed across the country,” he says.

Dry corn leaves crumble in the hands of Avagnina, the agronomist from Las Heras, as he laments that the soybean plants are half their size and have not yet developed the beans.

What is left of the corn will not go to the market, but to feed the cattle.

This has been an emergency solution for many producers, such as Diego Maíz, who rents 300 hectares in small plots spread out near the Avagnina fields.

Maíz grew up on top of a combine harvester, and over the years it stopped providing services to third parties to concentrate on its own crops.

“He suffers when he sees how the work that one has done with passion is lost.

We keep doing tests to improve and these blows make you go back from a slap ”, he says.

A farmer in Correa (Santa Fe Province) walks in a dry soybean field on February 7. Eduardo Bodiño (Getty Images)

The forecasts are the worst.

It will not be enough for the rains to return little by little this autumn, as forecasts anticipate, because recovering the water from the groundwater will take several seasons of good rainfall.

The countryside then asks the Peronist government for help, with whom it maintains a bad historical relationship.

“The drought has come together with official actions,” says Marcos Mathe, a producer with the Sociedad Rural Argentina with fields in Salto, in the core zone of Buenos Aires province.

“We are talking, for example, about the exchange rate of the dollar, which costs 377 pesos on the street against another that, after the withholdings on exports that the State applies to us, remains at 137 pesos.

The Argentine producer has achieved very high yields and has been able to overcome the storm of withholdings and dollars, but now the drought has come together,

negative projections

The Buenos Aires Grain Exchange put numbers on the tragedy.

According to their projections, the drop in production in the 2022/2023 campaign will be 45%, with 9% less planted area and a drop in yield -the average tons produced per hectare- of 34%.

For the foreign market it will be a very hard blow: wheat sales will fall 55% and corn sales 21%.

At the beginning of February, the national government offered, through Banco Nación, credits for up to 20,000 million pesos (about 100 million dollars at the official exchange rate) "to those who prove the emergency."

"Too a

A farmer in Correa (Santa Fe Province), shows an ear in a dry field, last month. Eduardo Bodiño (Getty Images)

There will be a new line for tenants at discounted rates”, said Silvina Batakis, president of the bank.

Raúl Catta, the producer from Arrecifes, agrees that “money comes out of this”, but considers that the money should come from the sector.

“There has to be a line of credit from the companies that supply agriculture, which are multinationals.

That they say 'take the seed and pay me when you can', the same with fertilizers.

It must be an arrangement between private parties where the Government does not intervene ”, he says.

Meanwhile, the Argentine countryside will continue to pray for the water to fall from heaven.

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