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Gran Chaco: South America’s second largest forest at risk of collapsing

by Rodolfo Chisleanschi
MONGABAY

  • Distributed between Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, the Gran Chaco is a collection of more than 50 different ecosystems typified by dry forest.
  • The Gran Chaco is one of the most deforested areas on the planet. Every month, an area twice the size of Buenos Aires is cut down.
  • Chaco deforestation is driven by the expansion of the agricultural frontier and hunting, as well as climate change.

The straight, strong trunk of a quebracho tree twisted mid-air as it fell to the ground, its crash the last sound in a cacophony of axe blows that increasingly wounded it until it could no longer stand.

There are certain films that, for various reasons, always remain in the collective memory of a country. In Argentina, one of them is Quebracho. Produced in 1974, the movie depicts the lives, struggles and aspirations of lumberjacks in the Argentine provinces of Chaco and Santa Fe in the early 20th century.

The events of Quebracho occurred a century ago, but the willow-leaf red quebracho (Schinopsis balansae) remains the target of logging today. However, there is a difference. The slow, methodical thwacks of axes have been replaced by the roars of the chainsaws and heavy equipment; trees that have been growing for a hundred years are sawed through and pushed over in the blink of an eye.

The three varieties of the quebracho —the quebracho blanco, the quebracho colorado chaqueño, and the quebracho colorado santiagueño— are the iconic tree species of the Gran Chaco. South America’s second largest forest, the Gran Chaco spans some quarter-million square miles and is home to species found nowhere else in the world. However, it receives much less attention than its neighbor to the north, the Amazon rainforest.

“This is a dry forest, and the lack of water takes away its colorfulness. That’s why, for the public, it isn’t very flashy and it goes unnoticed,” says Verónica Quiroga, a biologist who has studied the evolution of the jaguar (Panthera onca) and other mammals in the Gran Chaco region for over a decade.

According to the Royal Spanish Academy, the word “chaco” is derived from the Quechua word “chacu.” “Chacu” refers to a type of hunting historically done by Indigenous communities in South America in which hunters would circle around the targeted animal before closing in to kill it. Chaco wildlife include tapirs, peccaries, charatas (Ortalis canicollis), giant armadillos (Priodontes maximus) and jaguars.

The Gran Chaco is distributed between four countries: Argentina (60 percent), Paraguay (23 percent), Bolivia (13 percent), and Brazil (four percent). As a whole, it houses a wide variety of ecosystems and three major types of forest.

The humid portion of the Gran Chaco is made up of two strips of land that run north to south. The western strip begins in the foothills of the Andes mountains and it stretches southward from the Bolivian departments of Chuquisaca, Santa Cruz, and Tarija to the Argentine provinces of Salta, Tucumán, and Catamarca. The eastern strip, which covers the southern tip of the Brazilian Pantanal, crosses through the Paraguayan departments of Boquerón, Alto Paraguay, and Presidente Hayes, and also includes parts of the Argentine provinces of Formosa, Chaco, and Santa Fe. Between the humid western and eastern strips of the Gran Chaco lies the semi-arid portion. Below that lies the arid portion, which comprises parts of the Argentine provinces of Córdoba and San Luis.

In 2015, ProYungas, a foundation based in Argentina that focuses on biodiversity conservation, conducted a study of the Argentine Chaco. It found that the Chaco there included many different ecosystems, from savannas to forests to wetlands, concluding that “this translates into a high level of diversity of animal and plant species that makes the Gran Chaco a key area for the conservation of biodiversity in the region.”

But this biodiversity is under threat.

More than 2.9 million hectares (7.2 million acres) of Chaco forest was deforested between 2010 and 2018, according to Guyra Paraguay. The monitoring organization found that 34,000 hectares (83,915 acres) were cleared in June 2018 alone, meaning that an area of forest nearly twice the size of Buenos Aires was wiped out in a single month.

Eighty percent of Chaco deforestation during that time took place in Argentina. Matías Mastrángelo, a conservation biologist and an expert on the Gran Chaco, blames the country’s dubious honor on events that occurred between the late 1990s and 2010.

“The boom began with the arrival of genetically modified soybeans to Argentina,” he says. “This caused agriculture in the Pampas region to displace livestock, which was, in turn, pushed over to more marginal spaces, mainly in the semi-arid Chaco.”

The cultivation of soy, which reached record prices internationally during that time, was a driving force behind the deforestation of large areas of the humid Chaco in Paraguay and Argentina. To the north and west, patches of forest began to fall like dominoes, cleared by farmers lured by the region’s low land prices and loose regulations. Technological advances have allowed farmers to grow crops where before the region’s meager rainfall kept them at bay.

Researchers say climate change is also damaging the Chaco.

