Life after the commodity boom

ONE morning last month Louis Dreyfus, a big commodity-trading house, formally opened a new $10m storage depot in the Peruvian port of Callao. Two of its six bunkers were piled high with 55,000 tonnes of fine brown dust covered by white tarpaulins—copper and zinc concentrate, awaiting blending and shipment. The warehouse is “a bet that Peruvian mining will continue to be competitive,” says Gonzalo Ramírez, a Dreyfus manager. That looks like a sound wager. Blessed with high-grade ores and cheap energy, Peru’s output of copper—already the world’s third-largest—will more than double in the next three years (see article), thanks to the opening of several low-cost mines.

But rather than marking a new dawn, this burst of investment comes at the twilight of the great commodity boom occasioned by the industrialisation of China and India. By providing an unprecedented boost to the region’s terms of trade (the ratio of the price of its exports to that of its imports), this handed many Latin American countries a bounteous decade (see chart 1).