‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ of the agricultural expansion in the Argentine Dry Chaco

Vallejos, María; Faingerch, Melina; Blum, Daniel; Mastrangelo, Matías Enrique

doi:10.1080/01426397.2020.1808965

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Consequently, disappearing forest-smallholder homesteads do not just occur within active deforestation frontiers (Fig. 4) but also in areas of emerging frontiers where land is being partitioned for later development, explaining the displacement of forest smallholders (43). It is possible that some disappearing homesteads were displaced to other areas and were mapped there as emerging homesteads.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agricultural expansion and the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people

Levers

Romero‐Muñoz

Baumann

et al. 2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Agricultural expansion into subtropical and tropical forests causes major environmental damage, but its wider social impacts often remain hidden. Forest-dependent smallholders are particularly strongly impacted, as they crucially rely on forest resources, are typically poor, and often lack institutional support. Our goal was to assess forest-smallholder dynamics in relation to expanding commodity agriculture. Using high-resolution satellite images across the entire South American Gran Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot, we digitize individual forest-smallholder homesteads (n = 23,954) and track their dynamics between 1985 and 2015. Using a Bayesian model, we estimate 28,125 homesteads in 1985 and show that forest smallholders occupy much larger forest areas (>45% of all Chaco forests) than commonly appreciated and increasingly come into conflict with expanding commodity agriculture (18% of homesteads disappeared; n = 5,053). Importantly, we demonstrate an increasing ecological marginalization of forest smallholders, including a substantial forest resource base loss in all Chaco countries and an increasing confinement to drier regions (Argentina and Bolivia) and less accessible regions (Bolivia). Our transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe. Such knowledge is essential to inform policies aimed at sustainable land use and supply chains.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agricultural expansion and the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people

Levers

Romero‐Muñoz

Baumann

et al. 2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Both State-led and market-led land-tenure changes have been associated with large-scale deforestation and severe environmental impacts, while the latter also with increased socioeconomic inequality (Rudel & Hernandez, 2017). Observed changes in the dominance of agents in the Chaco region have been associated with processes of land dispossession of local land-users by arriving farmers and investors (Caceres, 2015;Mastrangelo & Aguiar, 2019;Vallejos et al, 2020), creating paradoxical landscapes with high levels of poverty and high export commodity production (Paolasso et al, 2012b).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land privatization and deforestation in a commodity production frontier

Faingerch

Vallejos

Texeira

et al. 2021

CONSERVATION LETTERS

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Conservation policies often promote land privatization to reduce incentives for deforestation. However, empirical evidence on the relationship between land‐tenure form and forest conservation outcomes is inconclusive. We combined key informant mapping and geospatial analyses to test the association between the area under tenure and the area deforested by extra‐local private and local nonprivate agents in the Argentine Dry Chaco over four decades (1976–2016). The study area is a typical commodity production frontier within a global deforestation hotspot. We found a strong spatial and temporal coupling between the area under tenure and the area deforested by extra‐local private agents from 1987 to 2006, when a 59% increase in the former was accompanied by a 508% increase in the latter. Local private agents maintained high levels of forest cover, similarly to local nonprivate agents. Our findings have implications for the adaptive design of the Forest Law in the Argentine Dry Chaco.

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“…Many dry forest regions harbor indigenous people and other traditional communities who critically depend on forests for their livelihoods (Blackie et al, 2014, Newton et al, 2016. Expanding commodity agriculture increasingly leads to hidden or open conflicts with such forest-dependent communities, and the Chaco is no exception to this (Vallejos et al, 2020b). Yet forest smallholders also cause considerable local forest degradation and defaunation (Altrichter, 2006, Grau et al, 2008, Romero-Muñoz et al, 2020, and it has therefore been questioned whether smallholder systems can be aligned with regional-scale conservation goals (Grau et al, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fading opportunities for mitigating agriculture-environment trade-offs in a South American deforestation hotspot

Law¹,

Macchi²,

Baumann³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Strong trade-offs between agriculture and the environment occur in deforestation frontiers, particularly in the world’s rapidly disappearing tropical and subtropical dry forests. Pathways to mitigate these trade-offs are often unclear, as well as how deforestation or different policies alter the option space of available pathways. Using a spatial optimization framework based on linear programming, we developed a landscape-scale possibility frontier describing trade-offs between agricultural profit, biodiversity, and carbon stock for the Argentinean Dry Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot. We use this framework to assess how current land-use zoning, as well as past and future land-use-trajectories, alter the option space to minimize trade-offs between biodiversity, carbon, and agriculture. Our analyses yield four major insights. First, we found substantial co-benefits between biodiversity and carbon, yet strong trade-offs of both with agriculture. Second, development according to the current zoning could lead to highly suboptimal socio-ecological outcomes, and our analysis pinpoints how this zoning could be improved. Third, high landscape-scale multifunctionality can be achieved using different land-use strategies, but maintaining >40% of forest is essential in all of them, and silvopastoral systems appear to be central for achieving high overall multifunctionality. Finally, our results suggest the window of opportunity is closing rapidly: recent land-use changes since 2000 have rapidly moved the Chaco within the options space, with forest extent declining towards critical thresholds for maintaining balanced, multifunctional landscapes. Our results emphasize that the time for sustainability planning in the Chaco is now. More broadly, we show how multi-criteria optimization can describe dynamic trade-offs between agriculture and the environment at landscape and regional scales. This can help to identify land-system tipping points that, once crossed, would inhibit more sustainable futures, and policies to avoid such potential traps.

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‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ of the agricultural expansion in the Argentine Dry Chaco

Cited by 14 publications

References 27 publications

Agricultural expansion and the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people

Agricultural expansion and the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people

Land privatization and deforestation in a commodity production frontier

Fading opportunities for mitigating agriculture-environment trade-offs in a South American deforestation hotspot

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