Paraguay’s Farm Growth Has Room to Run, but Roads and Power Are the Brakes

Paraguay’s Record Harvest Meets Its Infrastructure Limits

Paraguay’s farm sector closed a positive soybean campaign and is heading into a new season shaped by El Niño weather risks. Behind that outlook, however, a structural constraint remains: the country’s rural infrastructure. Former agriculture and livestock minister Santiago Moisés Bertoni says roads and electricity are now among the deciding factors in whether producers can expand.

Bertoni, cited by Forbes Paraguay, puts the latest soybean harvest at around 12 to 13 million tonnes — a record — and notes solid performance in other main crops. For the coming campaign, he warns that El Niño cuts both ways: rain is needed, but badly timed or excessive rainfall can create problems.

The former minister says the sector should prepare planting dates and use the available sowing windows to reduce climate exposure. But he argues that infrastructure, rather than weather alone, is the deeper limit. In areas where new roads arrived, crops such as rice expanded where production was previously almost impossible, because better access and electricity encouraged producers to invest.

Why Roads and Rural Power Gate Paraguay’s Next Farm Expansion

Bertoni's argument: infrastructure converts potential into acreage

Bertoni's central claim is that Paraguay's agricultural ceiling is not purely agronomic. He points to two physical bottlenecks — rural roads and interior electricity supply — that determine whether inputs arrive on time and whether farm operations can run reliably. During critical periods for input delivery and fieldwork, poor access can amplify weather problems. This is an interpretation, but it is grounded in the pattern he cited: the last major productivity jump came from biotechnology and direct seeding, which lifted output from five-to-seven million tonnes to current levels. In his view, the next productivity trigger must be physical infrastructure.

Where roads and power have already changed output

The article reports a concrete example: rice and other crops expanded in zones once considered unviable after routes and energy arrived. That supports the idea that infrastructure is not a background issue but a switch for production. If the pattern holds, infrastructure spending in underserved regions could bring more land into commercially viable farming and raise output without waiting for a new seed or agronomic breakthrough.

The shift from raw exports to processing

Bertoni links farm expansion to industrialisation. Paraguayan processing capacity for soy, maize and meat has grown, but he notes the country still exports a large share of its maize unprocessed. The strategic implication is that better infrastructure would not only move more grain out; it would make domestic transformation more attractive, capturing value that currently leaves the country with the raw commodity and supporting livestock finishing systems tied to maize availability.

What Paraguay’s Producers and Policymakers Can Act On

For Paraguay's producers, agribusinesses and policymakers, the specific moves implied by Bertoni's assessment are:

• Producers preparing for El Niño should lock in planting dates and take advantage of available sowing windows, since Bertoni singles out poorly distributed rainfall — not just drought — as a risk.
• Industry groups and cooperatives can prioritise road and rural electricity upgrades in areas where new corridors already expanded rice and other crops, using those zones as evidence for public investment.
• Agribusinesses planning processing capacity can target maize, soy and meat transformation, where Bertoni says Paraguay still exports too much raw grain and can add value before export.
• Public authorities should treat grid reliability and road access as farm productivity policy, not only transport policy, because input delivery and field operations depend on both during critical crop windows.