Argentina Extends Beef Export Restrictions to Year-End

Argentina, one of the world’s biggest producers and exporters of beef, announced it will extend its beef export restrictions until year-end in an effort to curb domestic price inflation. The move will likely force China, the biggest purchaser of Argentine beef, to look elsewhere to satisfy its fast-growing beef imports. 

Argentina supplies nearly one-quarter of China’s beef imports, which jumped 28% in 2020 from the previous year and are up 20% in the first five months of 2021. China can be expected to rely even more heavily on Brazilian beef, which already makes up 40% of China’s beef imports, along with supplies from Australia and the United States. 

Argentina halted beef exports for a month in mid-May in an attempt to curb domestic prices, as Gro highlighted here. The latest ruling restricts exports of certain cuts of beef and caps exports at 50% of last year’s average export pace until the end of 2021. 

These moves are the latest effort by a national government to limit exports in order to curb domestic food inflation. Join Gro on July 15 and July 20 as we take a deeper look at “What Is Driving Global Food Inflation,” and showcase the Gro analytics and forecast models that will be key to predicting how long the inflationary trends will last. 

Longer term, Argentina aims to ramp up domestic meat production by more than 60% from current levels, which in turn would sharply raise demand for Argentine corn. Most of Argentina’s corn is currently exported, and an increase in domestic usage would alter worldwide trade flows, barring an increase in the country’s corn production. 

Gro’s Argentina Corn Yield Forecast Model, available to Gro Premium subscribers, can gauge Argentina’s crop availability during the growing season and provide valuable insight needed for price forecasting.  

This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.