Argentina yerba mate growers face low prices

According to the sector report cited by CEPA and based on official data from the National Yerba Mate Institute, secaderos processed 568.9 million kilos of green leaf in the first seven months of 2026, down 11.2% from the same period in 2025 and 25.9% below the same stretch of 2024. July alone fell 20.6% year on year, showing the downturn has intensified as the harvest wound down.

That drop follows a 2024 peak of 987.1 million kilos, which had fueled the government’s argument that supply growth was the main reason prices were under pressure. But 2025 already marked a reversal, with processing down to 889.3 million kilos, and the latest figures indicate the industry is moving further away from that surplus narrative. The crop is shrinking faster than domestic consumption.

The demand side has not collapsed. Local consumption slipped just 0.7% in the first half of 2026, while output fell 7.2% over the same period. Exports, meanwhile, are rising strongly: shipments climbed 32.4% in 2025 to a record and were still up 6.6% in the first half of 2026, with Syria, Chile, Spain and the US among the main destinations. By July, exports had reached 32.1 million kilos, another record for that point in the year.

For investors and companies tied to Argentine agribusiness, that is a mixed signal. A tighter crop and stronger external demand should normally improve pricing for producers and intermediaries with export exposure. But the data show the transmission mechanism is broken. CEPA estimates the cost of producing a kilo of green leaf at 473.70 pesos, excluding tax and profit. Even with some secaderos paying up to 300 pesos late in the season, growers are still short by roughly 174 pesos per kilo just to reach cost.

The retail market tells a different story from the farm gate. A kilo of yerba in supermarkets was around 5,211 pesos in June, up 17% from May a year earlier, while the price of green leaf had risen only modestly from 210 pesos in December 2023 to 280 pesos in June 2026. Adjusted for inflation, the producer’s share of the final value has fallen sharply, averaging just 13.3% in the first half of 2026, the weakest first-half reading since 2019.

That gap helps explain why more exports have not automatically translated into better pay for growers. The export price per kilo is said to be more than 50 US cents below 2023 levels, while dollar costs have climbed, limiting the industry’s ability to pull domestic prices higher through foreign sales. Imports are not large enough to change that equation; they fell 30.1% in the first half of the year and are mostly molida, not green leaf.

The politics of the sector are also shifting. The government has defended deregulation and export expansion as the cure for weak prices, but the latest data point to a different problem: the benefits of a tighter market are being absorbed somewhere between secadero, mill and retail shelf. Until that pricing chain changes, lower harvests and stronger exports may improve volumes for traders and exporters without restoring profitability for producers.

For investors, the key question is whether the current squeeze eventually forces a repricing at origin or whether the margin adjustment continues to favor downstream players. The next indicators to watch are export volumes, secadero prices and the pace of inventory drawdown into the end of the year.