The Independent Blog, Soya: The Argentinian Gold Rush- Meeting the Winners and Losers

It is Autumn time south of the equator, and whilst the majority of Argentinians are readying themselves for another Boreal winter, the small town of Las Lajitas is ramping up for its busiest time of year.

Located in Salta province in the north of this vast country, the streets are jammed with chrome-clad Toyota Hiluxs, replete with tinted windows. Colossal agricultural machinery blocks the small, normally deserted roads. Some of the biggest grain driers in the world, interlinked with a myriad of curious pipes, dwarf the modern brick Catholic church. Local Authority workers are readying the town square for an influx of migrant farm workers, diverting the scant rains that have fallen this year into planters to bring life to the flowering borders. But the scent is not of pollen as we run through the province’s vast, seemingly endless seas of mono-culture crops, it is overwhelmingly that of Roundup and other non-selective herbicides, aerially (and indiscriminately) distributed by small planes that buzz overhead.

Hostels flip their vacancy signs over… click here to read more