Argentine Gran Chaco - Developing a Global Foodscape

As the America’s second-largest forest biome, The Gran Chaco — consisting of dry forest-land, savannas, and grasslands — holds significant biodiversity, is home to over 9M people (including several indigenous groups), and is also an agricultural powerhouse for soy, other crops, and beef. A landscape that stretches across 1M km2, of which 60% is located in Argentina, contains only 3% of protected area coverage and has lost between 5-7M hectares of forest in the last two decades due to the agricultural expansion.

From 2000 to 2012, conventional agriculture in the Argentine Gran Chaco witnessed an alarming 33% expansion for grains and oilseeds, mainly in soybean crops, thus increasing agricultural production from 26 million hectares to 35 million hectares. For livestock, cattle production has increased steadily since 2010, reaching 13 million cattle heads in 2018, thus representing 24% of the overall national stock. Year upon year, the impact of grazing has become more visible in certain areas, with wide forested areas becoming rapidly transformed into pastureland. This rapid expansion of the agricultural frontier has caused the following impacts:

• An increase in deforestation, accompanied by soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and carbon emissions.
• Several species endangered or in significant decline, such as the jaguar, giant armadillo, and giant anteater.
• Reduced resiliency to climatic events, such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods
• Decrease in rural communities’ economic livelihoods, with many at or below the poverty line and trends continuing downward.

As the Global team has initially identified three unique global foodscapes* in Northwest India, the Midwest of the United States and the Upper Tana in Africa, a noteworthy landscape in Latin America is currently missing from the global portfolio of successful case studies. The Gran Chaco has undergone all of the significant planning processes, as mentioned above, to position itself as Global’s next Regenerative Foodscape. Set to receive funding at the end of the 2021 calendar year, now is the time to pivot towards execution by establishing a TNC Global-Regional-Country collaboration model that will serve as TNC’s framework to achieving the ambitious 100 global foodscapes impacted while also addressing the pressing conservation issues this area currently faces. The Chaco well represents this model, including multi-stakeholder partnerships — a process connecting traders, value chains, roundtables and promoting a three-pronged vision of the environment, agriculture, and social building blocks through a platform approach — to prove the concept of scaling regenerative agriculture for TNC across the globe.

*TNC is using the term “foodscape” to describe a distinct geographic area where healthy land, freshwater, and ocean ecosystems coincide with critical food production systems—farms, grazing lands, aquaculture, and fisheries zones. These foodscapes are well-positioned to support enhanced food production but also contain significant reserves of wildlife and healthy habitat. In the regenerative foodscapes we target, TNC will reconcile food production with conservation to help support our vision of a world where people and nature thrive.

The Argentine Gran Chaco has been characterized as a hunting region - mainly by indigenous groups and locals – and a logging center of valuable wood, railway sleepers, and tanneries dyes from red quebracho. The first cattle ranches of criollo settlers were located on these lands, and the first agricultural nucleus was created. Agricultural expansion began in the 1970s, driven by higher grain prices, technical improvements, and increased rainfall in the area.

In the last 30 years, the landscape has changed drastically through the conversion of large forest areas to annual crops (soybean particularly) and non-native grass pastures. This continuous conversion is one of the main deforestation drivers with the greatest impact on the landscape; dry forests and grasslands being the most affected ecosystems.

Since 2015, regenerative ranching practices to produce soy, beef, maize, and other crops have been under development in the Gran Chaco. Activities include the preparation of a manual and a toolbox on good agricultural practices; the engagement of multiple actors in good growth platforms across value chains; the elaboration of sustainable business models for different products; and the inclusion of participatory mechanisms to ensure that future expansion is carried out on restored lands with no new deforestation, even in areas of the country where this is permitted by law. Funding for these activities has come from the InterAmerican Development Bank-AgroLAC 2025, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the agri-business sector (notably, Syngenta, Bunge, and Dreyfus).

The Argentine Gran Chaco is a landscape where TNC will focus on developing guidance for implementing global foodscapes for the regenerative food systems strategy. As part of this implementation roadmap, TNC will also pilot crucial tools such as the monitoring and evaluation of soil organic carbon sequestration in agricultural production systems and its verification and validation through a holistic approach that accounts for healthy soils, biodiversity, water aspects, and socioeconomic fundamental aspects among many others.

