The MGAP corrected its effect upwards and admitted that the situation could worsen. Forages are compromised. State aid will be renewed.
Uruguay will lose at least 1.8 billion dollars due to the prolonged droughtadmitted the minister of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries (MGAP), fernando mattoswho described the panorama facing agriculture and the national industry as the most difficult in the last 30 years.
The number of losses, which will increase if there are no significant rains in the coming weeks, is greater than the sum of all the losses that the country experienced as a result of the heat waves in the last three decades. It should be remembered that we are currently going through the 13th agricultural emergency in the last 14 years.
The $1.8 billion does not include drought-induced losses. Last Friday, the president of the Chamber of Industry of Uruguay (CIU), Fernando Pacheestimated in dialogue with scope.com a strong blow for the national industrial activity due to the fact that a large part of it processes agricultural goods.
Mattos stated that the effects will also be felt in the coming years with, for example, a drop in calf births. “It will have consequences within three years, due to the lower supply of farms to fish and meat to export,” he said.
The president of the Rural Association of Uruguay (ARU), Gonzalo Valdes, had projected a similar panorama in dialogue with this medium. “The impact is going to be for the breeders in the spring-autumn of next year. This is going to end up also affecting the slaughter, we are already talking about the year 2025, 2026 and perhaps something about 2027,” she said. And he added that “in what has to do with the agriculture we could talk about one by one unsuccessful summer harvest”.
The impact of the drought on the soybean cropswhich in mid-February were already 60% bankrupt, will also be decisive in the blow to exports since the item represented one of the records last year, with almost 2,000 million dollars.
The fodder structure It is also affected by drought. Minister Mattos reported the difficulties that exist to rebuild it, since it could not be sown even though there is a large volume of seeds, which also registered an increase in prices.
Given the lack of animal feed, some producers “let go” of their breeding cows, affecting a livestock market “oversupplied”, Hence, several cuts of meat are experiencing a drop in consumer prices. In the last Consumer Price Index (CPI)meat was one of the items with the greatest decline.
Source: Ambito
