ARGENTINA is putting a ceiling on exports of corn and wheat in a fresh bid by the leftist government to quell food inflation at home.

The government will first decide how much of the grains are needed in Argentina, and then proceed to stop exporters from registering shipments that would jeopardize those domestic supplies, according to a resolution published on its website on Friday.

“It’s a resolution that the food industry considers necessary to provide predictability,” Agriculture Minister Julian Dominguez said in a statement. “And to safeguard what Argentines need for their own consumption.”

The South American nation is the world’s third-biggest corn exporter and a top supplier of wheat, so any change to exports may have broader implications for global agriculture markets when supply chain snags have disrupted transport and food prices around the world have soared.

Argentina will be able to export 12.5 million metric tons of wheat and 41.6 million tons of corn, Mr. Dominguez said, without specifying the crop season. Farmers have collected two thirds of the 2021-22 wheat crop and are sowing 2021-22 corn plants, which start to get harvested in March.

The government has been seeking to tame food inflation running at 51%. Before Friday’s move, Argentina had blocked agricultural traders from registering exports of some corn and wheat for several weeks. While interventions in grain and beef markets do work in the short term, Argentina’s history shows that over a longer period of time, such controls tend to discourage production and cause supply shortages and higher prices.

“We’re going back to the old and failed system of quotas,” Horacio Salaverri, head of farm group Carbap, told La Nacion newspaper.

The policy comes at the end of a year in which the government tussled with farmers over a move to curb corn exports and then slapped controls on beef, sending shipments plummeting. The latest measure adds to the tense relationship Argentine farmers have with President Alberto Fernandez’s administration since coming to power two years ago.

“You don’t encourage a nation’s production by putting limits on it,” top farm group Rural Argentine Confederations said in a statement. “You need only look at recent history to demonstrate the impact of measures like these, when the result of a set of similar rules was the biggest fall in farmer planting intentions in history.” — Bloomberg

SÃO PAULO/AMSTERDAM — Six European supermarket chains, including two owned by Dutch firm Ahold Delhaize and a Carrefour subsidiary, said they would stop selling some or all beef products from Brazil due to links with destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

The pledges ranged from supermarket chain Lidl Netherlands, which committed to stop selling all beef originating in South America starting in 2022, to more focused decisions to halt sales of certain corned beef or beef jerky products. Many of the products affected are linked to the world’s largest meat-packer, JBS SA. The boycotts are in response to an investigation by Brazilian publication Reporter Brasil that alleged JBS indirectly sourced cows from illegally deforested areas, in a scheme known as “cattle laundering.”

This occurs when cattle raised on an illegally deforested plot of land are sold to a legitimate farm before sale to a slaughterhouse, to hide its origin.

JBS told Reuters it has zero tolerance for illegal deforestation and has blocked more than 14,000 suppliers for failing to comply with its policies. The company said monitoring indirect suppliers — the ones before the final seller to the slaughterhouse — is a challenge for the entire sector, but that JBS will institute a system capable of doing so by 2025.

The Brazilian meat-packer said that Reporter Brasil’s research mentioned only five out of 77,000 direct JBS suppliers and that those suppliers met the company’s policies at the time of purchase.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, has soared since right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and rolled back environmental protections. He has said he aims for more farming and mining to lift the region out of poverty. Deforestation hit a 15-year high in 2021 with an area larger than the US state of Connecticut being cleared. Most of the denuded land is used for cattle ranching.

Among other commitments, Ahold Delhaize’s subsidiary Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, will stop sourcing beef from Brazil entirely. An Albert Heijn spokesperson told Reuters that the company currently sells only a handful of corned beef and beef jerky with Brazilian origins each week.

Auchan France will also remove beef jerky products linked to JBS from its shelves. Carrefour Belgium and Delhaize supermarkets will stop selling Jack Link’s brand beef jerky. JBS and Jack Link’s have a joint venture that produces jerky. Jack Link’s did not respond to a request for comment. — Reuters

J Sainsbury Plc’s Sainsbury’s UK will stop sourcing its store brand corned beef from Brazil, but said that 90% of its beef is already sourced from the Britain and Ireland.