Tierra-i real time satellite imaging reveals rapid deforestation throughout Latin America, and estimates that nearly 250,000 hectares of forest are lost in Argentina alone every year. Deforestation is particularly a problem in the northern provinces, home to the Argentine part of the Gran Chaco forest. As farmers have found soy to be more lucrative than cattle, traditional crops are traded for the profitable bean.

The Argentina Independent hits the streets to find out what the locals think about deforestation. Do you think that deforestation is a significant concern? Why is a problem in Argentina in particular?

Photos: Agus Carini

Susana, 41, Administrative Assistant, San Martín

Yes, it is important. More than anything because of everything that it has to do with oxygen itself, and when we consider how it has contributed throughout the years to the destruction of the ozone layer…One can sense that the climate has changed, and now winters are no longer the same winters, and summers are not the same summers, either…I speak from my own understanding, because sometimes there are things that one does not fully understand, but one can perceive…

Maybe the reason that deforestation is a big problem in Argentina would have to do with the regulations, that the regulations are not well formed or that there is no legislation that covers the area well at this moment…. For me it must have to do with this, that the legislation is not managing to cover everything that has to do with natural reserves… there could be other undercurrents that one doesn’t know about.

Pablo, 20, Mechanic, Palermo

Yes, it’s important, because to cut down trees in an effort to get more lands is crazy, I don’t know the percentage of lands that they have taken in order to make furniture, things like that, but yes, it should be.

It’s such a big problem in Argentina because we have a lot of land. There are other countries where it’s not as big of a problem because they have less area. But for example, they also take lands from tribes.

The forests allow us to breath; without them, we couldn’t breathe. It’s important to have them, definitely for this reason, but also because I like green spaces. When I go to the country, I tell you – I love Buenos Aires, but when I go to Juaní, it’s completely different….it’s beautiful.

Alberto, 48, Stone Mason, Berazategui

Yes, I think that deforestation is certainly a problem. The climate has changed, there are days that are so cold in the middle of summer that we have to bundle up. It’s the same in the winter; this past week, there was a polar wind and then it rose to 24 degrees.

It may be that the problem is that the politicians have only recently taken note of the issue, not much importance is given to protecting the forests. We cut down twenty trees, and not one is planted to replace the twenty. They only remember to plant again when the fields are bare.

That’s why today many people are against the planting of soy, [which] is at once a step forward and a step backwards, because it ruins the soil. Where you plant soy, you can’t then go plant other grains. Because there has to be a process to make the earth fertile again, in order to plant grains such as wheat and barley.

Camila, 20, Promoter, San Fernando

Yes, it seems to me that it is a concern…it seems to me that they should inform people a little more, because I, obviously, am not well informed, but I know that deforestation is a problem. Or, better put, that they inform people a little more, so that people can be aware and can realise that it is really bad.

Deforestation is a problem here because here are many cities, there are many buildings, and the little green now isn’t anything more than the plazas, and the few green spaces we have, we can’t take advantage of them often.

These green spaces are important so that people can take advantage of the free time they have, to at least spend some time in a green area, now that we have so much city, streets, cars, noise; when one wants pass a little time in peace, to study, share mate with friends, play the guitar.

Agustín, 23, Unemployed, Pilar

Yes, deforestation is definitely a topic of concern, because trees are extremely important in the equilibrium of the environment, the ecosystem. We’re outside of nature’s harmony. This disconnection causes various problems.

I am not very familiar, but I know – because of Greenpeace’s campaigns more than anything, perhaps – that there is a lot of deforestation in the north, in Missiones, in Entre Ríos, in Formosa… It’s not good to lose even one hectare of forest a day; a hectare is a lot, and a lot more than that is being lost.

One time, I was traveling in the mountains in the south. It was a lovely trip, I was alone, with the birds and the trees. And after climbing for three hours I came upon a logging field. It was rather sad; I had travelled looking at all of the nature, all of the force of nature, and the harmony, and it was all dead there, murdered.

Latin America’s vast forests are rapidly disappearing. They have come to represent yet another quickly diminishing artery of the continent’s many ‘open veins’. Their fertile land is being converted at an increasingly alarming rate for the purposes of large-scale agribusiness, namely, soy.

