The results were excellent, and encouraged the sowing of larger areas. There are now, in the various colonies founded in Chaco, which grow practically nothing but cotton, some 13,600 acres under cotton. It may to-day be asserted, says an official report, that Chaco is in the van of the Republic in the production of cotton; by reason of the area under cultivation, the quantity of cotton picked at each
harvest, and the importance of its trade with the Buenos Ayres market.[72] In the short space of two years, from March 1902 to March 1904, the exports from Barranqueras, the port of this region, amounted to 850,564 lb. of cotton and 286,831 lb. of cotton-seed. From this we may well augur, as the above-mentioned report asserts, that Chaco will become a great cotton-producing country, on condition that various refractory factors are eliminated.
[72] See the notable monograph entitled: Investigaciones algodoneras en los territorios del Chaco, Formosa y Misionès, año 1904, by the agronomical engineer, Fidel Macial Perez, upon whose data we have drawn for this book.
That the reader may form some idea of the future in store, during the economic development of the Argentine, for the cultivation and exploitation of cotton, he need only refer to the following calculation as to its results. The land in Chaco given over to cotton yields, in good years, an average crop per acre of 1785 lb. of cotton “in the pod”—that is, fibre and seed together. Selling the cotton at the very low price of ·96d. per lb.—and the present price of cotton runs to 1·16d., 1·44d., and 1·65d. per lb.—the minimum yield would be £7, 2s. per acre, even with prices as low as we have indicated. As for working expenses, they do not exceed £4, 5s. 6d. per acre, unless by some trifling sum, according to locality; so that the average profit would be about £2, 16s. per acre.
This is the cost of production of an acre planted with cotton during the first year. Later the expenses diminish by 25 per cent., so that the net profit might reach £3, 11s. 3d. per acre.
One of the great obstacles in the way of the full development of this industry is to be found in the lack of hands indispensable for the minute and delicate operations connected with gathering the crop. It has even happened, during the last few years, that in certain districts as much as 3s. 7d. per cwt. has been offered for selected cotton, and in others as much as a third of the results of the harvest. But we may be sure that when the native farmer and the foreign agriculturalist once awaken to the extraordinary profits which cotton yields, its production will assume a far larger scale.
As the growers have to deal with an industrial branch of agriculture in process of establishment it has not yet been possible to draw from it all the profit that is secured in other countries: cotton-seed, for example, in the United States especially, is a considerable source of wealth, but in the Argentine the growers have scarcely begun to utilise it by the extraction of its oil. But there is a beginning: several mills have lately been established for this purpose. The agronomic expert Macial has justly remarked that we only require spinning-mills and looms for the cycle of the cotton industry in Chaco to attain its completion.
Rubber.—Another source of forestal wealth in the Argentine, and one which is for the moment unexploited,—principally because of local depopulation and a lack of means of transport—is the extraction of the rubber contained in certain tropical plants.
Lately, for example, competent observers have discovered that the true rubber-plant, the Ficus elastica, exists in abundance in the north-east of the Republic, and in the Provinces of Salta and Jujuy, between 23° and 26° of south latitude, and 62° and 66° of west longitude. It is this tree which has given such value to the Brazilian territory of Acre and to various other regions of Brazil.