Every Month, An Area Of The Gran Chaco Forests 2X The Size Of Buenos Aires Is Destroyed

[hatrack]

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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.”

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https://news.mongabay.com/2019/09/gran-chaco-south-americas-second-largest-forest-at-risk-of-collapsing/

[sandensea]

1. Deforestation in the Chaco is indeed a long-running problem - since the 1930s at least.

That said, it should be noted this is not as serious as the Amazon crisis, as it's not a rain forest - and therefore produces much less oxygen, and houses much less biodiversity.

The woodland sections of the Chaco are dry forests, not too different from the ones found in Southern California. Here's a typical landscape:



As to the culprits behind deforestation in the area, that would be the Argentine Rural Society (SRA) - the country's main landowners' association, particularly cattle ranchers.

They were among the staunchest supporters of the disastrous Macri administration - who reciprocated, among other ways, by refusing to enforce laws protecting forests. Deregulation of Glyphosate use and costly tax cuts were other ways.

Here's a recent protest of vegans against Macri, deforestation, and the SRA - quashed (illegally) by gauchos on horseback, to the delight of the largely right-wing crowd: