News Releases

Nov 8, 2006

Province of San Juan, Argentina, will receive $32.6 million IDB loan to support economic growth and job creation

Program will make supply chains more competitive and will generate investment projects

The Inter-American Development Bank announced today a $32.6 million loan to the province of San Juan in Argentina to finance a program to promote economic growth and job creation by making supply chains more competitive and generating investment projects.

San Juan, located in western Argentina’s Cuyo region in the foothills of the Andes, has an arid climate and has traditionally been a major producer of table wines, grapes and olives, nuts and dried fruits, mining and manufacturing, as well as tourism.

“Traditionally, provincial production has been tied to the primary sector. The challenge is now to increase the locally generated value added and the diversification of the province’s economic base”, said IDB Team Leader Juan Antonio Ketterer.  “Working in that direction, several groups of companies formed production-oriented networks and organized supply chains. The main objective of the project is to strengthen the process by fostering strategic coordination and linkage among production units and access to long term credit for the province’s firms.”

 “In the last three years supply chain production volume has grown significantly. It now accounts for 76 percent of provincial exports and employs 46,000 workers,” added Ketterer. “To sustain this growth process requires accelerating the pace of medium and long-term investment in critical phases of the supply chains, such as cold storage capacity for grapes and winery capacity for varietal wines, new crushing plants, lime ovens and oil mill capacity.” 

The loan to the province is for a 25-year term, with a five-year grace period at a variable interest rate, and it has a national government guarantee. Local counterpart financing will total $20.4 million. The province’s Ministry of Production and Economic Development will be in charge of the project.

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