Images of deforestation in the wild Chaco. (Photo: Greenpeace)

Louis Reymondin is the man behind a new satellite imagery and ground processing system, Terra-i, mapping deforestation across South America.

Reymondin, a Swiss native, is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at King’s College of London and has been working as a visiting researcher at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), whose headquarters are based near Cali in southwest Colombia, for the last five years. During this time he developed Terra-I from scratch.

The complex system detects land-cover changes resulting from human activities in near real-time, producing updates every 16 days. It currently runs for the whole of South America.

“So far the system has shown that deforestation has increased in Caquetá, Colombia by 340% since 2004, and the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay, the second most forested area in South America, has lost over a million hectares of forest.”

Deforestation in Argentina

According to Reymondin, “In Argentina, Terra-i has performed habitat status monitoring every 16 days from the 1st January 2004. During the past eight years, it has detected a cumulative habitat loss of 1,955,419 hectares, equivalent to an annual national loss rate of 244,525 ha/year.” To give an idea of scale, that is roughly an area the size of Luxembourg lost each year.

Deforestation is centred in the north of the country where its largest forest, and the continent’s second largest, following only the massive Amazon, lies.

“The provinces of Santiago del Estero and Salta were the most heavily impacted, having 590,094 hectares and 516,069 hectares converted respectively between 2004 and 2011.”

Map of habitat loss in Argentina, Terra-i detection.

The Gran Chaco spreads over three countries: Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. As defined by data provided by the Organization of American States (OAS), the “Gran Chaco Americano” biome covers approximately 1,000,000 km² of South America and encompasses the central-north region of Argentina (53% of the total area of the Gran Chaco and 22% of the country’s surface area).

According to Reymondin, the South American Gran Chaco is a mosaic of habitats. It is a hotspot of biodiversity on the continent and one that is becoming increasingly threatened.

The data coming from Terra-i is especially pertinent as it attempts to isolate the deforestation resulting from human activity.

“The Terra-i outputs are of course not noise [error] free and we cannot guarantee that every single pixel that has been detected is the result of human activity, nor is Terra-i detecting all the events of deforestation that occurred since 2004.”

That said, Reymondin has included many special equations to ensure it is the best data available: “… we have implemented a range of methodologies to reduce the effect of noise, such as cloud cover, and to filter land cover changes that are not human-caused, or at least not directly, such as floods and drought. We can therefore say that the majority of the detections that we observe can be attributed to human activity.”

Why is the Chaco Disappearing? 

Perhaps the most obvious driver of change is the blanket of soy that has been rapidly spreading over the continent since the 1990’s.

Changes in global markets have expedited this process in the new millennium, especially in Argentina. A country with a huge farming component, the rolling pampas of grazing cattle typically associated with the Argentine countryside are being replaced by industrial farms growing soy, now a much more lucrative crop for any farmer.

The romantic vision of ranch life remains important in Argentine culture, but the economic equations involved in the agriculture business have changed in recent years. The expansion of soy farming is driven by US ethanol production and a global interest in biofuels; prices for soy continue to break records.

Soybean farming has been rapidly spreading over the continent for the last ten years. (Photo: Greenpeace)

Some agricultural analysts say that Argentine soybean farming is now several times more profitable than cattle ranching.

It is these profitable equations which are threatening the Chaco. Large-scale agribusinesses are encroaching on protected Chaco regions both themselves, and by pushing cattle ranchers into the area after evicting them from lands they traditionally used.

Now the third largest soy producer in the world, Argentina’s aggressive land conversions will soon change this status. Widespread drought in the US, formerly the top soy producer, combined with a larger than usual yield predicted for the 2012-2013 harvest, will put the Southern Cone soy producers in the top spot for production.

Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil combined are producing well over half of the soy on the international market. All countries in the Southern cone are rapidly converting all arable land to soy at breakneck speed.

Lessons of Paraguay 

Perhaps nowhere is the power of soy, and the threat to the Chaco in the face of this, more apparent than in the case of Paraguay.

