Our Chris Kraul, who is based in Bogota, Colombia, has been very busy lately. The other day he had a piece in Barron's on potentially good investments in Latin American banks. And he also has this interview piece for KPMG with the head of Fiat Argentina on trying to sell cars in Brazil. And he has this piece for the University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton site on Argentine ranchers switching to soy production, From his story:
In San Miguel del Monte, Argentina, fifth-generation cattleman Mario Caceres never wanted much more from life than to be a modern day gaucho tending his herd, which a few years ago topped 1,600 head of Angus cattle, the breed that has helped make his country synonymous with delicious cuts of beef.
But globalization, modernization and his country’s politics have intervened. Like hundreds of other Argentine cattlemen, Caceres is slowly leaving his cowboy life -- if not its spirit -- and becoming a farmer of row crops, notably soy, to meet increasing demand from food buyers in Asia as well as biofuel manufacturers in his native country.
Since the height of his cattle-ranching career in 2007, Caceres has converted half his two ranches’ 5,000 acres to soy and other row crops while reducing his livestock to 130 head -- a token number that he keeps, he says, largely for sentimental reasons. And he’s hardly alone. In the San Miguel del Monte district of Buenos Aires province, virtually all his neighbors on the eastern edge of the Pampas have converted in some degree or other to soy, corn, sunflower and wheat, Caceres says.
It's a microcosm of a trend spreading across Argentina. According to the Agriculture Ministry, the national herd this year will decline 22%, to 47 million head from the 2007 peak of 58.7 million head, and is expected to continue falling.
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