By Matías Mastrángelo
What do a German eating his traditional sausages, a Frenchman tasting his typical cheeses and an Italian wearing his famous leather shoes have in common? All of them, through their consumption and customs, have a share of responsibility, whether they are aware of it or not, in the accelerated loss of biodiversity in the dry forests and savannahs of central South America.
The South American Gran Chaco extends through Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil over more than one million square kilometers, an area equivalent to France and Germany combined. Despite extending across latitudes where there are only deserts on other continents, until 30 years ago this region was covered by hardwood forests, savannahs and wetlands. These ecosystems are capable of absorbing large amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and hosting rich biological and cultural diversity.
Accelerated deforestation
Since the mid-1990s, the benefits that the ecosystems of this vast region provided to society have been fading at a rapid pace due to deforestation for the expansion of commercial agriculture and livestock farming. In fact, the South American Gran Chaco holds the sad record of being one of the most deforested regions worldwide.
This phenomenon is driven by landowners from Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, who replace forests and savannas with monocultures of soy and corn, or pastures for cattle.
A large part of the grains, meat, hides and tannin produced in the South American Gran Chaco is exported to Asia and Europe (around 60% and 20%, respectively). This is made possible by a well-oiled supply and export chain of raw materials, which is controlled by a few multinational companies.
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The journey of raw materials
These commercial connections harmful to biodiversity are usually invisible to society. Fortunately, initiatives like Trase Earth (https://trase.earth) today allow us to trace the journey that these raw materials take, from the place where they were produced to the country where they are consumed. This non-profit initiative was founded by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy in 2015 to empower civil society and governments in the pursuit of deforestation-free raw material supply chains.
Within Europe, Spain and Italy are the main importers of soybeans and corn from the Argentine Chaco, although the largest volume of these grains travels to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In both Europe and Asia, they are mainly used to feed cows, pigs and chickens raised in confinement. In this way, “artisanal” preparations from the Old World such as German sausages or French cheeses are made from animals fed with grains whose production generates high environmental and social costs in the New World.
The manufacturing and consumption of luxury shoes, handbags, and car upholstery in Europe also drives biodiversity loss in the South American Gran Chaco. The European Union imports two thirds of the leather produced in the Paraguayan Chaco, with Italy being the main importer with 25,000 tons of leather per year. To make matters worse, these leathers are tanned with tannins extracted from quebrachos, the main species of hardwood tree in the Chaco forests. At the beginning of the last century, the Quebrachales were decimated by the English. Since the early 2000s, an average of 30,000 hectares of quebrachales in the Argentine Chaco are felled annually by Italian companies to extract the tannin with which the leather is tanned.
The responsibility of consumers and producers
What are European consumers and South American producers doing to stop the accelerated loss of biodiversity in the Gran Chaco? Actions, including those of their governments, are diverse and depend on three key factors.
First, they depend on how those responsible perceive the biodiversity loss they cause. The large Argentine landowners manage their fields in the Gran Chaco from their offices in Buenos Aires, thousands of kilometers away. From there, they do not see the bodies of the wild animals charred by the fire that they ordered to be used to “clean” the land and plant corn, soybeans or pastures. The same goes for Germans, who enjoy their sausages made with pigs fed grains from deforested and burned fields.
Second, some producers and consumers manage to perceive the negative consequences of their decisions, but still fail to change their logic. This is the case of many producers who today see how the soils of their fields are degraded, and what was a forest became a desert in a couple of decades, but they continue to expand deforestation blinded by the extraordinary income they obtain in the short term. Only by speculating on the price of the land, a landowner can buy land with forest in the Bolivian Chaco for 100-250 dollars per hectare and then sell each deforested hectare for 2,500 dollars.
Thirdly, those driving the loss of biodiversity in the Gran Chaco may want to reverse the damage caused by their production or consumption decisions, but they are not always able to effectively contribute to the solution. For example, an Italian who becomes aware that a brand of shoes in his country uses leather tanned with tannins from the illegal logging of Chaco quebrachos may choose to buy another brand. However, the decision of a few conscious buyers will not be enough for Italy to stop importing leather and tannins from deforested areas.
Transform international trade
Fortunately, a growing number of European consumers perceive that their consumption decisions generate negative impacts on the other side of the world. Many of them care and are willing to support import regulation policies. So much so that the European Union promotes regulations so that its member countries stop importing grains and meat from deforested areas after 2020, for example, in the Gran Chaco and other regions of South America.
Unfortunately, the entry into force of this European Union regulation scheduled for 2025 has been postponed in response to the lobbying of multinationals such as Bunge, Cargill and JBS, or the Argentine Rural Society and the European People’s Party, among others. This position clearly demonstrates that many South American producers, multinational exporters and European consumers are still not willing to stop the accelerated loss of biodiversity caused by their actions, even when this puts their own business and the well-being of society at risk.
Due to the current rules of international commodity trade, we have producers blinded by extraordinary rents on one side of the world causing invisible environmental damage to consumers on the other side of the world. Could a change in the rules of international trade in raw materials reverse this situation? To do this, it is necessary to first identify who has the power to transform international trade and, then, whether they have sufficient incentives or there is enough pressure to do so. It is up to them to make international trade part of the solution to biodiversity loss, rather than continuing to be the main driver of the problem.
*A text produced in conjunction with the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of their organizations.
Matías Mastrangelo is an Open Data specialist at the Inter-American Research Institute for Global Change (IAI) and an Independent Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina.