In 2005, TNC et al* developed one of the most comprehensive ecoregional assessments for the Gran Chaco with more than 100 organizations and institutions involved. It had been a well-recieved product by partners in Argentina, representing important areas for conservation or high conservation value areas (HCVA).

The ecoregional assessment identified 21% of the Argentinian Gran Chaco as important areas for conservation or HCVA. After 2005, only 330.000 hectares (1.08%) had been declared formally as protected areas and only 3.5% of the Gran Chaco is currently under some protection instrument.

The possibility of increasing the quantity and expanding protected areas is limited, so it’s necessary to use other legal and voluntary means to conserve a system with substantial food production pressures. The vision of the foodscapes is to integrate HCVA and agricultural/livestock systems to make the whole Gran Chaco system resilient to climate fluctuations and economic challenges. Effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) - areas that are achieving the effective in-situ conservation of biodiversity outside of protected areas – are present in the region (as corridors or individual areas), and their value to generate complete functional landscapes has to be integrated at scale for conservation at large landscape levels. If large areas are to be protected, links and networks with private stakeholders and conservation areas are essential.

* The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina (FVSA), Fundación para el Desarrollo Sustentable del Chaco (DeSdel Chaco) y Wildife Conservation Society Bolivia (WCS). 2005. Evaluación Ecorregional del Gran Chaco Americano / Gran Chaco Americano Ecoregional Assessment. Buenos Aires. Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina  

In Argentina, productivity has come at the expense of nature, with around 8 million hectares of the Gran Chaco forests being lost only in the last two decades, of which most can be attributed to soy expansion. This process generated public outcry and social reaction in the form of a command-and-control tool known as the Native Forests Law (NFL). The tool possesses provisions for thorough territorial planning and specific restrictions to avoid any illegal change in land use from forests into agriculture in the Gran Chaco and other forest regions in Argentina. The NFL is a solid policy mechanism to guide integrated land-use planning, representing a unique opportunity to combine activities, including the restoration of degraded lands for production, habitat restoration in HCVA, and the implementation of regenerative ranching and agriculture as a strategy to achieve conservation, social and sectoral goals.

In the Argentine Gran Chaco, the Forest Management with Integrated Livestock (FMIL) proposes forest conservation and livestock management in the same productive matrix, enabling the integration of all components and taking advantage of the benefits that each one brings to the whole.

This approach is based on the adoption and combination of technologies with low environmental impact, creating a balance point between the productive capacity of the system, its integrity, and its services, under the principle of maintaining and improving the well-being of the producer and associated communities. The FMLI aims to achieve a profitable production of beef and timber, and non-timber products, in a way that is compatible with the conservation of the native forest, its biodiversity, and its ecosystem services, within a framework of environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

The FMIL plan is formulated in a scenario of expansion of the agricultural frontier (mainly by soybean crops), with the shift of livestock to the forests. Evidence of this situation can be found in the data on livestock stocks (especially cattle) in the provinces with the largest area of ​​forest and in the increasing appearance of livestock components in the management plans of the Forest Law in those provinces.

The FMIL has promising results that contribute to climate adaptation, increasing yields and income, improving soil conditions, restoring connectivity of native ecosystems, preserving biodiversity, and enhancing social welfare, particularly amongst communities, towns, and villages that surround rural areas. Refining and scaling these production systems are part of an integrated approach to conservation and food provision with vulnerable climate change conditions.

Only 1% of the Argentinian Chaco is currently under legal protection. To increase this amount to nowadays internationally recognized goals, such as 30%, collective actions across public, civil society and production sectors are required, acknowledging that most of the available land is in private hands and the role these can play in effective conservation efforts. 

Conservation responsibility needs to be adopted not only by public and civil entities but also by the food sector´s producers and businesses. To achieve that, the economic, social and environmental benefits through the transformation of large foodscapes into regenerative agriculture systems are the key. 

We believe that only by integrating protection into a landscape matrix with production, conservation, and climate goals we can achieve effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative, and well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscapes.