From whom and for what? Deforestation in Dry Chaco from local-urban inhabitants’ perception

Abstract

To meet the global-human population increase, deforestation resulting from agriculture expansion threatens the ecological and social dimensions of subtropical and tropical forests. Here, we identified classes of agricultural frontiers in the Dry Chaco ecoregion based on land-use changes between 2000 and 2013, in which we performed interviews and quantified local-urban people's perception regarding (1) main drivers of deforestation, (2) main actors responsible for it, and (3) if deforestation drivers impact positive or negatively on their welfare. Whereas in early frontier’ stages (i.e. new and incipient-active frontiers) the drivers perceived as responsible for deforestation were forest exploitation and real-estate transactions, in a later stage (i.e. active-frontier class) global agribusiness and livestock emerged. In mature-frontier stages, only cropland replacement was perceived as responsible. Across all agricultural-frontier classes, extra-regional people were the most pointed as responsible for deforestation, but governments were mentioned concerning weak policies and absence of plans. Global agribusiness was the driver most mentioned as impacting positively and negatively on local-urban people’s welfare, mostly related to job opportunities. This likely reflects that not all the population can take part in the economy boosted by commodities production. The identification of stages of agriculture-frontiers resulted in a simple and rigorous classification that could allow predicting social-ecological trajectories.

Keywords

• Agricultural frontiers
• Land-use changes
• Livestock
• Actors
• Social-ecological systems
• Soybean crops