En la Pampa Argentina

Last weekend I traveled to Irazusta, a tiny town in the Province of Entrerios, about 3 hours North of Buenos Aires. It was like traveling back in time. The roads leading to Irazusta are dirt, and when it rains, they turn into mud. In fact, one of the problems that we had navigating them, although it was dry, were the deep furrows that had been created by trucks traveling on these roads when they were muddy. The bottom of the car was definitely not happy about those ridges of hardened mud.
The train travels through Irazusta twice a week. Only about 300 people live there, and, as you can imagine, everyone knows everyone.
Irazusta is one of the places where the train still travels after Menem privatized the Argentinean railroad in the 1990s. The country went from having 40,000 Km of rail lines to having about 8,000. One of the results was that many small towns like Irazusta simply disappeared because once their connection to the outside world was gone, the railway, they couldn´t survive.
It´s hard to imagine what people in Irazusta do for a living, but there is a local butcher who slaughters cattle that graze in the surrounding fields. There are also people who do light construction work. A few people have factory-style chicken farms, which are a stark contrast to the area´s old-fashioned pastoral scene. I saw a rooster and a couple of hens taking refuge from the sun in the shade of a bush by the side of the road on Saturday morning. What a different life from that of the chickens who never got to walk freely and who are pumped up with antibiotics and hormones.
Making a living is a big issue in the area, and not just for people from Irazusta. As a result, many people who own tracts of farm land are renting those tracts to large companies that use them to plant soybeans. The last census reported that 17 million hectares in Argentina are being cultivated for soy beans. The majority of this is shipped abroad for use as animal fodder or other products.
While farming soy allows smaller landholders to earn something from their property, the cultivation requires immense areas without trees or other vegetation. It´s no surprise then that flooding and landslides have become an issue in different parts of the country. Last week, in fact, one of the main news stories in Argentina were the flooding and mudslides that had taken out a large chunk of an area called Tartagal, in the Northern province of Salta, which borders Paraguay and Bolivia. Roughly 60 people died, not to mention all the destruction to the land, like the loss of topsoil. The same thing happened in this province last year, so people aren´t holding their breathes for "La Presidenta", Christina Kirchner, to do something that will produce a substantial change.
Again, the issue comes down to money. Soy creates a cash crop for Argentina, and people need the money. Renting 6 hectares of land for soy cultivation will bring in the equivalent of the minimum government pension. Obviously, the more land someone has to rent, the more money they can make, with no capital investment.
What will happen to Argentineans, though, if the soy market crashes, or if the crops are destroyed? The country no longer produces the food that it needs to be self-sufficient, an irony for a country known for its gauchos and rural life.