Here’s a clip from early in the year that might interest libertarians who’ve been looking outside the US for farmland, in anticipation of any further worsening of the economy.
The video depicts the effects of drought in Santa Fe province….and makes a rather vague (and likely, insubstantial) reference to global warming.
But there are many other problems in Argentina besides drought – bad government policies, problems with squatters, the depletion of the soil from soy monoculture, the influx of genetically modified foods, and the relatively high prices of land in recent years.
And now there’s also increasing social unrest.
I was talking to some American friends who live in one of the north-eastern provinces, Misiones. They liked where they were, but there were certainly problems. Foreigners couldn’t own the land outright, since it was on the border. And the little enclave of immigrants didn’t always get on with other foreigners. On the good side, they thought the land itself was a natural paradise….
Not a cloud in the sky, and nothing else either… oh boy, not a pretty picture either way. This is not something you’ll read about on Yahoo news. I’ve been seeing pictures of Uruguay getting tons of rain lately, I wonder if there will be a huge migration of people from Argentina to Uruguay as a result? Now the deal on PanamaLaw.com about retirees needing $100,000 to go there makes a bit more sense, from Uruguays perspective anyway.
I read that in Uruguay there are new subsidies for purchasing housing, and I read this about the same for the poor in Brazil: http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=5620#comments
Are they trying to make a housing bubble down there or sustain what little high prices they do have from what I thought was a worldwide real estate bubble? With an influx of Argentinians in the beginings, housing priced above what the poor and working classes can afford might appear sustainable, for a time.