Many districts in the Argentine Provinces of Corrientes, Santa Fé, Salta, Tucumán, Catamarca and La Rioja and in the National Territories of Misiones, Formosa and the Chaco are eminently suited for cotton cultivation.
It will be observed that Argentina alone is almost always here referred to in connection with these secondary (as they still are) products of the River Plate countries. The reason for this is that, while many parts of Uruguay are equally well suited for their growth, the latter Republic is, owing to her later continuance of civil disturbance, in a less advanced condition than Argentina in regard to extensive development of the great primary industries of cereal cultivation and stock breeding.
Tentative and apparently successful cultivation of better classes of tobacco has already been commenced in the Province of Buenos Aires and official drying sheds have been erected in each of the Provinces of Tucumán, Salta and Corrientes and the National Territory of Misiones. These facilities should greatly stimulate the increase of production and improvement of quality of the leaf in those, the most climatically appropriate, districts. Even if they should not confer on the growers the “moral and intellectual” benefits explicitly expected from them by the aforementioned translator.
As for rice, even if the question of export be reserved for future consideration, there is an enormous local demand which could very well and profitably be supplied locally.
Experimental cultivation of this crop in large and suitably watered areas of the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Entre Rios and Córdoba has proved the ease with which it could be grown in them.
Another crop in universal demand in both Argentina and Uruguay is MATE, or “Paraguayan Tea,” the leaf of the Ilex Paraguayensis. This shrub grows wild in the Territory of Misiones and in the Republics of Paraguay and Brazil; and Argentina and Uruguay import it from the latter countries to annual values of several millions of gold dollars. The cultivation of mate yerba only presents difficulty and risk of loss during the very earliest periods of its growth; but study has now shown how to avoid most, at any rate, of such risks, so that it has become an absurdity that such an article of universal daily, indeed hourly, consumption in both of the countries under consideration should not be grown by them in districts so suited for the cultivation of this shrub that they have become its home in a perfectly wild condition.
Wherever one goes in Argentina and Uruguay the MATE (as the small gourd in which the infusion of the dust-like YERBA—“herb”—is made, and from which it is sucked up through a special tube called the “bombilla” from its perforated, bulb-shaped end) is omnipresent and usually in working evidence in the hands of one or other member of the household throughout the livelong day.
Mate is a stimulant of great sustaining and stomachic qualities; and its use is not followed by the depression which follows excessive tea and coffee drinking. A River Plate peon will go from daybreak to midday, riding or doing physically hard work the whole while, on nothing more than a hunch of bread or a “biscuit” (a hard, dry maize-flour roll) and a few small mates. With sugar, mate is very palatable and the taste soon develops into a habit, but in the camp it is usually drunk “bitter,” that is, without sugar, both from motives of economy and because it is popularly supposed to be healthier and more sustaining when taken in that way.
At any rate, there can be no doubt that mate growing must one day become a very large and profitable industry in the Northern parts, where the climate is suitably mild, of the two Republics.