Argentina’s Port of Concepción del Uruguay is expanding timber storage capacity to serve a fast-growing Latin American log trade to India. That is according to EAPCU — the port authority for the Concepción del Uruguay terminal, a multipurpose river port in Entre Ríos province, which said a growing number of trucks have moved cargo through the port in recent months as exporters fill timber storage sites to handle the India-bound volume.
As it stands, Latin American producers, namely Uruguay, Ecuador, Panama, Argentina and Brazil, account for 37% of India’s log imports, according to USDA GAIN data, with competitive pricing driving Indian plywood manufacturers to the region as domestic poplar and plantation eucalypt prices reached all-time highs.
It comes after Brazilian exporters sent more than 15,000 tonnes of eucalyptus into Cochin Port in Kerala in 2024, the first such shipment in more than a decade, to supply the region’s 400-plus plywood manufacturing plants. Whilst Uruguayan radiata pine has joined Australian and New Zealand volumes at Indian ports through 2024 and 2025, Latin American supply pressure has been strengthening just as New Zealand exporters resolved a long-running methyl bromide fumigation dispute with India that had hurt trade for years.
The widening Latin American pipeline is tightening the squeeze on Australasian radiata pine, with New Zealand exporters already absorbing freight-cost pressure and CFR margin compression on Indian shipments through 2025. Pine and eucalyptus are the two grades Indian plywood mills have pursued across 2024 and 2025, with Kandla Port in Gujarat — one of India’s largest bulk terminals — emerging as a key arrival point for radiata pine from across the Tasman and eucalyptus from South America.
That shift followed a 2024 surge in Indian poplar and plantation eucalypt prices to all-time highs, which had forced some plywood mills in the country’s north to either reduce production or close, before imported pine for core veneers — and imported eucalyptus — gave the sector a fresh supply route through Kandla, Cochin and other bulk terminals.
Alongside the timber operation, EAPCU said the vessel Manta Hatice docked on Sunday, 12 April at berths 14, 15 and 16 to load 10,000 tonnes of poultry and pig feed bound for several Central American markets, with Entre Ríos Crushing and the Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas (ACA) acting as producer and exporter and Urcel Argentina handling loading logistics.
The parallel operations — timber stockpiling for India, bulk feed for Central America — are part of an Argentine export program EAPCU said has been planned by Entre Ríos Crushing and ACA across the 2026 calendar year, targeting Europe and Central America from Concepción del Uruguay.
It comes as India’s roundwood demand is expected to grow from 57 million cubic metres in 2020 to 98 million cubic metres by 2030, with Latin American producers looking to capture a rising share of that pipeline in the coming years.
