In the Chaco of Paraguay, biodiversity rivals that of the Amazon – but its destruction is accelerating
OUR six-seater Cessna takes off from Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. Within a few minutes we are flying over the dense thorn forest, some of it only ever trodden by members of the Ayoreo tribes. Stretching north and west for 1000 kilometres on a plain as flat as a tabletop, the Paraguayan Chaco is the last great wilderness in South America.
It is a land of odd creatures: giant anteaters, tapirs, maned wolves, the llama-like guanaco, flightless rheas as tall as I am, and as many as 10 species of armadillo. The plant life is equally mysterious, with dense thickets of bushes with vicious thorns, and giant cacti and bottle-shaped trees that hold moisture like a camel’s hump. They are all part of a unique ecosystem that is more ancient than the Amazon rainforest, and arguably more biologically important. Yet its treasures have been hidden from scientists as well as to most Paraguayans. “Most of its taxa are largely unknown,” says of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.
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That’s partly due it its extreme climate, which switches between 50 °C summers and below-freezing winters, searing droughts and extensive floods. And unlike most other border areas between tropical and temperate zones, it is not desert but covered by thick bush. All of this makes its biology unique.
The thorns and the extreme climate have kept the modern world out until now – but no longer. Three groups with different agendas are now fighting for the land. Besides the native people who are struggling to preserve their culture, there are the ranchers who want to clear the forest for farmland. And there are the scientists and conservationists who hope to explore the region to chart and protect its enormous biodiversity.
Much of this activity is evident from my flight, which I am sharing with conservationists from , a local NGO that is recording the escalating destruction, and its partner, the UK’s , which is trying to buy up land to protect the forest.
There is no doubt that the destruction of the Chaco would be a severe loss, since it appears to be unique even by the standards of the other regions of the “Pleistocene Arc”, which encircles the Amazon basin from north-east Brazil through the Cerrado of Brazil to the Columbian Andes. “The Chaco differs – profoundly I would say – from other woodland regions like the Cerrado,” says Darien Prado, Chaco specialist and head of botany at the National University of Rosario in Argentina. The extreme conditions have led to adaptations rarely seen elsewhere, Prado says. “They have to adapt or die.”
Many of the organisms are both endemic and ancient. The gnarled shrub Ruprechtia triflora, a member of the rhubarb family, for instance, diverged from its relatives some 8 million years ago – so long ago that it may be reassigned to a genus of its own. A lot of the species are xeromorphic, meaning they have adapted to holding onto moisture through long dry seasons and intense heat. These include the distinctive quebracho trees and Prosopsis flowering plants. It is this kind of unique adaptation that has led of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, UK, to call the Chaco a “museum of diversity” – a refuge over millions of years for species adapted to its unique environment.
Vital flora
Indeed, the Chaco might be responsible for the extraordinary biological diversity found right across South America. During past ice ages, which were dry as well as cold, the weird species of the Chaco appear to have spread much more widely, invading tropical regions as far as the Amazon to the north, where rainforests retreated to a few pockets. The invaders left their seeds behind, helping to keep the Amazon’s genetic soup stocked up during these harsh conditions.
The Chaco could play a similar role in the future. As we face increasingly extreme climates as a result of global warming, the thorn forest may be the perfect place to look for organisms that are well adapted to harsher environments. The destruction of this forest could therefore be a loss not just to science, but to humanity as a whole. “Without knowing it, we could be losing a flora that is not just incredibly evolutionarily distinct, but of vital importance to other biomes,” says Pennington. “At a time when we fear climate change, it seems especially crazy to be losing species that are obviously incredibly well adapted to extreme climate.”
“At a time when we fear climate change, it seems especially crazy to be losing species that are incredibly well-adapted to extreme climates”
Yet that destruction has already begun. The biome of the Chaco once covered 1.3 million square kilometres – five times the area of the UK – extending into Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina. But it has been eaten away by the expansion of agriculture – particularly in Argentina – and most of what survived into the 21st century was its thickest, hottest, most distinctive and most forbidding heart in Paraguay, where it covers two-thirds of the country but contains just 2 per cent of its population.
Now that, too, is going. An hour into our flight, we are over a ranch that covers 500 square kilometres. It is laid out in 100-hectare rectangles of cleared land separated by thin strips of forest, making it look like a giant’s paved pathway across the forest. Soon afterwards comes another 100-square-kilometre gash in the forest, all cleared in the past 12 months.
This reflects a rapid rise in deforestation, with rates of destruction growing from virtually zero to 10 square kilometres a day – that’s approximately a soccer pitch every 90 seconds. The pressure comes, in part, from Paraguay’s government, which wants to tap into global markets for key agricultural products. Beef exports have trebled in the past decade, and the cattle herd in the Chaco has risen from 2.4 million to 3.9 million. It can take as much as 3 hectares of Chaco to sustain one cow, and the last national land census showed that some 6 million hectares of the Chaco had been converted to pasture by 2008 – and the pace of clearance has accelerated since.
That places it in stark contrast with the Amazon rainforest, the international poster-child for conservation. While action by the Brazilian government has cut deforestation rates by 70 per cent since 2004, deforestation in the Chaco is accelerating, and if the trend continues it will surpass that in the Brazilian Amazon within a couple of years.
The Paraguayan government approves almost all proposals to clear the forest, while paying lip service to protecting the Chaco by requiring ranchers to leave a quarter of the trees – perhaps 60 to 80 per hectare. Some do, some don’t; it isn’t tightly monitored. “The Chaco is a no-man’s land,” said Jose Luis Casaccia, the chief environmental prosecutor from Paraguay’s attorney general’s office, when I met him at Guyra Paraguay’s office in the suburbs of Asunción. “The ranchers on their huge estates make up their own laws.”
