This huge forest area on Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, lost more than 8 million hectares between 2000 and 2019. Faced with the emergency, the inhabitants and associations mobilize.
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scathing, the sun taps on a dusty dirt path plotted between steep shafts, shrubs and, that and there, bringing shadow into the drought, of Quebrachos – all of the South American trees of South America Gracile branches. On the side side of the road, sometimes, cows cows rot in the heat: the animals, introduced by the few peasants from the corner, have succumbed before finding water, so rare in the forest called “L ‘ Impenetrable “, because of this dry hostility. The Gran Chaco region kisses over 107 million hectares part of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and a tiny tear in Brazil, in landscapes varying moist abundance to semi-aridity. It houses the second forest in South America after the Amazon.
Here too, the bulldozers swallowed thousands of trees, participating in deforestation, making the second largest in number of hectares in Latin America after the Amazon basin, according to a report from the NGO Greenpeace, in 2019. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) thus classifies Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia among the ten most deformed countries between 2010 and 2015. Brazil occupies first place. According to the collaborative project Mapbiomas , including the Global Fund for Nature (WWF) is a member, Gran Chaco lost 8.7 million hectares between 2000 and 2019.
Argentinian side, 80% of deforestation focuses, according to Greenpeace, in four Northern Provinces: Salta, Santiago del Estero, Formosa and Chaco, the region being the region that has retroceded its forest between 2016 and 2019 ( More than 130,000 hectares lost, according to the NGO). If the cadence of deforestation has decreased since 2009, it continues to wreak havoc. “Even during the containment in 2020, [she] continued,” Note Hernan Giardini, coordinator within Greenpeace, who reports the loss, for half illegal, more than 13,000 hectares in Chaco in 2020.
Advanced Agriculture and Large Livestock
On the satellite map in which Natay Collet plunges, a member of the Somos Environmental Defense Collective (“We are the forest”), vast white spots plotted in the Cordeau stand out of green immensity. “We can see all the deforestation of the province of Salta [in the extreme north-west of the country] and this immense rectangle, 19 kilometers long,” she returns, from his office.
This “rectangle” is visible after 180 kilometers of dirt road in the “impenetrable”, hidden at a man’s height by a “curtain” of trees. “This allows people who are deferred to hide the area when you go on the road, but it does not escape satellite images,” says Natay Collet. At the turn of a more way to the gap, after having passed cactus with orange or yellow flowers and carob trees, we can see the bald land as far as the eye can see.
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