Argentina temporarily suspends the registration of Affidavits of Foreign Sales (DJVE) for Maize

To relieve those who produce meat that uses corn for animal feed, the government temporarily suspended future agreements of the grain, thus harming the grain producers. Fearful that grain will become scarce and domestic prices will skyrocket this summer, the Government has just suspended the declaration of new export business whose shipment start date is prior to March 1, 2021, when the new harvest will be available and the offer can be normalized. Domestically, corn prices rose almost 40% in 2020.

In Argentina, about 16M tons of corn are consumed internally per year, especially in the aforementioned activities and in the bioethanol industry, which is almost paralyzed. Forage production has reached 51M tons in the 2019/20 campaign and surpassed soybean production for the first time in decades. In any case, it would not seem to be enough to attend to both flanks, the internal and the external, given the surge in exports.

In this regard, the Ministry of Agriculture specified that the export of 34.23M tons of corn for the 2019/20 season has been authorized, out of a theoretical exportable total of 38.50M tons. In other words, 89% of the planned balance has been met.