Drought and global crisis: The perfect storm hits Uruguayan livestock production

Somebody may consider it ironic comparing the negative combination of the international economic crisis and the drought that affected the Uruguayan rural sector – remembered by many people as one of the worst in their memory – with the exceptionally harmful weather conditions (a tropical hurricane from Bermuda colliding with a cold front from the Great Lakes) that created the worst storm in history, known as “the perfect storm”. A “drought” does not look precisely like a “storm”, may be argued. However, it serves as a metaphor to illustrate the impact derived from the combination of two unrelated but already negative events, which together even potentiated their deadly outcome: the international economic crisis that caused the fall down of the commodity markets, particularly the beef market, and the severe drought that seriously affected the infrastructure of the Uruguayan livestock production.