Civil Society, Environment, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT-ARGENTINA: Impenetrable Neglect

Sebastián Lacunza

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 1 2008 (IPS) - The “El Impenetrable” forest, which covers nearly four million hectares in northern Argentina, could finally be protected thanks to a new forestry law, after decades of deforestation which have plunged impoverished indigenous people in the area into a grave humanitarian crisis.

After a campaign that managed to collect 1.5 million signatures, the forestry law finished winding its way slowly through Congress and was passed late last year.

The law declared a one-year ban on logging in native forests and requires the national and provincial authorities to draw up land-use plans clearly defining protected areas and sustainable forestry zones.

Each new logging permit issued after the ban is lifted will depend on approval of an environmental impact study and will only be issued after public hearings are held.

The dense El Impenetrable forest, which covered 8.2 million hectares in the northern provinces of Chaco, Santiago del Estero and Salta 95 years ago, has shrunk over the years as livestock breeders and soy farmers have moved in.

The area, the poorest part of Argentina’s poorest province, is now rife with corruption, drug trafficking and the smuggling of contraband cigarettes.

The deforestation picked up speed over the last decade. The Environment Ministry estimates that Argentina lost 1.1 million hectares of native forest between 1998 and 2006.

El Impenetrable represented more than 60 percent of that total, according to environmental organisations.

A forest survey carried out in 1982 found that El Impenetrable had shrunk to 5.4 million hectares, and a 2005 study reported that it covered 4.8 million hectares.

But according to the Nelson Mandela human rights centre, based in Resistencia, the capital of the province of Chaco, a more accurate estimate is 3.5 million hectares.

The Nelson Mandela centre maintains that the provincial government sold off more than 3.3 million hectares of public land, mainly in El Impenetrable, from 1995 to 2007.

The head of the centre, Rolando Nuñez, described to IPS a corrupt scheme “through which land sales were encouraged, to obtain mortgages, which devastated state-run banks, because the value of the land two years after it was bought was far lower than the amounts loaned.”

The inhospitable El Impenetrable is a dry forest made up of carob, quebracho, and chañar (or palo verde) trees, which receives little rainfall and is crossed only by a branch of the Bermejo river, the Bermejito. Temperatures can climb as high as 45 degrees Celsius in the long summer.

That is why the sandy soil left after land in the forest is cleared is only good for producing one or two harvests of soy, the star crop that has displaced other crops, like cotton, which used to provide local indigenous people with seasonal employment.

“But the soil is so poor that only two harvests are possible,” the head of Greenpeace Argentina’s forest campaign, Hernán Giardini, told IPS.

Satellite images show areas that have been turned into desert, as well as slashes in the forest where the trees have been felled for makeshift airstrips, some of which are still littered by the remains of abandoned broken-down aircraft. The landing strips are used for smuggling drugs and contraband cigarettes, say local residents.

The destruction of the forest has not only caused harm to the environment, but to local inhabitants as well, according to both human rights groups and the Chaco provincial government of Jorge Capitanich, who took office in December and has declared a health, food, educational and environmental emergency.

Eighty percent of El Impenetrable is located in Chaco, where it covers 35 percent of the provincial territory.

Chaco is Argentina’s most impoverished province, with 47 percent of the population living in poverty and 23 percent in extreme poverty – nearly twice the national average for poverty and three times the average for extreme poverty.

But the poverty is especially pronounced among the scattered communities living in El Impenetrable.

Of 86,000 people living in the Chaco districts of Almirante Brown, Maipú and General Güemes, where the forest is located, 30,000 are indigenous, mainly Toba but also Wichi and Mocovi Indians.

Shocking photographs of indigenous people suffering from acute malnutrition shook the country last year, when 22 people were reported to have died of malnutrition.

Plagued by Chagas disease, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis and other diseases closely related to poverty, and deprived of the fruit and wild game previously supplied by the forest, thousands of indigenous people from El Impenetrable have flocked to the slums on the outskirts of Resistencia, while thousands of others have migrated to the city of Rosario in the northeast and to Buenos Aires, the Nelson Mandela centre reported.

Of those who stayed in El Impenetrable, many moved to towns like JJ Castelli, Tres Isletas or Villa Río Bermejito. The largest community of Wichi Indians is found in Misión Nueva Pompeya, a remote town 550 km from Resistencia.

All of these towns experienced enormous population growth over the past decade.

When asked about the likely impact of measures taken under the humanitarian and environmental emergency declared in the province, Núñez said they will be useless “if they are applied as merely a short-term solution, without monitoring and oversight.”

He said the provincial government must adopt long-term, comprehensive humanitarian measures, and engage in dialogue with local indigenous communities.

The activist also criticised the fact that food and medical supplies and aid are being “partly distributed by the army – an error because indigenous communities tend to be wary of uniforms.”

In addition, he said, assessments must be carried out on the ground in Toba and Wichi communities, in order to spray dwellings and teach local people how to prevent Chagas disease, an illness caused by a parasite carried by the vinchuca or reduvid bug, which typically lives in the walls and roofs of the local mud, thatch or adobe houses.

“We also have to hear what the Toba and Wichi want. If the (government’s) Zero Hunger programme only focuses on food and medicine, it is doomed to failure. And the bush has to be fenced off (and protected), while the subsistence techniques of the indigenous groups should be supported and strengthened, to help them survive on their own,” said Núñez, who frequently visits El Impenetrable.

The Capitanich administration is also undertaking land titling efforts, so that local families whose descendants have lived in the forest for generations will finally hold formal title to their property.

Greenpeace activist Giardini, meanwhile, said the new forestry law “will be effective, because most of the logging in Chaco is legal, and the permits have now been cancelled. And the fact that the law earmarks one billion pesos (315 million dollars) to foment sustainable forestry activities is another important aspect.”