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Amritsar man is Argentina’s Peanut Prince!
Cultivates over 12,000 hectares & hires 140 persons
Prabhjot Singh
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 18
When first US Astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, folklore is that he bumped into some Sikhs strolling there. They told a perplexed Armstrong that they had landed there right after Partition! Similarly, an Indian delegation to Argentina led by Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, and including Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, was welcomed by a tall and handsome Sikh sporting a flashy red turban among others -- Simmarpal Singh.

Known as the ‘Peanut Prince of Argentina’, Simmarpal grows the nut over 12,000 hectares and soya and corn over 5,000 acre in the Rio Cuarto area of Cordoba province, about 1,000 km from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires. Simmarpal employs 140 persons to work on his company’s farms and plans to expand operations to diversify into wheat and pulses’ cultivation.

Simmarpal, his architect-wife Harpreet Kaur and their two children moved to Argentina in 2005 to buy peanuts for his company, Olam, a $5.6 billion firm into agri-business. Hailing from Amritsar, Simmarpal did his BSc (honours) in Agriculture from Guru Nanak Dev University there and later a Masters in Rural Management from IRMA, Anand. Before coming to Argentina, he was working in Mozambique, Ivory Coast and Ghana and is fluent in Spanish.

Indian Ambassador to Argentina, Rengaraj Viswanathan has described Simmarpal as a role model for success in agribusiness in his blog. “The role model has become the target pursuit of hot Argentine models. When they see his flashy red turban, they chase him; they follow his car and stalk him everywhere... When I visited Rio Cuarto County Club on May 16 last year, the Argentine players asked me where they could buy a turban and how to wear it. I asked them the reason for this interest. They showed me a villa within the country club complex and said ‘Here lives an Indian Maharaja. He looks handsome with his turban. When he goes to the nightclubs, he gets premium service and gets it free because they think he is a Maharaja’,” wrote the Ambassador about his first meeting with Simmarpal.

Inspired, Sukhbir keen on soya farming

Impressed with Simmarpal’s success, Sukhbir Singh Badal wants Punjab to explore the option of soya farming as part of diversification. India imported soya oil worth $1.4 billion from Argentina alone in the first seven months of this year.