Argentina Slashes Forest Conservation Budget While Stimulating Soy Production.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
Argentina, one of the world leaders when it comes to deforestation, is entering into a dangerous new phase this year with regards to its treatment of natural resources.
For the 2018 national budget, the government of President Mauricio Macri significantly reduced the amount of money to be spent on native forest conservation. The move essentially sends the country back a decade, to November 2007, when the state didn't have any tools to protect its green lungs. It was then, just 12 days before the presidency of the late Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) ended, that the legislature passed Ley 26.331, better known as the Native Forest Defense Law, which required that a fixed percentage of the national budget go to forest conservation. The portion should have amounted this year to US$466 million. Instead, the government designed a budget that sets aside just 6.3% of that amount--less than US$30 million--for conservation efforts.
The move coincides with a government decree that reduces taxes for soybean exporters by 0.5% monthly starting now and continuing until the end of 2019--for a total reduction of 12%. The measure is expected to stimulate production of the oilseed and thus extend the agricultural frontier (the dividing line between farmland and wilderness areas) at the expense of natural forests. Critics say that defunding the native-forest defense mechanism is an indirect way of promoting deforestation. And in a context dominated already by the expanding agricultural frontier, the budget cut couldn't come at a worse time.
As it stands now, Argentina accounts for 4.3% of deforestation worldwide, according to the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And for the period between 2001 and 2014, the organization Global Forest Watch (GFW) ranks Argentina ninth among countries with the greatest tree cover loss.
Recurrent flooding
An analyst with the cooperatively owned newspaper Tiempo Argentino recalled that in 2015, the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (2007-2015) submitted a report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change acknowledging that 22.1% of Argentina's greenhouse gas emissions stem from the shift in land use and its poor management of forests. The analyst cited various sources to conclude that the effect deforestation has on the climate and soil "is already apparent and can be seen in the increasingly recurrent floods [taking place in Argentina]."
A recent study by agricultural...
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