Agriculture expansion and deforestation in seasonally dry forests of north-west Argentina

By H. R. Grau, Néstor Ignacio Gasparri, T. Mitchell Aide. Environmental Conservation, 2005

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Argentina, deforestation due to agriculture expansion is threatening the Semi-arid Chaco, one of the largest forested biomes of South America. This study focuses on the north-west boundary of the Argentine Semi-arid Chaco, where soybean is the most important crop. Deforestation was estimated for areas with different levels of soil and rainfall limitation for agriculture between 1972 and 2001, with a finer analysis in three periods starting in 1984, which are characterized by differences in rainfall, soybean price, production cost, technology-driven yield and national gross domestic product. Between 1972 and 2001, 588 900 ha (c. 20% of the forests) were deforested. Deforestation has been accelerating, reaching >28 000 ha yr−1 after 1997. The initial deforestation was associated with black bean cultivation following an increase in rainfall during the 1970s. In the 1980s, high soybean prices stimulated further deforestation. Finally, the introduction of soybean transgenic cultivars in 1997 reduced plantation costs and stimulated a further increase in deforestation. The domestic economy had little association with deforestation. Although deforestation was more intense in the moister (rainfall >600 mm yr−1) areas, more than 300 000 ha have already been deforested in the drier areas, suggesting that climatic limitations are being overcome by technological and genetic improvement. Furthermore, more than 300 000 ha of forest occur in sectors without major soil and rainfall limitations. If global trends of technology, soybean markets and climate continue, and no active conservation policies are applied, vast areas of the Chaco will be deforested in the coming decades.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05bec177fc4c0eff653b33cab667f08a2f735291

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Citations in the corpus

Soybean Seed Vigor: Uniformity and Growth as Key Factors to Improve Yield (2020, background): “In order to increase the soybean supply to meet this demand, a larger area of land must be cultivated, leading to deforestation in the tropical forests of South America [2].”
Modifying Argentina: GM soy and socio-environmental change (2014, background): “Many authors agree, however, that the rate of deforestation has accelerated with the introduction of GM soy (Gasparri et al., 2008; Grau et al., 2005; Paolasso et al., 2012; Pengue, 2005).”
Rents, Actors, and the Expansion of Commodity Frontiers in the Gran Chaco (2018, background): “…increasing global demand and rising prices for soy and the adoption of no-till cropping and genetically modified (GM) soy seeds in the mid-1990s, in the context of a long-term increase in rainfall (Grau, Gasparri, and Aide 2005; Zak et al. 2008; Delvenne, Vasen, and Vara 2013; Hoyos et al. 2013).”
Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on The influence of human demography and agriculture on natural systems in the Neotropics Globalization and Land-Use Transitions in Latin America (2008, background): “The concentration of modern agriculture on the most productive soils (“agriculture adjustment,” Mather and Needle 1998) has favored the abandonment of marginal agriculture and recovery of forests in many countries (“forest transition,” Mather 1992, Rudel et al. 2005), and is contributing to…”
Balancing food production and nature conservation in the Neotropical dry forests of northern Argentina (2008, methodology): “Extensive grazing continues to be the most common land-use practice, but expanding global markets for soybean are promoting deforestation for agriculture expansion in areas where increasing rainfall is sufficient for rain-fed agriculture (Grau et al., 2005).”
Estimating the world's potentially available cropland using a bottom-up approach (2013, background): “Subtropical and temperate dry forests and savannas of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, called the Gran Chaco, represent a large continuous woody ecosystem where soybean and planted pastures are expanding rapidly (Grau et al., 2005; Aide et al., 2013).”