Rains over recent days have helped accelerate early 2011/12 soy planting in Argentina, a local meteorologist said on Tuesday, after an overly sunny September caused fears that La Nina might dry out soils.
The weather disturbance — called La Nina, or «The Girl» — tends to cause excessive dryness in Argentina.
«Starting in October and lasting through the first week of November there was a very good supply of rain,» Jose Luis Aiello, director of the Applied Climatology Consultancy, or CCA, told Reuters.
«Everything is fine at this point, which is speeding the planting of soy,» he added.
Argentina is the world’s No. 3 soybean exporter and the top supplier of soymeal and soyoil. Its main growing areas are in the central eastern provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Entre Rios and Cordoba.
Argentine farmers will plant soy on 18.6 million hectares (46 million acres), the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange said last month in its first 2011/12 area estimate.
Argentina is also the world’s No. 2 corn supplier after the United States. The South American country produced a record 22.9 million tons in 2010/11, the government says.
But the 2011/12 season got off to a bad start as planting was slowed by dry soils before October rains swept across the Pampas crop belt, allowing farmers to go ahead with sowing.
Uncertainty about the weather is mixed with concerns about the global economy and the farm policies of President Cristina Fernandez, who won a landslide re-election victory last month.
Argentina — with its vast, fertile Pampas — should be in a good position to cash in on growing world food demand. But it lags its neighbors in attracting private capital, due in part to the government’s unorthodox economic policies.
Farmers say interventionist measures, such as high soy export taxes and quotas on corn and wheat exports, are applied in a haphazard way that dampens investment in the country’s key agricultural sector.
Source: Reuters