Argentina is the world's largest exporter of soymeal, most of it crushed in the plants around Rosario and shipped up-river to European feed buyers. Under EUDR it is a standard-risk origin with an unusual asset: a sector-wide traceability platform built specifically to answer this regulation. This page covers the Argentine specifics on top of the soy guide.
Where the deforestation risk actually sits
Argentine soy splits into two geographies. The Pampas core (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Santa Fe) was converted to agriculture generations ago; plots there essentially never show post-2020 forest loss, and screening against the cutoff is fast. The Gran Chaco provinces (Salta, Santiago del Estero, Chaco, Formosa) are a different matter: the Chaco's dry forest has been one of the world's fastest-disappearing woodlands, cleared for soy and cattle, and its denser formations meet the FAO-based forest definition EUDR uses. A soymeal cargo blending northern origination therefore carries genuine cutoff exposure, concentrated in a minority of its farms. Argentina's Forest Law zones native forest into protection categories (red, yellow, green), and clearing authorisations tie to those zones, so legality checks have a public reference: conversion inside red or yellow zones is a legality fail on top of any deforestation finding.
VISEC: the sector's collective answer
Rather than each exporter building separate systems, the Argentine grain sector (crush industry, exporters' chambers, producers) stood up VISEC, a common platform that maps farms, monitors them against deforestation data, and certifies deforestation-free parcels for EU-bound flows. For an importer this is the default answer to "where does the polygon file come from": your supplier originates through VISEC-verified farms and passes the geometry and monitoring results with the parcel. Treat it like any scheme or national system: a data source and strong evidence, not a substitute for your own risk assessment and DDS. Ask what share of the cargo's farms are platform-verified, and get the polygons themselves, not just a certificate that polygons exist.
Geometry and filing mechanics
Argentine farms are large; expect polygons throughout, often machine-generated from field boundaries and generally clean. The bulk-cargo mechanics match Brazil: one DDS per consignment, polygon file sized within TRACES limits, meal and oil declared under their own Annex I codes with net mass in kilograms. Country of production is Argentina even when the meal was crushed there from imported beans only in rare cases; if a crusher blends Paraguayan or Bolivian beans, those plots (standard risk, Chaco-exposed) belong in the file too, and your supplier should disclose the blend.
Sequence for Argentine soy buyers
- Ask suppliers for VISEC-verified origination and the polygon file per parcel.
- Check for northern-province farms and screen those with Chaco-aware evidence layers.
- Cross-check clearing permissions against Forest Law zoning where conversion appears.
- File in TRACES and retain polygons, monitoring outputs and blend disclosures for five years.
Compare soy from Brazil for the Cerrado version of the same frontier problem, and the cutoff guide for how dry-forest classification questions resolve in screening.