ENVIRONMENT-ARGENTINA:
From Floods to Drought
Marcela Valente
The expansion of the agricultural frontier at the expense of Argentina's native forests is posing serious environmental challenges in the northeastern province of Chaco, whose inhabitants - among the country's poorest - go from severe flooding to lengthy droughts in the same year.
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 10 (IPS) - It hasn't rained in Castelli, a town of 36,000 people in central Chaco, for six months. But the drought isn't only affecting the crops and livestock. The water distributed every day for human use by the local cooperative has been reduced to one-third of the normal quantity, and can only be obtained in the wee hours of the morning.
Chaco is one of Argentina's poorest provinces. Nationwide, 38 percent of the population of 37 million lives below the poverty line, but that proportion stands at 60 percent in Chaco, while 27 percent of people in the province live in extreme poverty.
The lack of water has forced the poorest of the poor to turn to unsafe water supplies from wells. Early this month, one local resident was hospitalised with cholera.
Deforestation began in the province in the early 20th century, when the quebracho tree, a hardwood species, was heavily logged in the province for the extraction of tannin, which was used in the leather industry.
Later, forests were cleared to grow cotton.Today, it is the production and exportation of soy and sunflowers that are fuelling the destruction of forests by large landowners.
The growth of intensive monoculture farming has led to severe deforestation in Chaco, which has exposed the soil to the rigours of the climate. Around 70 years ago, 70 percent of the territory in Chaco was covered with forests or bush, compared to just 45 percent today.
From 1996 to 2003, the area planted in cotton in the province shrunk from 612,000 to 85,000 hectares, according to the provincial Ministry of Production. In that same period, the land planted in soybeans and sunflowers climbed from 76,000 to 768,000 hectares, and from 56,000 to 300,000 hectares, respectively.
The clearing of forests for farm land has accentuated the vulnerability of the local population, especially in the central part of the country, the area bordering the jungle known as "The Impenetrable", the second-largest in South America after the Amazon jungle.
Vicente Barros, who has a doctorate in meteorological science, told IPS that over the past two decades, the climate in Chaco has suffered wild swings. "For many months in the wintertime the climate is extremely dry, but at year-end (in the southern hemisphere summer) it rains so heavily that the same arid zones are flooded," said Barros.
The expert, the author of the book "El cambio climático global" (Global Climate Change), admitted that the causes of this extreme variability are not completely clear to scientists.
But he pointed out that in the face of climatic phenomena like drought and flooding, the soil management decisions made by large farmers and the provincial government have turned out to be "disastrous."
After heavy rainfall, farmers, with support from the government, clear forests and sow their crops. When drought hits, they pull out, leaving the fragile soil exposed to erosion, he explained.
Rolando Nuñez is president of the Nelson Mandela Centre for Studies and Research, a human rights group in Chaco. In an interview with IPS, he largely concurred with Barros, but stressed the weak role played by the state, with respect to zoning and the regulation of land use.
Despite having large rivers running along its northern and eastern borders - the Bermejo and Paraná rivers - Chaco lacks a province-wide piped water system. Water is only piped to the provincial capital and three nearby cities, while the rest of the province lacks the infrastructure to obtain water from the rivers.
Nuñez explained that of the 10 million hectares in the province, 70 percent are currently plagued by drought to a greater or lesser extent. But the phenomenon "is extraordinarily grave" in the northern part of the province, he said, because it affects the poorest sectors of society, which have no clean drinking water.
In a letter to the authorities in Chaco, Raúl Montenegro, the head of the Foundation for the Defence of the Environment, warned in early 2004 that the forest is irreplaceable in the process of soil generation.
The best insurance for life in the Chaco ecosystem is the survival of the forests, argued Montenegro at the time. If most of the province is converted into cropland, the country will lose one of the forest systems best adapted to heat, drought, the generation of soil and the conservation of water, he underlined.
That warning was prompted by a provincial government decision to sell off public forest land to agribusiness interests for the cultivation of soybeans.
But the warnings from environmental organisations fell on deaf ears, and the problems worsened, until the provincial government finally announced that it would build a water system to pipe water to Castelli from a nearby river, and would create other infrastructure and take measures to better prepare the province for facing future effects of the climate.
Environmentalists, however, will have to wait for the land zoning policy that they are demanding, which would set aside protected areas and open up other land to agriculture.
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