El agro argentino: Un sistema productivo y organizacional eficiente

The recent technological paradigm that is spreading worldwide, characterized by technologies that can be applied to natural resources, presents important opportunities for the relatively less developed countries, where agriculture, livestock and their value chains are an important part of the productive tradition. IFPRI has recently been studying the Argentine agricultural production model of recent decades, noting that this organizational and productive system has allowed the rapid adoption of productive techniques and the overcoming of financial and risk barriers, with the consequent improvement of average productivity. The activities linked to agricultural production have undergone a considerable transformation, which has become particularly intense in recent years. The quantitative changes in production were accompanied by changes in technological models and by transformations in the organization of the activity, which expanded the number of sectors involved in production, decentralizing activities and giving rise to new actors (including the landowner, the service centre, and rural contractor) that contribute to technological diffusion. This new productive and organizational model has established a more associative and less individualistic production system that has allowed a faster dissemination of knowledge and facilitated the incorporation of new technologies, greater financing and better risk management in the Argentine agricultural sector, with notable positive impacts on productivity. This case analysis is a first step towards the possibility of fostering the adoption of some of the characteristics of the Argentinean productive (or agricultural) and organizational system by the agricultural sectors of other countries in the region. However, it should be noted that the changes observed in Argentine agriculture not only respond to the adoption of a particular technology, but are the result of long previous processes of accumulation of knowledge at the local level, as well as certain cultural and anthropological characteristics typical of Argentine agriculture.