The protein system
Argentina's cattle are raised mostly on grass, with maize used more and more to finish them.[3] Home-grown maize and soybeans[4, 5] also feed its poultry and dairy farms.[7, 8] Milk production reached 11.6 billion litres in 2025, and USDA put chicken output that year at about 2.5 million tonnes.[7, 9] It forecasts 3.08 million tonnes of beef in 2026, 800,000 tonnes of it for export.[3]
Argentina's crops feed its own animals and much larger markets abroad. USDA forecasts 41 million tonnes of maize exports in 2025/26 and 30 million tonnes of soybean meal exports in 2026/27.[4, 5] Exports on that scale give Argentina room to keep crops at home in a crisis. They also tie farm incomes and the country's dollar earnings to the harvest.
The drought showed what happens when the export crop fails. When the 2022/23 soybean harvest halved, crushers imported a record 10.4 million tonnes of soybeans in 2023, mainly from Paraguay and Brazil, to keep their export plants running.[24, 47] Those imports served the export industry, not household food. Fertiliser and crop chemicals are a more lasting dependence. They keep up the yields behind both local feed and exports.[16, 11, 18]
Durable domestic capacity:
Most Argentine farms rely on rain and grow their own feed. Argentina draws 10.5 per cent of its available freshwater,[14] and cattle spend much of their lives on pasture.[3] That does not remove the weather risk. In the 2022/23 drought, soybean production fell from 43.3 million to 21 million tonnes.[24] Exports and crushing suffered, yet by 2025/26 the crop was back to about 50 million tonnes.[6, 47] A bad harvest can cut the surplus sharply without shrinking the farm base for good.
Cattle face a slower squeeze. The official herd count ended 2025 at 50.92 million head, down 704,000 on the year after three years of drought and high costs.[12] If the herd keeps shrinking, Argentina will have less beef to eat and to sell. For now it still has a large herd and plenty of land and water. Its main risk is a farm system that depends on the rain.
Resource headroom:
Argentina has plenty of land and water: 0.887 hectares of arable land and 6,431 cubic metres of renewable freshwater per person, against a world average of 0.172 hectares of arable land.[13, 15] There is almost no fish farming, so little demand for fishmeal from wild fish. The 2025/26 wheat crop shows that yields can rise. They grew 46 per cent to 4.28 tonnes a hectare after a wet winter and more fertiliser.[4]
Money is flowing in to use that land and water. A joint lending platform run by Santander and Grupo Financiero Galicia lent US$1.1 billion in 2025 and expects US$1.5 billion in 2026. The industry expects yearly farm investment to rise from US$16 billion to US$22 billion as export taxes fall.[44] The soybean area grew from under 5 million hectares in 1992/93 to about 20 million by 2015/16.[45] Only 4 per cent of arable land is irrigated, and most yield growth has come from rain-fed farms.[46] Expansion has also driven forest clearing in the Gran Chaco, and Pampas soils are losing nutrients because farmers put back less than their grain removes.[16, 18]
Import exposure:
Argentina imports almost no protein. What little it does import comes from its Mercosur neighbours and passes through no sea chokepoint. It exports beef,[3] poultry,[7] dairy,[9] wheat, maize[4] and soy products[5] all at once. The main recent import is cheaper beef from Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, which came in as local cattle prices hit records: 23,779 tonnes in 2025, forecast to reach a record 60,000 tonnes in 2026 as Argentine exporters send their own beef abroad for higher prices.[3] That is less than 3 per cent of the beef Argentines eat. It is trade driven by price, and it lowers supply risk rather than raising it.
The main exception comes in drought years, when Argentina imports soybeans to keep its crushing plants running. The 2022/23 drought that halved the soybean harvest led to a record 10.4 million tonnes of soybean imports in 2023, 5.8 million tonnes from Paraguay and 4.1 million from Brazil. Even so, 54 per cent of crushing capacity sat idle that year.[47] Those soybeans went to the export industry, not onto plates, so this is a risk to production, not to food supply. They also show that Argentina's very low exposure holds in normal and good years, but not in a severe drought. Pork is a small net import. In the first half of 2024 Argentina imported US$16.5 million and exported US$5.8 million, as Brazilian pork and chicken filled a gap left by a shrinking herd.[48] Neither exception is large in a normal year.
Upstream dependence:
Farm inputs are Argentina's weak point. Feed, the biggest input risk for most countries, is all home-grown, and energy is now produced at home. Vaca Muerta shale took oil output to a record 859,500 barrels a day in October 2025.[21] The energy trade surplus hit a record US$7.815 billion in 2025, with exports of US$11.086 billion and imports of US$3.271 billion.[20] Argentina breeds its own cattle, and its own vaccine industry supplies foot-and-mouth vaccine.
Crop inputs are another matter. Imports supplied 56 per cent of the fertiliser Argentina used, on average, over the fifteen years to 2025, mainly from Morocco, China, the United States and Peru.[16] Argentina makes about 1.7 million tonnes a year, while farms used 4.8 million tonnes in 2024/25.[16] It makes some phosphate fertiliser, but far less than it uses.[16] For nitrogen it has one large plant, Profertil's at Bahía Blanca. Its 1.3 million tonnes of urea capacity meets about 60 per cent of national demand.[17] Crop chemicals are also imported. China and Brazil supplied 48 per cent of Argentina's US$688 million of pesticide imports in 2024, and the United States 16 per cent.[11] Brazil, China and India are the main sources of the active ingredients registered for use.[18] Almost all the soybean area, 16.3 million hectares in 2022, is planted with soybeans bred to tolerate glyphosate, a weedkiller Argentina does not make at scale.[19]
Seeds add a smaller layer of the same dependence. For decades a 1970s law let farmers replant soybean seed without paying royalties. From 2016, Monsanto, later Bayer, collected some fees by testing grain cargoes at the port. Argentina has at most two or three serious soybean breeding programmes of its own, against at least thirty in Brazil, and its soybean yields are about 17 per cent below those of Brazil and the United States.[49] A reform under way in 2024/25 would sign Argentina up to the 1991 UPOV seed convention and let Syngenta, Corteva and Bayer collect royalties directly, mostly to foreign seed owners.[49] Bayer suspended its Argentine soybean seed and biotech business from the 2021/22 season.[50] Hybrid maize, unlike soybeans, must be bought new each year, which ties farmers to a few mostly foreign seed companies.
