The Argentine oil industry reached a historic record in processing.

The oil industry is a fundamental sector of the Argentine economy and a key pillar for the added value of the agro-industrial chain. From a historical perspective, in the 1960s and 1970s, the annual processing level was around 2 million tons per year and was an industry more closely linked to the crushing of sunflower seeds. With the introduction of soybeans, towards the end of the 1970s, the crop began to gain prominence and by 1984, soybeans began to take the lead in terms of the volume of industrialization and became the engine of investment in large-scale industrial infrastructure to grow the country's oilseed processing capacity. As can be seen in the following graph, the annual processing of oilseeds shows exponential growth between the mid-1970s and 2011. Although starting from a low level, in the 1980s the crush increased by 222% to reach 10.8 million tons in 1990, a figure that doubled (↑109%) in the following 10 years to reach a processing of 22.36 million tons by the ...