What does Argentina produce and export?

The Pampas are among the best crop soils on earth: deep, dark and level, with a temperate climate and enough rain across Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Santa Fe provinces to farm without irrigation. The transformation of the last thirty years was less about the land than about a technique. Herbicide-tolerant soybeans, approved in 1996, made no-till farming practical at scale, which cut costs, protected moisture and allowed a second crop after wheat in the same season. Planted area expanded across the Pampas and into the drier northwest. Argentina grew 12% of the world's soybeans in 2024 (FAOSTAT) and 4.7% of the world's corn in 2024 (FAOSTAT).

The way that crop leaves the country is the more interesting fact. Argentina held only 2.6% of world soybean export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), a small share for the third-largest grower, because it does not sell many raw beans. Along a stretch of the Paraná river around Rosario sits the densest concentration of soybean crushing capacity anywhere, with plants that take beans by truck and load meal and oil straight into ocean-going vessels at their own berths. Export taxes have been set for decades at a lower rate on processed meal and oil than on whole beans, which locks the crushing margin in place and keeps the beans at home. The plants run above what local farms supply, so Argentina also buys beans from Paraguay and Brazil to crush: 3.6% of world soybean import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).

Corn behaves differently because there is no equivalent processing incentive, so it leaves as grain. Argentina held 16% of world corn export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), a much larger share of trade than of production, and it ships on the southern hemisphere calendar, harvesting from March and competing with United States supply in the northern spring. Wheat, grown as a winter crop before soybeans on the same fields, accounted for 3.4% of world wheat export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). All of it depends on one waterway: barges and Panamax vessels on the Paraná load to a draft that falls when the river runs low, as it did severely in 2021.