Recently, Paraguay made headlines worldwide by the all-too-quick impeachment of left-leaning president Fernando Lugo, prompting international sanctions and public condemnation.

Paraguay is currently the fourth-largest exporter of soy. Loose regulations and relative poverty make it an easy target for multi-national soy giants to take hold there. Terra-i created a video -which can be viewed here– illustrating the massive changes in land taking place in the neighbouring country.

Around 77% of Paraguay’s arable land is owned by just 2% of the population. In the past ten years, deals have been struck for 203 million hectares of land — nearly six times the size of Germany — at a pace and scale that outstripped the ability of governance structures to respond, a situation which Lugo sought to reverse with a reform that never quite came to fruition.

Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International, writes in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, “The Paraguay soy boom — made in China and Europe and grown upon the lands of the political elite — is controlled by the boardrooms of Big Business. As much as 70% of Paraguay’s soy is exported each year and of that the multinational grain giants Cargill, ADM, and Bunge account for about 70% [of all soy exported].”

Los Angeles based KPFK’s Sojourner Truth radio show recently featured a segment on the impeachment of Fernando Lugo. The show hosted Miguel Lovera, the former national secretary for plant safety under Lugo, who spoke of the impeachment as being a coup orchestrated by a ‘Genetically Modified Soy Mafia.’

Lovera was outspoken on the show in claiming Lugo’s removal as being intrinsically related to his moves to protect Paraguay’s Gran Chaco from encroachment by multi-national soy companies and his desire to redistribute their land to smaller-scale farmers.

“The main comparative advantage of Paraguay as a soy growing territory has actually been the lack of regulations in the past. Since Lugo’s government took over that condition changed, and we actually started regulating … venturing into sensitive territory and they weren’t ready to adapt.”

Lovera hints that the original struggle in the northern region resulting in the deaths of peasants and police officers was not only orchestrated by the soy mafia, but actually committed by those in their employment.

At the very least, there is a dangerous concentration of power in terms of Paraguayan soy -an industry controlled by only a handful of very powerful multinationals which account for an undeniably influential lobby.

Lovera states that the Chaco, after small-scale peasants, is becoming the most visible victim, “[The Chaco] is also the area that is allocating all this displacement, the cattle ranching displacement in the areas that are good for soy growing, they are encroaching into this wilderness.”

To Bear Witness

The power of something like Terra-i in the face of the great changes taking place in South America is perhaps that it is an indisputable witness to what is occurring here. An omniscient eye-in-the-sky silently watching and detailing every change taking place, no matter how remote the location in which it is occurring.

“Habitat conversion is contributing to widespread loss of biodiversity and other critical ecosystem services, yet in many parts of the world the scale and pattern of habitat loss still goes unmonitored,” says Reymondin.

“Decision makers at multiple scales (local to national to regional) need information on land-cover change, as accurate and recent as possible, in order to prioritise interventions and act upon new land-cover change patterns in a timely manner. Terra-i aims to provide information about habitat loss at a temporal and spatial resolution that is relevant for decision makers.”

The data and real-time images coming from Terra-i provide interest groups, interventionists, and really anyone with an interest, solid data to point to. It is free, accessible, and irrefutable.

Infographic of the deforestation in Chaco showing the locations and damage done. (courtesy of Greenpeace)

Reymondin and his team aim to expand Terra-i. South America, while a significant achievement to monitor an entire continent, is but one of many hotspots in terms of biodiversity loss and deforestation due to human activity.

“We will keep updating the detection of deforestation in Latin America as data comes in from the MODIS satellite sensors. We plan to extend Terra-i to cover the whole tropics which will be a new challenge as this increases considerably the amount of data to process.”

Terra-I also plans to broaden its lens to encompass other resources, including the multifarious effects deforestation has on water resources.

Quite simply, Terra-I is the fly on the wall (or better, bird in the sky) bearing witness to the changes taking place. Increasing awareness and solid, publicly available information are key to social action. Given this, perhaps tools like Terra-i could help to prevent future stories such as Lugo’s in South America.

How aware are Argentines of the deforestation problem? Click here to find out.