"Most of the drop in wheat plantings will go to sunflowers," Gary Groves, an agricultural attache with the US embassy in Buenos Aires, told Reuters.

Strong prices for vegetable oils are making sunflowers more attractive to Argentine farmers, he said. The plants are also more drought-resistant than wheat, an important consideration when many weather forecasters are predicting a reversal of this year's wet El Nino phenomenon.

"Some of the wheat land may go fallow because the prices of all the grains are low now," Groves said in an interview. He was in Washington for a meeting held by USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service.

Argentina is expected to harvest a record 65 million tonnes of grains and soyabeans this year. The crop was given a boost byplentiful rain from the El Nino weather phenomenon, which wreaked havoc with harvests in several other countries. "The El Nino was an incredibly positive event for Argentina's crops," Groves said. Last week the USDA's monthly world supply and demand report trimmed its estimate of Argentina's wheat crop in 1998/99 to 11.5 million tonnes, down from a previous projection of 12 million tonnes. In the 1997/98 year, Argentina's production was estimated at 14.7 million tonnes.

Argentina's corn production was estimated at 18 million tonnes and soybeans at 15 million tonnes for the 1998/99 crop year. The country's corn and soybean plantings will be influenced by what happens with the US crop and world prices this summer, he said.

Argentina's other major export, beef, has been beset by high prices and recent flooding in cattle country in the northern provinces.

"They are having a tough time right now with high beef prices and the liquidation of herds that occurred several years ago," Groves said. He declined tocomment on private analysts' recent estimates that Argentine beef exports could slump to 300,000 tonnes in 1998.

Last winter, the USDA estimated Argentina would export about 430,000 tonnes of beef in 1997, down from 470,000 tonnes in the previous year.

"We do not expect that Argentina will even make its tariff rate quota for exports to the United States," he said.

Last autumn, Argentina began shipping fresh beef to US supermarkets for the first time in 70 years.