The Argentine Refrigerated Meat Industry

Abstract

THE importance of a meat supply for the people of this country in an age which is characterised by the slow and gradual exhaustion of the meat supplies of the world available for the purposes of international trade lends special interest to the position of British capital in the Argentine meat industry. The Argentine Republic is one of the few countries of the world which has a considerable export of meat of all varieties, for the United States has already become a beef-importing Thus in an age when the industrial populations of the world are making increasing demands on sources of meat supplies, the investment of British capital in the Argentine refrigerated meat trade, and in the Republic generally, has a new significance. This view of the relation of the world demand to world meat resources may seem unduly pessimistic, but it is the conclusion reached by Shanahan from a detailed study of the available and potential sources of meat supplies.' Cattle and sheep rearing in the Argentine Republic dates back to the earliest stages of its history; in fact, to the sixteenth century, when the Spaniards first settled in the River Plate provinces. So peculiarly adapted to cattle rearing did the soil and climate of the country prove, that the slender stocks imported by the Spanish pioneers became the progenitors of herds of both domestic and wild cattle that spread rapidly over the rich pasture lands of those parts of South America with a temperate climate. Cattle were so plentiful that they threatened to become a menace through sheer force of numbers. They multiply so prodigiously, said a seventeenth century writer, that the plains are covered with them . . . in such numbers that, were it not for the dogs that devour the calves and other tender animals, they would devastate the country. 2 But the period of the greatest development of the