“Cycles of floods and extreme droughts are natural in the Chaco,” Quiroga said, “but before, these cycles were measured in decades, and now they are measured in years. In 2013, the lack of rain dried the Bermejito River, and in 2017, we experienced a flood so large that the water reached people’s waists in Impenetrable [National Park].”

As farming took hold in the Chaco, the landscape changed. Native plant species disappeared, replaced by commercial cultivars. Wildlife populations began to decline from the effects of habitat fragmentation.

Yamil Di Blanco, who researches the giant armadillo, said road construction in the Chaco is also making it easy for hunters to access new areas.

“This is evidently good for the [human] inhabitants, but at the same time, it generates more traffic and facilitates the entrance of hunters from more distant provinces into the area,” Di Blanco said. “It would take a higher level of auditing to combine and compensate for both situations.” He added that the growing presence of dogs is another threat to native wildlife in the area.

When Mastrángelo investigated the behavior of birds as an indicator of how the ecosystem is changing in response to its agricultural transformation, he discovered a tipping point past which populations could not recover.

“Birds tolerate up to a certain level of forest volume decline,” he said, “but when a certain threshold is exceeded and the loss reaches 30 or 40 percent, the collapse in the wealth of species is resounding. It changes the composition of the area, and non-forest species begin to appear.”

It’s not just the region’s plants and animals that are feeling the effects of agricultural expansion. The Chaco is also home to unique human communities, which largely inhabit Argentina’s portion.

“The cultures and traits of the inhabitants, both Indigenous and Creole, are very rich, interesting, and distinct from the rest of the country,” Quiroga said.

However, native residents report having suffered due to the effects of land conversion. Some residents say they were displaced from their homes by new landowners. Others say new wire fences prevent them from accessing areas they depend on for subsistence agriculture.

If deforestation continues at its current rate, another 4 million hectares of Gran Chaco forest will be lost in the next decade, according to the Argentine Wildlife Foundation.

“If the trend registered between 2007 and 2014 continues, there will be an additional loss of almost four million hectares (over 9.9 million acres) of forests in the Chaco region by 2028 ,” said foundation director Fernando Miñarro, “— about 200 times the size of the city of Buenos Aires.”

 

This story is a translated and adapted version of a story first published by Mongabay Latam on Aug. 21, 2019.

Full Report

INDIGENOUS-RIGHTS

Argentina’s Indigenous People Fight for Land Rights

By Daniel Gutman

  1. TARTAGAL, Argentina , Jan 12 2019 (IPS) – Nancy López lives in a house made of clay, wood and corrugated metal sheets, on private land dedicated to agriculture. She is part of an indigenous community of 12 families in northern Argentina that, like almost all such communities, has no title to the land it occupies and lives under the constant threat of eviction.

“The indigenous people who live on the outskirts of the cities are refugees who have been displaced from their place in the forest over the past 100 years by non-indigenous farmers who arrived with their cows and, in recent decades, by agribusiness.” — John Palmer

Today, indigenous people in Argentina are struggling to preserve their way of life in a scenario made complex mainly due to conflicts over land.

Ninety-two percent of the communities do not have title to the land they live on, according to a survey published in 2017 by the National Audit Office, an oversight that depends on the legislative branch.

The scope of the conflict is huge. Approximately half of the 1,600 native communities in the country have carried out or are carrying out the process of surveying their lands that the State began more than 10 years ago, and they lay claim to eight and a half million hectares – a total area larger than the country of Panama.

The backdrop is the pattern of discrimination that persists in Argentina despite advances made on paper, as then UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples James Anaya reported after a visit to the country in 2011.

“There are still legacies from the colonial era and the history of exclusion is still highly visible,” Anaya wrote in his report.

Nancy López, a leader in her community, says children no longer want to speak Wichí, because if they do, they suffer discrimination at school, which must have a bilingual assistant teacher, according to the National Education Law in effect since 2006.

“The bilingual assistant is given jobs like making photocopies or running errands. He barely translates to the kids what the homework is. There’s a lot of racism,” Lopez said, as local children from the community played with mud in the rain.

Her community, El Quebracho, is one of dozens located near Tartagal, a city of 80,000 people in the province of Salta, on route 86, which is actually just a dirt road that leads to the Paraguayan border.

López explains that the families in her community settled six years ago in the countryside where they now live, without the owner’s permission, “because this used to be uncleared forest.”

The Wichí and other indigenous peoples of the area, who are hunter-gatherers, have historically depended on the forest for food, medicine, or wood to build their houses.

But every day there are fewer forests. Along with neighboring Santiago del Estero, Salta is the Argentine province that has suffered the greatest deforestation in recent years, due to the expansion of the agricultural frontier, pushed mainly by transgenic soy, which today occupies more than half of the area planted in the country.

“As the city of Tartagal grew, they pushed our indigenous communities out, so we go wherever we can,” explains López, who says that a couple of years ago they were evicted in an operation in which some 200 police officers participated.

