Argentina's bread-basket province of Buenos Aires will remain mostly dry over the days ahead, meteorologists said on Tuesday, after reporting scant rains over the weekend in the country's biggest and most productive farm area. The drought in some parts of Buenos Aires has put upward pressure on international soya prices, on supply worries. Argentina is the world's top exporter of soyameal livestock feed and its third biggest supplier of raw soyabeans.
"In most of Buenos Aires the rains were slight to non-existent," Natalia Gattinoni, a meteorologist with the state-run INTA farm technology institute, told Reuters, in reference to the weekend and Monday. During the rest of this week Buenos Aires can expect lower than average rainfall, she added.
CBOT March soyabeans were down 1 cent at $9.60-3/4 a bushel on Tuesday. Losses were kept in check by concerns that the low rain and high temperatures in Argentina will limit the size of the country's harvest. As of late last week Argentine farmers had planted 82 percent of the soyabeans expected to be sown in the 2017/18 crop year, according to the Buenos Aires grains exchange. The amount of the remaining seedings to be completed will depend on fields being moist enough to be planted.
The Rosario exchange expects a 2017/18 soya harvest of 54.5 million tonnes. "There is going to be some drought damage, but it's not a disastrous season. The area most affected will possibly be the southwest part of Buenos Aires and (the province of) La Pampa," said Eduardo Sierra, climate advisor to the Buenos Aires Grains exchange.
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