ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-ARGENTINA: Logging, Global Warming Behind the Floods

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 9 1998 (IPS) - Few in Argentina, in the grips of severe flooding which has claimed 17 lives, remember the long-time warnings of environmentalists and meteorologists of the risks presented by clear logging and global warming.

Heavy rains in northeastern Argentina over the past month and the resultant overflowing of the rivers of the Rio de la Plata basin have forced nearly 150,000 people to be evacuated and caused the flooding of around eight million hectares and economic los ses estimated by the government at three billion dollars.

But former under-secretary of the environment Hector Dalmau said the flooding was not a natural catastrophe, but a result of neglect and improvidence.

Authorities in Argentina and neighbouring Brazil “should have started carrying out programmes to reforest the upper basin six years ago to boost the absorption of water,” said Dalmau. He added that more than 50 percent of the jungles from the southwest ern Brazilian state of Mato Grosso southwards were lost in the past 40 years.

Claudio Bertonatti, the head of the ‘Fundacion Vida Silvestre’, told IPS that the flooding was caused by several factors, including deforestation in the states of Rio Grande and Santa Catarina in southern Brazil, and in northeastern Argentina, particular ly the province of Misiones.

“Forests and jungles act as sponges that absorb a great quantity of rainwater,” said Bertonatti. “But this century 60 percent of Argentina’s forests have disappeared, and more than 90 percent of the jungle has been devastated in southern Brazil,” as revealed by satellite images, he added.

Dalmau pointed out that forests used to absorb 80 percent of the rainwater, which is now swelling the Parana, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers and their tributaries, until reaching the Rio de la Plata.

The governmental Institute of Space Research in Brazil acknowledged that from 1995 to 1997, clear logging destroyed more than 60,000 kms of Amazon jungle, an area larger than Switzerland.

The phenomenon is not only linked to the “latifundio” (large estate) prevalent in much of Latin America, but also to clear- cutting by small farmers who sell the wood and use the land for pasture and growing subsistence crops. After the jungle’s fragil e soil is exhausted, they move elsewhere and start the process all over again.

The same thing is happening in northeastern Argentina. “It is a problem associated with poverty,” said Bertonatti. Many small farmers from southern Brazil and Paraguay emigrate to the northeastern Argentine province of Misiones, where they cut down the forests and exploit the soil, which is left vulnerable to fast erosion by rain.

“The soil cannot absorb as much rainwater as do trees, and it is washed away – in other words, the organic material that makes the land fertile is washed off, and then erosion affects short- term subsistence, forcing farmers to migrate again,” he added .

Meteorologist Juan Jacinto Burgos, with Argentina’s Centre for Biometeorological Research, told IPS that the heavy rains and flooding in the northeast were a consequence of the El Nino weather phenomenon.

“This El Nino current has already been identified by the experts as ‘the current of the century’ due to its intense, long- lasting and unseasonable character,” said Burgos. The heavy rains should have ended in February, but could last until July, he wa rned.

In the future, “the El Nino current will be increasingly long and intense due to global warming, which causes a rise in the temperature of the oceans, greater evaporation and humidity, storms, rains and floods,” he predicted.

Burgos blamed global warming on industrialised countries that continue generating large quantities of carbon dioxide through the use of coal and oil.

But, he added, the solution does not only lie in the commitments assumed by developed countries to reduce emissions of toxic gases. “Developing countries also contribute to global warming by destroying the forests and jungles that act as carbon sinks. T hat means we must stop logging, and reforest,” he maintained.

The meteorologist pointed out that logging was on the rise, even while some 40,000 square kms of jungle in southern Brazil were destroyed by forest fires this year.

Millions of dollars were invested in the timber industry in the past few years in Argentina, mainly concentrated in the northeastern provinces of Misiones and Corrientes, where thousands of families have been evacuated in the past month due to the floodi ng of the Parana, Paraguay and Uruguay rivers.

Chilean and U.S. companies, and even the Anglo-Dutch transnational Shell, have acquired thousands of hectares and installed sawmills and timber and paper factories in those provinces over the past two years.

Thousands of evacuated families, meanwhile, many of them sick and hungry, packed into temporary shelters, continue to gaze up at the sky, wondering how long they will have to wait to return to what is left of their homes, and start over again.