Argentina ranks in the top ten producers of 13 commodities: soybeans (#3, 12% of world output in 2024), sunflower oil (#3, 7.5% of world output in 2023), beef (#4, 4.6% of world output in 2024), corn (#4, 4.7% of world output in 2024), lithium (#5, 7.9% of world output in 2025), strontium (#5, 0.2% of world output in 2025) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of peanuts (#1, 20% of world export value in 2024), lithium (#2, 19% of world export value in 2024), corn (#3, 16% of world export value in 2024), honey (#3, 9% of world export value in 2024), sorghum (#3, 9.6% of world export value in 2024) and more.
Share of world production, 2024. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
The Pampas are among the best crop soils on earth: deep, dark and level, with a temperate climate and enough rain across Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Santa Fe provinces to farm without irrigation. The transformation of the last thirty years was less about the land than about a technique. Herbicide-tolerant soybeans, approved in 1996, made no-till farming practical at scale, which cut costs, protected moisture and allowed a second crop after wheat in the same season. Planted area expanded across the Pampas and into the drier northwest. Argentina grew 12% of the world's soybeans in 2024 (FAOSTAT) and 4.7% of the world's corn in 2024 (FAOSTAT).
The way that crop leaves the country is the more interesting fact. Argentina held only 2.6% of world soybean export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), a small share for the third-largest grower, because it does not sell many raw beans. Along a stretch of the Paraná river around Rosario sits the densest concentration of soybean crushing capacity anywhere, with plants that take beans by truck and load meal and oil straight into ocean-going vessels at their own berths. Export taxes have been set for decades at a lower rate on processed meal and oil than on whole beans, which locks the crushing margin in place and keeps the beans at home. The plants run above what local farms supply, so Argentina also buys beans from Paraguay and Brazil to crush: 3.6% of world soybean import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).
Corn behaves differently because there is no equivalent processing incentive, so it leaves as grain. Argentina held 16% of world corn export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), a much larger share of trade than of production, and it ships on the southern hemisphere calendar, harvesting from March and competing with United States supply in the northern spring. Wheat, grown as a winter crop before soybeans on the same fields, accounted for 3.4% of world wheat export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). All of it depends on one waterway: barges and Panamax vessels on the Paraná load to a draft that falls when the river runs low, as it did severely in 2021.
Argentina's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Argentina's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Argentina dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Argentina's own $26.2 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Corn alone is 29% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Argentina compares with other countries.
Sources: FAOSTAT (crops and livestock), USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (minerals), Energy Institute Statistical Review (energy) for production; CEPII BACI for trade. Ranks count only the commodities on this site.
Argentina commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Argentina is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Argentina, computed from the same data as this page.
What Argentina uses
Argentina had about 46 million people and a food supply of 3,360 kilocalories per person a day in FAO's 2023 food balance sheets. Its eight largest supplies among the commodities tracked there:
Largest domestic supplies of tracked commodities in Argentina, 2023
FAO reports a negative domestic supply for Argentina's sesame seed (−6 thousand tonnes; production 0 tonnes, imports 1 thousand tonnes, exports 7 thousand tonnes), meaning exports exceed production plus imports in the year. These are not counted as use and are left out of the table above.
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
Who supplies Argentina
Single-supplier markets. Argentina buys half or more of its imports from one country in 3 of 5 import markets of $250 million or more, among them soybeans from Paraguay (94%, $2.9 billion); natural gas from United States (52%, $1.1 billion); iron ore from Brazil (87%, $588 million). Import dependency.
How long Argentina's own reserves would last
Lithium: Argentina's reserves are about 191 years of its own output at the current rate (7.9% of world output, 12% of world reserves), against 128 years for the world.
Silver: Argentina's reserves are about 8 years of its own output at the current rate (3.1% of world output, 1.1% of world reserves), against 23 years for the world.
USGS national reserve figures, rounded. A short national figure usually reflects how little has been proved up, not when mining stops. See country reserve life.
Downloads and citation
This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does Argentina produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/ARG/ (CC BY 4.0).
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