“We stayed on the side of the road for about two months, until the policemen left and we went back in. We have nowhere else to go. This used to be all forest. Today we are surrounded by soy,” she says.

Since Argentina became a nation in 1853, one of its main goals was to exclude or assimilate indigenous people.

In fact, the constitution that went into effect that year called for “the preservation of peaceful treatment for the Indians, and the promotion of their conversion to Catholicism”, while, on the other hand, it imposed on the government the obligation to encourage European immigration.

The directive on the original population was still in force until just 25 years ago. Only in 1994, during the last constitutional reform, was it replaced by an article that recognises “the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of indigenous peoples” and “community possession and ownership of the lands they traditionally occupy.”

However, according to then rapporteur Anaya, the constitutional change did not modify a reality marked by “the historical dispossession of large tracts of land by ranchers and by the presence of agricultural, oil and mining companies that operate on lands claimed by indigenous communities.”

In 2006, Congress passed the Indigenous Communities Act, which declared indigenous lands in an emergency situation, ordered surveys of ancestrally occupied land and suspended evictions, even in cases with a judicial ruling, for a period of four years.

Since then, however, the survey has not even begun to be carried out in half of the communities, despite the fact that the law has been extended three times. And the great majority of the communities where the survey has been conducted still have no community property titles.

Today it is also reported that evictions are still being carried out, although the law in force prohibits them until 2021.

According to Amnesty International, which in 2017 released a study that detected 225 unresolved conflicts throughout the country, it is not surprising that the vast majority of the conflicts involving indigenous people in Argentina are over land.

“Some provinces have granted property titles, but there are no institutional mechanisms for access to indigenous community property in Argentina. We need a national law,” attorney Gabriela Kletzel, of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), told IPS.

This non-governmental organisation brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) the case of a group of communities whose ownership of 400,000 hectares was recognised by the government of the province of Salta in 2014.

This non-governmental organisation brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) the case of a group of communities whose ownership of 400,000 hectares was recognised by the government of the province of Salta in 2014.

“However, these communities are not yet able to take control of the land because they do not have title to it. And they still can’t get white families to take their cattle off their land, which destroys the natural resources that are the foundation of indigenous life,” Kletzel said.

John Palmer, an English anthropologist who arrived in Salta more than 30 years ago and married a Wichí indigenous woman, told IPS: “The indigenous people who live on the outskirts of the cities are refugees who have been displaced from their place in the forest over the past 100 years by non-indigenous farmers who arrived with their cows and, in recent decades, by agribusiness.”

“The destruction of the forests has wiped out all of the resources that their economy is based on. So, like many animals that no longer have anything to eat, they came to the cities,” concluded Palmer, who lived for years in a rural Wichí community until he moved to Tartagal with his wife and their five children.

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The paradigm of a sustainable economy

The paradigm of a sustainable economy goes beyond a recycling program. Nowadays recycling isn’t enough, we have to think of the way we use natural resources.
👉🏿Reduce: implies not only consuming only what we need but also saying no to what has been shown to us as necessary.
👉🏽Reuse: recovering or giving new use to things so they don’t become obsolete.
👉🏻Repair: in a crafted way. Giving back some value to the jobs that seemed obsolete so that fixing something used overcomes the need to have something new.
👉Rot: is not just a way to recover nutrients to preserve the soil fertility, it also helps to reduce the waste treatments and avoids the methane and CO2 release.
♻️Recycling: recollection process and transformation of materials to turn them into products. Many companies use it to legitimate the overproduction of garbage.
These values, which we find so necessary today for a sustainable economy, have been for centuries part of the ancient communities’ DNA.
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Chaco Region and deforestation

Deforestation continues in Salta in territories of indigenous communities in the Tartagal area. There are precautionary measures, there are judicial rulings that are not fulfilled. The police do not respond to complaints or calls from communities trying to protect these territories.
We give all the support to the families and @radiocomunitarialavozindigena who try to stop the destruction of their territories and natural wealth.

More than two years after the judicial decision, the impact on the Wichí territory continues. “We were there until March 15 and the logging was constant and permanent,” Kraft told Salta / 12 when recounting his experience. He affirmed that despite the complaints that were presented to the Police, there was no intervention and they only told the community “to organize among themselves.”

One of the topics of the documentary points to the recovery made by the chief Juayuk (or Juan de Dios López, according to the Western name), who “recovers trees cut from the roots with chainsaws, or trees burned to their roots,” said the filmmakers. This is possible due to the ancestral knowledge of Juayuk, since “it can combine species by hybridizing new seeds in these roots that still have life”.

