Sowing Resilience: Lessons from the Saline Agriculture Mission in Chile and Argentina

Nieuwsbericht27-04-2026 | 09:45

Salinisation is no longer a silent threat. Across the world, soil and water salinity is emerging as one of the most significant and underestimated risks to agricultural productivity and food security. In April 2026, The Salt Doctors and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam undertook a joint mission to Argentina and Chile, organised by the LAN Cono Sur Office. The mission brought together farmers, researchers, private sector actors, and public institutions - reflecting the Dutch "diamond approach" of structured collaboration across government, academia, industry, and civil society. Its objective was not only to assess current field conditions, but also to raise awareness, exchange knowledge, and identify concrete opportunities for scaling adaptive solutions.

Chile: From Desk Study to Field Reality

In 2021, The Salt Doctors conducted a Quick Scan on salinity in the Metropolitan and Valparaíso regions, combining literature review, stakeholder interviews, and limited field observations, largely carried out remotely due to the Pandemic restrictions. The study identified a structural trend: increasing salinity in irrigation water, driven by prolonged drought, reduced river flows, and natural soil conditions. The findings pointed to a growing risk, particularly for salt-sensitive crops such as avocado and walnuts.

The 2026 mission provided a critical opportunity to contrast those findings with direct field observations. Visits across the Maipo basin, covering walnut orchards in Lo Herrera, citrus in Mallarauco, avocado in Santo Domingo, and horticulture near the Metropolitan Region, confirmed that salinity is not yet a widespread crisis, but is clearly a systemic and evolving risk.

A key insight emerged from the upper Maipo basin in San José de Maipo: the river itself carries a natural saline load, while its tributaries provide significantly lower-salinity water. This underscores that salinity is not solely the result of farm-level practices, it is also a basin-level condition that may become increasingly critical as water availability continues to decrease.

Further downstream, many producers working with salt-sensitive crops already demonstrate a high level of awareness and are implementing adaptive strategies: monitoring soil and water salinity, adjusting irrigation practices, applying soil amendments, and transitioning to more tolerant rootstocks. However, impacts remain uneven. In some horticultural systems, salinity is already affecting productivity - yet as long as profitability remains acceptable, adaptation tends to be postponed. This raises a critical question for the years ahead: how will these systems respond when water scarcity intensifies?

The Chilean part of the mission concluded with a workshop at the Embassy titled "Saline Soils and Environmental Risks in Agriculture," linking field observations to the framework of Responsible Business Conduct (RBC). A key message from the Chilean National Contact Point for RBC was that environmental and climate risks, such as salinity, are already part of an international due diligence framework in active application. Companies are increasingly expected to identify, assess, and manage these risks across their operations and value chains.

For an export-oriented sector like Chilean agriculture, this shift is particularly relevant. International markets are moving beyond compliance with local regulations towards demonstrating how environmental risks are actively managed. The workshop brought together perspectives from public policy, academia, and agricultural production, reinforcing that addressing salinity is a shared responsibility requiring coordinated action.

Argentina: From field-level innovation to system scaling

In Argentina, the mission focused on the Humid Pampas, one of the country's most productive agricultural regions, characterised by fertile soils and a favourable climate for cereals and oilseed crops such as soybean, maize, and wheat. These are areas and crops that connect Argentina and the Netherlands. Ultimately, these products often end up with European consumers. Directly as food, but more often indirectly as feed. Yet according to the National Soil Map of Argentina, between 27% and 38% of Argentine soils are affected by salinity to some degree.

Salinisation in this region is closely linked to fluctuating water table levels, influenced by rainfall, flooding events, soil permeability, and land-use change. The transition from deep-rooted perennial pastures to annual cropping systems (soybean/maize) has reduced the landscape's natural capacity to regulate water movement, accelerating salinisation in low-lying basins. At farm level, salinity tends to concentrate in lower areas, often in a mosaic pattern, a challenge for precision management at scale.

The mission engaged directly with this context through the Saline Agriculture Innovation Hub, a project initiated in 2024 in collaboration between Dutch and Argentine stakeholders, including researchers from Wageningen University & Research, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Salt Doctors, América Agroinnova, and the School of Agronomy of the University of Buenos Aires, farmer networks Asociación Argentina de Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola (AACREA) and Asociación Argentina de Productores en Siembra Directa (AAPRESID), and public and private sector partners. The Hub aims to identify, test, and scale integrated adaptation strategies within a broader soil health framework.

Key technical milestones achieved to date include the development of a Salinity Map of Rivadavia, in Buenos Aires province by Laboratorio de Análisis Regional y Teledetección -CONICET-FAUBA (LART), using Landsat and Sentinel satellite data to achieve 80% accuracy in salinity characterisation across five distinct environment types. Field trials in 2024 demonstrated that while soybean performance declines sharply under saline-sodic conditions, sorghum proves a reliable and economically viable alternative, and locally-developed options such as Tricepiro (a wheat-barley-agropyron hybrid), sugar beet, and chard are being actively explored to diversify the saline crop portfolio.

The mission in Argentina concluded with a multi-stakeholder roundtable hosted at the Dutch Embassy in Buenos Aires, bringing together representatives from government, the private sector, technical institutions, and academia. The objective was to share the mission's findings, exchange good practices, and explore concrete pathways to scale these initiatives on the ground.

At this session, The Salt Doctors presented the key findings from both country visits; Wageningen University & Research and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam shared their conclusions on adaptation strategies, governance frameworks, and scaling approaches; and América Agroinnova presented the latest advances from the pilot project in the field. The event created a space for multisectoral dialogue and demonstrated the Embassy’s core role as a convening hub for sustainable agriculture cooperation, where it provides added value.

Looking Ahead: From Pilots to Scale

The insights gathered across both countries point in the same direction: early action matters. Addressing salinity before it becomes a widespread and irreversible constraint allows for more flexible, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions. The mission identified concrete next steps, including training programmes, applied research partnerships, and opportunities for international cooperation - that can build on the pilots already underway.

This type of initiative takes on special relevance in the context of the relationship between Argentina, Chile, and the Netherlands, where agri-food value chains are deeply interconnected. Strengthening resilient and sustainable production systems at origin contributes directly to the security and sustainability of these shared value chains.

Soil degradation through salinity is a growing global challenge, one that threatens agricultural productivity and food security at multiple scales. The work carried out during this mission, advancing the assessment of salinity in productive systems, deepening engagement with farmers and local actors, and identifying scalable solutions, represents a meaningful step towards turning that challenge into an opportunity.

We invite technology providers, policymakers, researchers, and agri-food businesses to engage with this ecosystem. In this work, the aim goes beyond adaptation, it is about reclaiming degraded land and restoring its productive potential.

More information

Would you like to know more about the work done by the LVVN Office Cono Sur? You can visit the Landeninformatie | Agroberichten Buitenland of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature. You can also send an email to the LAN team in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile: bue-lvvn@minbuza.nl and stg-lnv@minbuza.nl.