Agricultural Credit in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1890-1914
In 1879, for the first time, Argentina exported more wheat that it imported. A generation later the Republic figured among the top five exporters of wheat in the world, and wheat had become its premier earner of foreign exchange. The expansion was by any account remarkable. With the expulsion of the Amerindians from the Pampa Humeda in the late 1870s, hundreds of thousands of hectares of arable and highly fertile land were suddenly made available to settler farmers. Railways, built largely with British capital, provided the means to ship new agricultural produce out of the region to the newly erected ports. Immigrants flocked from Europe to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the vacant land, either as new property owners, as tenants, or as wage-earners. The surge in the supply of land, labour and capital initiated a period of growth in Argentina, a growth which was shared by other regions of recent European settlement which responded to similar opportunities. The credit system helped differentiate Argentina from them.