 

“The ancestral Wichí culture is on the verge of fading into the darkness of oblivion.” The phrase comes from the synopsis of the documentary Whispers in the Wind, directed by Argentine Martin Kraft and produced by Belgian François Toussaint, both residents of Spain. It summarizes, through the experience of the Territorios Originario Wichí community, located at kilometer 3 of National Route 86, in the department of San Martín, the situation that this original town is going through throughout the province.

In the eyes of the filmmakers, the event emerged immediately. In mid-March, during the filming, they would choose a place with mountains to take pictures. When they returned the next day, they saw the devastation of the place as a result of illegal logging in a territory recognized for ancestral use by a survey of the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs (INAI).


The fact was already denounced before the Justice in 2019 asking that an action be ordered to prevent the clearing of the 593 hectares of original territory. On December 30, 2019, the Justice of Tartagal granted the precautionary measure presented by the lawyer Cecilia Jezieniecki ordering those who carried out actions that affected the territory to refrain from continuing with that activity.

The devastation referred to the fencing of the territory, as well as the entry of cattle and the felling of wood. The Tartagal judge Griselda Nieto ordered the suspension of all “those activities / actions that alter or modify the factual situation in the Territory that is of community occupation and is so until the main trial, under warning of judicial disobedience.” At that time, in addition to giving intervention to a Justice of the Peace of the jurisdiction, it was decided to also give rise to the Ministry of the Environment of the province, “for the extraction of wood.

We give all the support to the families and @radiocomunitarialavozindigena who try to stop the destruction of their territories and natural wealth.

More than two years after the judicial decision, the impact on the Wichí territory continues. “We were there until March 15 and the logging was constant and permanent,” Kraft told Salta / 12 when recounting his experience. He affirmed that despite the complaints that were presented to the Police, there was no intervention and they only told the community “to organize among themselves.”

One of the topics of the documentary points to the recovery made by the chief Juayuk (or Juan de Dios López, according to the Western name), who “recovers trees cut from the roots with chainsaws, or trees burned to their roots,” said the filmmakers. This is possible due to the ancestral knowledge of Juayuk, since “it can combine species by hybridizing new seeds in these roots that still have life”.

In Kraft’s understanding, the devastation of the original forest “is coordinated by timber producers who attack the communities.” He also reported on a strategy that has always been used in the area and is the land registry title, sometimes even imperfect, to appropriate the territories “and plant soybeans.”

In the territories, different measures are carried out to try to displace the communities, such as logging, setting fire to wood, or using tricks such as giving the land in loan (which implies that whoever is in the firm territory and with it transfers the ownership of the land to the appropriators), and if all else fails, summon other families from outside the community to initiate an internal conflict.

“We understand that the province’s business is soybeans and not look further,” said Kraft, stating that little is taken into account of the fact that this is a declared area of ​​health emergency and “very sensitive.” “They do not understand the level of social and health disaster that occurs in a short time,” added the audiovisual producer.

The documentary in many aspects tries to rescue the link between the Wichí culture and nature, which is also part of the culture of all indigenous peoples. “There is no other than to make a complaint for the violation of human rights in the area,” said Kraft, stating that one of the objectives that accompanies the documentary is to generate an overcoming proposal to make the territory led by Juayuk, a nature sanctuary . “But they are looking at where we wanted to do the project,” he said.

Guarantee of impunity


“For a long time the Community has been constantly suffering from the logging of its native forest. People enter the territory and do the mountain, they do it generally at night, on Saturdays and Sundays. They cut down all night and then retreat with loaded trucks. They are slowly predating the native forest and the Community, ”said Jezieniecki, a lawyer for the Community, in a document released by ENDEPA.

“All these intrusions imply a violation of the territorial rights of the original Community, which has already made several complaints to the police, to the Ministry of the Environment of the Province of Salta, but never received any answers. The rural police are not going to check the logging that they denounce and the Ministry only made an act, “he added.

The inspection report No. 042-000942 carried out by the Ministry of the Environment, on September 6, 2018, states that “the Rural and Environmental Police No. 4 of the town of Tartagal, having verified the existence of cut specimens of cebil and palo blanco in the geographic coordinates referred to “.

Juan de Dios López noted with concern that “logging forces us to withdraw from our territory and abandon what is ours, abandon our sacrifice and we don’t want that. We made many complaints because we know about the situation and we want the clearing in indigenous territory to stop. For us the mountain is vital, it is to be close to nature, respecting the call of mother nature, living in a healthy way ”.

Regarding the constant subjugation to which they are being subjected, López affirmed that “these actions are destroying our culture and are causing the division of our forces. The indigenous people for decades have strengthened the territory, strengthened the trees and now these companies send bulldozers to subjugate the entire indigenous territory. We want to protect our territory, we seek that our rights are fulfilled. We are cultural, the land is our life ”.

 

Published by:

Agustín Giménez
Nicolas Cuadra
Paulina Neyman
Rufino Basavilbaso
Martin Kraft
Juan M Leguizamón