
You could sum up Paraguay’s economy in three words: beef, grains, and dams. Ranching, soybean, and hydropower account for nearly 40 percent of GDP and roughly 70 percent of exports by value.
This reliance on a few, weather-dependent rubrics makes the country highly vulnerable to climate change and fluctuations in global commodity prices. Paraguay’s agribusiness sector is also coming under increasing scrutiny for driving deforestation and concentrating wealth in a few hands while creating few and poorly-paid jobs.
Reflecting shifts in global demand, new industries are emerging that could diversify Paraguay’s export matrix. Yet questions remain as to whether they represent a genuine economic transformation — or simply the extraction of new commodities that come with little local value added and their own ecological and social challenges.
Below, I break down three fast-developing sectors I think we’ll be hearing more about in the coming year, detail major players, and explore potential downsides. Standard disclaimer: this isn’t investment advice or an endorsement. It’s simply an attempt to look ahead at what Paraguay will be producing in decades to come — and what that could mean for everyday people.
1. Critical Minerals & Fossil Fuels
Paraguay is perhaps the only South American country whose economy and society is not closely bound up with mining. It lacks the huge Andean deposits of copper, silver, tin and emeralds boasted by Peru, Chile and Colombia, the world-beating offshore oil blocks of Brazil and the Guianas, and the bountiful gas fields of Argentina or Bolivia.
Yet industry insiders talk of Paraguay as the next big thing in mining. It’s an open secret that the country is sitting atop serious mineral reserves, waiting for favourable market conditions — and a way around technical obstacles — to be exploited.
A geological survey published by the Ministry of Defence in 1990 outlined dozens of metallic elements scattered around the country. A band of titanium straddles the border between Paraguarí and Misiones. The hills of Cordillera are studded with manganese, critical to steel-making.
There’s also a dense cluster of uranium along the Río Tebicuary in southeastern Caazapá and just south of the Río Apa in Concepción (exploration licences have recently been granted near both). This could soon come in handy: Paraguay’s hydroelectricity surplus is forecast to run out within a decade, and officials are now pondering nuclear energy as a means of confronting the “post-Itaipu” scenario.
Meanwhile, Canadian firm Chaco Minerals thinks that Paraguay’s vast northwestern outback could be “the world’s next great lithium producing region.” The Vice-Ministry of Energy and Mines has approved nearly 30 prospection licences in areas though to be rich in the ultra-light mineral, prized for its use in electric vehicle (EV) and cell phone batteries.
At least one of these concessions — now being revised — lies within territory belonging to the native Ayoreo people, as Consenso has recently reported. And while global prices for lithium have plunged since 2022, they’re forecast to pick up in 2025, potentially spurring a fresh wave of interest from miners.
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