| War in Ukraine: there is a boom in demand to buy grains in Argentina |
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“From the five to ten requests per week from new buyers that we had, today we receive between 30 and 50 additional daily requests from new interested importers, generally in wheat, corn and sunflower”.
The data is categorical and was given by Gustavo Idígoras, president of the Chamber of the Oil Industry and the Cereal Exporters Center (Ciara/CEC), who highlighted that these queries come particularly from markets that were supplied by Ukraine and Russia /today both in the middle of the conflict of the war/ for example from countries in southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, even Southeast Asia. Ukraine and Russia are important global suppliers of wheat, corn and sunflower.
“Questions that are not only about short/term offers, but about questions about Argentina’s productive growth capacity in the coming years, to the effects that we are in a region of the world without armed conflicts”, he detailed in the 2nd panel on the impacts of the pandemic and the armed conflict in the 9th Symposium “From the South to the world”, organized by the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Buenos Aires (Fauba) and promoted by Fernando Vilella, from that house of studies.
Under the moderation of Agustín Tejeda, manager of Economic Studies of the Buenos Aires Cereals Exchange (BCBA), Idígoras commented that to the climatic variable that exists in all productive systems and that had been impacting with droughts in these regions, a “novel variable” appeared, the pandemic, which began to generate inconveniences in flows and breaks in global value chains, supply problems in logistics, a substantial increase in costs and delays in foreign trade, among other inconveniences.
“But now, the appearance of a black swan, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, generates a phenomenal impact on a global level, with food supply, energy, supply problems and a global inflationary process that impacts production systems, not only because of the value of the products but also because of the value of the inputs,” he assured.
In this context, he stressed that, first of all, today the war variable is now one more risk variable at the level of food production and marketing: “It hasn’t been on the table since World War II.”
“This generates imbalances, imbalances, losses and consumer problems. This type of problem generates the natural temptation of governments to intervene to correct market problems”, he explained. However, he stated that many times these market problems with intervention “encourage or promote a greater growth of problems than the search for their own solutions to them”.
In this sense and with this international context, expressed that should point to a revaluation of Mercosur as a supplier of food. “This opportunity should go hand in hand with sustained agro/industrial policies in the medium and long term and agreed with the countries of the region, with assistance and joint cooperation to have not only a productive strategy but also a logistics one”said.
Gustavo Idígoras (Ciara/CEC), Agustín Tejeda (Buenos Aires Grain Exchange) and Manuel Otero (IICA)
In this line, for this positioning and growth of the region to be effective, for the manager It is necessary to address three securities: food, energy and environmental that must go hand in hand.
“We are selling Europe more biodiesel but we cannot do it in the domestic market because it is prohibited by law. This type of inconsistency should not exist in this new international context, where these three securities are prioritized”, emphasized.
In his opinion, the access to markets that was previously through multilateral negotiations “is not only frozen but will be archived” for several decades. “We are heading towards a recovery of the historical bilateralism or, if you prefer, complex regionalism, where the conditions of access to markets are going to be pure and exclusive, without taking multilateral rules into account. Today there is an opportunity for growth, development and insertion. There are more challenges than threats that lie ahead, we must know how to arbitrate them through agro/industrial policies”, hill.
In his turn, Manuel Otero, general director of the Inter/American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), pointed out that This international situation shows that today we live in an interconnected world.
Manuel Otero, Director General of the Inter/American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA)
Manuel Otero, Director General of the Inter/American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA)
“On the issue of fertilizers provided by Russia and Belarus, for example, there is a great dependence on the entire Central American region. There is a lot of concern in the world about how to keep the wheel of agriculture turning. The obvious conclusion is that here we have to produce more with less and in a different way”, Indian.
“Food security is at the top of the world agenda and we have to be clear that this is the case. Agriculture is an instrument for peace and for the consolidation of democratic systems”, he added. |
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