Opinion Sur Joven

When we imagine our planet many mental pictures come to our mind, and among them there’s surely one picturing giant forests far away from the cities, with jungles full of flora and fauna, a wild scenario covered in a magnificent green. However, this typical image is close to become an image of the past. There are less forests in the world every minute.

Deforestation is going faster and faster every time all over the world. The so-called equatorial rainforests (the Amazon basin, central Africa and South-East Asia) have an annual deforestation rate of almost 47,000 square miles, and another 40,000 are partially destroyed; the entire area of Switzerland is 16,000 square miles, and Portugal’s is almost 39,000.

At this destruction pace, calculations indicate all tropical forests will have disappeared by the second half of the 21st century, that is, in 50 years. [1]

Our continent -especially in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia- is clear evidence of the problem. Between 2002 and 2006, deforestation increased in Argentina almost 42% in comparison to the period between 1998 and 2002 [2]

The most serious situation takes place in the rainforests and scrublands in Argentina’s northern provinces of Salta, Chaco, Formosa, Santa Fe, Santiago del Estero and Córdoba: the process worsened over the last four years and logging destroyed almost 2,800,000 acres, an area equivalent to Israel’s. With these numbers, the deforestation rate in Argentina -which measures the loss percentage per year with regard to the remaining area- is six times higher than the world average.

Looking for lands

In order to understand clearly this problematic, Opinión Sur Joven interviewed Hernán Giardini, the coordinator of Greenpeace Argentina Rainforest Campaign, whose action has been in the limelight this year to promote the Ley de Bosques (Forest Law) (in Spanish only), which aims at limiting deforestation rates, by means of protests and collecting more than 1.3 million signatures to support the project.

“To deforest means to remove native forests to use the land for other purposes, and it’s generally aimed at gaining new lands to use them for livestock farming and agriculture", Giardini explains. Deforesters aim at gaining more lands to farm them and thus increase production, taking advantage of a global economic scenario where the price of raw material is rising, especially soya’s.

“In the search for lands, the rainforest ‘bothers’ production. Today, the search for land in Argentina has moved from the central region to the north, because the pampas are overexploited and northern lands are very cheap", Giardini says.

Although the phenomenon of native forest disappearance is known as “deforestation”, we must state the difference between “logging" and “clearance”. To log is to cut down the forest material to sell the timber. On the other hand, clearance aims at removing the forest and using the land for other purposes, such as farming.

The Greenpeace campaign coordinator describes a discouraging future in Argentina’s situation. “There are three endangered ecosystems: the parque chaqueño (which is the South American heat pole, the region with the continent’s highest temperatures and the second largest rainforest after the Amazonia), where clearance is carried out for soya crops and livestock farming. Secondly, the yungas rainforest, which goes from Tucumán province to Bolivia, where clearance is done to cultivate sugar cane and soya. And the third one is the selva misionera (the rainforest in Misiones province, near the border with Brazil), where the aim is to plant pines and eucalyptuses to obtain cellulose or timber”.

Climate change and the like

More than one may wonder why so much fuss about deforestation. The question is valid, and the answer is clarifying: stripping the Earth of its forests and other ecosystems such as its soil has an effect similar to burning a person’s skin. Forests help maintaining ecological balance and biodiversity, as well as limiting erosion in hydrographic basins, and they influence weather changes.

Deforestation and forest degradation are the causes and the results of climate change. Forests absorb carbon dioxide, acting like a “drain”, but when they are degraded or destroyed (for example, in fires or by deforestation) they turn into a “source” of carbon dioxide emission.

Up to 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions are due to indiscriminate logging. In fact, South America contributes to worldwide greenhouse effect with 5%; half that percentage would be due to deforestation. Forest destruction emits about 6,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, which explains how this practice worsens the greenhouse effect [3].

Not only do logging and clearance impoverish the soil and leave it unprotected from erosion and water evaporation, but they worsen climate change because they increase draughts and human pressure upon forested areas.

The economic scope of the subject is obvious: cheap lands and highly valued raw material within the global market make a perfect combination for businessmen who are looking for high and fast profits from their investments. However, the production resulting from deforestation (such as soya crops or timber commercialization) doesn’t generate mass employment.

But there’s also a political scope upon this issue: indiscriminate deforestation is encouraged by provincial governments. “The worst problem in Argentina is that a great part of deforestation is legal; governments authorize it and the policies on the subject are unilaterally decided by each local Environment secretary. There isn’t a national coordination and opinions from different sectors aren’t considered. The result isn’t positive, because it doesn’t generate large resources and country people end up moving to the city. Projects are planned for the short run and no one thinks about the consequences”, Giardini explains.

In Argentina, 100 acres an hour (which represents 40 football fields) and 740,000 acres a year disappear, and those native forests that disappear will never be recovered again. Giardini says Argentina has almost 80 million acres of forests left, but its deforestation pace is much higher than the global average, even higher than in African countries. As we can see, there’s no time to waste.

We can reach a solution

Greenpeace has been promoting for some time now a national law that proposes to postpone clearance for one year and “put the territory in order” by planning and making agreements between the productive sector, environmentalist, experts, farmer organizations and indigenous groups [4].

The Forest Law also aims at deciding upon a forest technique to reach political agreement afterwards to define three regions within the country: a green region where regulated deforestation can be held, a yellow region where clearance is not allowed but controlled logging is, and a red region where total protection is enforced.

Or we could also follow the May 1968 slogan and bring imagination to the power. That’s what they did in Brazil, where they managed to reach an agreement with European companies by committing not to buy soya from Cargill, which was produced in cleared lands, and Cargill -the largest agricultural company in the world- also committed to change its forest policies.

Some sectors are also mentioning the possibility to create a second Kyoto Protocol to generate funds for world preservation of native forests.

Notwithstanding all this, the most important thing is that, lately, this issue got to be included in the public agenda and, as some people say, acknowledging the problem is half the way towards the solution. “We’re winning the battle within public opinion, which we fought hard for. We still have to win the political battle, but very strong interests are involved and pressure will always be present; today for soya, tomorrow for something else. Now we want the Forest Law, but then we’ll have to keep fighting for more”, Giardini concludes. Let his words be heard.

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