Ask people outside South America what Fray Bentos means to them, and they will probably answer ‘corned beef’, or ‘meat pies.’ Few know that it’s a Uruguayan town of 23,000 people, a four-hour drive north-west of Montevideo, and just 100 miles across the water from Buenos Aires. But what is the link between the town and the product? And is there more to Fray Bentos than meat?

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Fray Bentos was the centre of the industrial revolution in South America. Justus von Liebig, a German chemist who developed the beef extract which we now know as Oxo cubes, was responsible for opening a huge meat processing factory in Fray Bentos in 1866. The location, on the Rio de la Plata, was ideal.

The plant, which after the first world war was renamed The Anglo, was extremely successful, attracting European immigrants, and local workers. At its height, it employed 5,000 people.

The extract was made using every part of the cow, and brought the cost of meat down to a third of what was the European price. The processed meat was hugely popular, as it could be shipped and preserved easily.

But after almost a hundred successful years, the bubble burst. In 1964, an outbreak of typhoid in Aberdeen, in which three people died, was traced back to Fray Bentos corned beef. And when Britain joined the Common Market, interest in distant producers waned. The factory was handed over to the Uruguayan government in 1971, and it continued processing meat for eight years, but then had to close down. It had the technology, the raw material, and the labour … but no market. The label was sold to Campbells, which was subsequently sold to Premier Foods, who produce the famous Fray Bentos pies.

Fray Bentos became a ghost town. People forgot about it. Until a few years ago, when the Uruguayan government reached a deal with the Finnish company Botnia S.A. to establish the largest pulp mill in the world there. Amid huge controversy, this heralded a new beginning for Fray Bentos. But the controversy is another, very complex story which I do not have time to go into now: for details please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_plant_conflict_between_Argentina_and_Uruguay .

So what happened to the meat processing factory?

A few years ago it was restored, preserving the original shell of the building, and now houses a superb industrial revolution museum. You walk up a narrow spiral staircase into a huge warehouse of an office, where suddenly you are transported back to the nineteen thirties. It feels as though you have barged in after working hours, and that the empty desks have just been temporarily vacated. There are original typewriters, calculating machines, and neatly kept records in huge books. There is a local government project being prepared to make the plant into a UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

But this is not all that happens in the historic Anglo building: another section has been turned into a new centre for LATU (Technological Laboratory of Uruguay), which was opened just under a year ago. The idea was to decentralise operations from Montevideo, and offer specialised local employment to young people in the area.

The laboratory has world-class equipment which not only offers services of quality control to the cellulose, forestry and food industries in the area, but also carries out rigorous environmental tests on the soil, water and air. There are sixteen monitoring stations for water all along the river, and a unique air quality control tower. The Biotechnology lab works in conjunction with the University of the Republic and the Pasteur Institute in Montevideo.

So the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are all represented under one roof. Fray Bentos is once again at the fore of development, back on the map, and is rapidly becoming a world centre in the field of environmental research.

Greenpeace are long gone. So are the Argentine demonstrators, who have found more lucrative work protesting about their own country's problems. The World Bank has agreed that there will be no negative impact on either country's environment or tourism. Apart from one woman, who sits across the Rio in Gualeyguachu in Argentina with her mobile phone, blocking all traffic across the bridge between the two countries. Should anyone challenge her, backup is just a call away.

But Uruguay has shown that it gives serious weight to the lessons of history, to the environment, development, and innovation.