Argentina does have real strengths of its own. Bioceres' HB4 wheat, which tolerates drought thanks to a gene found in Argentina in sunflowers, was the first genetically modified wheat approved anywhere in the world. It was cleared in 2020 and first planted commercially in 2022/23. The United States approved the same trait for its own wheat in August 2024,[51, 52] so in this case Argentina exports plant genetics instead of importing them. If fertiliser and farm chemical imports stopped for a long time, Argentines would still eat for years, thanks to pasture and the fertility already in the soil. But yields would slowly fall, and with them the export surplus that pays the country's way.
Access and affordability:
In 2023, 33.8 per cent of people were moderately or severely food insecure.[27] Other measures are mixed. was 3.4 per cent in 2023, among the lowest in Latin America.[33] A national survey found 8.7 per cent of children stunted, but the modelled estimate rose to 10.7 per cent in 2024. A study in Salta found 18 per cent among Indigenous children in one area and 1.9 per cent among non-Indigenous children in the Calchaquí valleys.[34, 35, 43] Food reaches people well across the country, though some provinces lag.[37]
Food prices swing hard. Food inflation reached 308.3 per cent in the year to March 2024 and was still 34.4 per cent in June 2026.[36] The share of people who cannot afford INDEC's basic food basket has recovered fast, from 18.1 per cent in early 2024 to 6.3 per cent in late 2025.[56] That basket is cheaper than a healthy diet.
The currency explains much of the price shock. The official dollar rate rose 208.7 per cent between 2023 and 2024, so the peso lost about two thirds of its value.[57, 60] Food prices rose 308.3 per cent in the year to March 2024, their peak.[36, 58] Beef prices in the shops still follow export prices, and the weak peso pushes them up. They rose 57 per cent in 2025. At the July 2026 minimum wage, a kilogram of beef cost 5.67 hours of work.[61, 62]
Shock endurance:
The 2022/23 drought cost an estimated US$20 billion.[25] Most of the cost fell on export earnings and the soybean crushers, who imported a record volume of beans but still left 54 per cent of their plants idle.[47] It showed how a country with plenty of food can still run short of the dollars it needs to pay for farm inputs.
Argentina's finances are its weak spot. Reserves missed the IMF programme target by US$10 billion at the end of 2025,[22] and inflation, though falling, was 31.5 per cent that year.[23] With no state food stocks and little room in the budget, households pay prices set by export markets. Beef rose 57 per cent in 2025, and yearly consumption fell to a 20-year low of 44.5 kg per person by April 2026.[3, 26] Poverty fell from 52.9 per cent in early 2024 to 28.2 per cent by late 2025,[29, 28, 56] but 33.8 per cent of people were still moderately or severely food insecure in 2023.[27]
Reserves covered 4.05 months of imports in 2025, up from 2.46 months in 2023.[38] Argentina has yet to test whether it can borrow abroad again. The extra interest it pays over US bonds fell from about 14.6 percentage points in September 2025 to 4.21 by early July 2026, but it had not issued an international bond by then.[39, 41, 42] In 2020 the emergency family payment, Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia, reached nearly 9 million people by June, at a cost of 1.14 per cent of GDP.[40]
There are two more risks, one about transport and one about disease. Nearly 80 per cent of farm exports leave along the Paraná-Paraguay river and through the Rosario ports on it.[6] When the river ran low in 2021, exporters' shipping costs rose 300 per cent, on the Rosario Grain Exchange's estimate.[30] That puts export earnings at risk rather than food supply, but those earnings pay for imported inputs and the state's thin buffers. Bird flu was confirmed at a commercial farm in Buenos Aires province on 26 August 2025. China, Chile and others suspended imports. Agreements to limit bans to the affected area covered markets that took at least 60 per cent of 2024 poultry exports.[7]
Argentina has meddled with farm trade during past price shocks. In 2008 a plan for export taxes that could have raised soybean duties to 44 per cent set off a national farm strike. The Senate rejected it and the government withdrew it.[53] In May 2021 a 30-day ban on beef exports failed to bring prices down, and farmers stopped selling cattle for nine days.[54, 55]
Those episodes show the state can keep exports at home, but also that it can disrupt its own supply. The current government has changed course. It has been cutting export taxes since mid-2025, on a path to 15 per cent by December 2028.[6, 31]
Grain waiting for export and soybeans stored on farms in silo bags add to official stocks. Households also switched to chicken and pork as beef got dearer.[3] But reserves and large harvests cannot make up for being shut out of international borrowing. Argentina's protein supply of 121.5 grams per person a day could fall by half before people went short.[1]
Trajectory
Lower export taxes are starting to close the gap between world prices and what farmers are paid, a gap that has held back investment for two decades.[6, 31] Things would improve further if reserves were rebuilt, inflation kept falling, nitrogen fertiliser output grew and the cattle herd recovered.[3, 17] A return of economic crisis, another long La Niña drought or bird flu spreading through the poultry belt could undo the progress.[7, 24]
Argentina's farms produce a large surplus for export. Its households' buying power and its imported fertiliser remain exposed to shocks in the currency, prices and shipping.