Casaccia was briefly Paraguay’s minister for the environment. He says he was removed two years ago for wanting to strengthen the law to require protection of 50 per cent of all forest land licensed for clearing. “There was huge pressure. The ranchers said I was against development.” His successor, he says, “is very weak and is doing nothing for environment protection. Right now 95 per cent of the deforestation of the Chaco is legal, because the minister issues so many licences for ranchers to clear the land.”
Apocalyptic future
I asked Casaccia how he would describe the fate of the Chaco. “Apocalyptic,” he replied. “On current trends, everything that is not protected will all be gone by 2025. The Chaco will be reduced to desert, with all the species in it being lost.”
“With current trends, everything that is not protected will be gone by 2025. The Chaco will be reduced to desert, and all the species within it will be lost”
There have already been some efforts to preserve the Chaco, a couple of which can be seen from our flight. As we fly north towards the Bolivian border, the ranches beneath us are suddenly replaced by a big patch of forest stretching towards the horizon. “That’s the Moonies’ land,” says Oscar Rodas, habitats coordinator for Guyra Paraguay, checking his coordinates. Sun Myung Moon’s Korea-based Unification Church has been buying forest in Paraguay and across the border in Brazil for more than a decade. It has amassed some 8000 square kilometres. Moon calls it “the best place to practise heavenly life on Earth”.
We spot an abandoned logging railway snaking through the Moonies’ forest. Part of this domain was, until a decade ago, owned by descendants of a swashbuckling Spaniard called Carlos Casado. For a century, they raided the forest for the quebracho tree, which grows extremely hard wood (its name is derived from the Spanish for “axe-breaker”) and contains high concentrations of tannin, used for tanning leather. The railway transported the logs for processing. The quebracho trees on the estate are now gone, but the Moonies’ purchase has protected the forest from clearance by ranchers.
There is also good news at the 4400-hectare Cardozo estate, west of the river town of Bahia Negra, which we approach as my fellow passenger, Roger Wilson from the World Land Trust, checks the tree cover. Here, the landowner has gone green and is selling up to conservationists. The purchase went ahead in June.
You might expect these attempts to find support from the forest’s indigenous inhabitants. These include the Ayoreo people, who number around 5000, living in 200 or so wandering hunter-gatherer groups who have remained “uncontacted” by outsiders. There are also the 1500 or so Ishir fishing people, who live along the west bank of the Paraguay river.
Friends or foes?
All these people have a long history of protecting the Chaco, and environmentalists tend to see them as allies. Wilson has reached an agreement with the Ishir, for example, to manage the Cardozo ranch jointly for 20 years before giving full title to the Ishir, on condition that the forest is maintained. Things are not so harmonious between the Ishir and the Moonies, however, who now control land that the Ishir claim. This includes their sacred burial grounds. Candido Martinez, an Ishir community leader and councillor in Bahia Negra told me: “The cemeteries are our most precious land. We are not even allowed to visit them.” So much, you might say, for the Moonies’ view of “heavenly life on Earth”.
Attempts to document the amazing biodiversity of the region have also met with suspicion. In November 2010, 60 botanists and zoologists from the NHM and its Paraguayan counterpart, headed by Knapp, had intended to embark on a major expedition – at the hottest and most humid time of year – to discover new species in the remote north-west of the Chaco. But weeks before they were due to set off, representatives of the Ayoreo began to voice strenous opposition to the project. Their objection is that the scientists might stumble on one of the 10 or so families of isolated Ayoreo who live in the Chovoreca national park, which is the main focus of the expedition.
Benno Glauser of the indigenous peoples’ group Iniciativa Amotocodie wrote to the NHM saying that the expedition “constitutes beyond any doubt an extremely high risk for the integrity, safety and legal rights of life and self-determination of the isolated Ayoreo, as well as the integrity and stability of their territories… We do not understand why you prefer to lose human lives just because the English scientists want to study plants and animals. It’s like genocide.”
, a London-based NGO that supports tribal people, agreed, arguing that “contact with isolated groups is invariably violent, sometimes fatal and always disastrous”. Paraguay’s environment minister, Oscar Rivas – the same man who is, ironically, licensing the destruction of the Chaco – sided with the objectors, and the expedition was postponed for talks. They continue today.
Survival stands by its opposition to the trip until there is full support from the Ayoreo. But its spokesman concedes that there are more pressing dangers. “Frankly [the row] was always considered a distraction from the more serious threat to the Ayoreo from the rampant deforestation.”
It is a distraction that may have badly damaged their larger cause. Without the forests, the surviving Ayoreo would be doomed for sure, says Alberto Yanosky, the head of Guyra Paraguay. Greater knowledge of the diverse range of species in danger could capture the global imagination – and so help put the Chaco on the same footing as the Amazon rainforest. A sustained science-based campaign might be the best chance of saving the Chaco and the Ayoreo who depend on it, says Yanosky. Seen in this light the “English scientists” may be their best hope.
Land of conspiracy theories
The Chaco has a brutal and bizarre history – and it is the focus of many conspiracy theories. Paraguay and Bolivia fought an improbable war here in the 1930s, in which nearly 1 in 30 Paraguayans died – more from thirst than from battle wounds.
In the 1980s, the US constructed a 3.5-kilometre-long runway along the route to Bolivia, long enough for its biggest military transporter to land. Our Cessna landed there to refuel before returning to Asunción. I can report that the rumours of a US military garrison there are false, unless they are camped out in the bush. The only sign of life was a tiny filling station and a man on a motorbike who came over to check ID. Oh, and the persistent rumours that George W. Bush bought a giant ranch in the Chaco – allegedly as a way of capturing underground water reserves – are also not supported by any evidence that I know of.
Down the road from the airstrip is an area of the Chaco occupied by groups belonging to the Christian fundamentalist Mennonite sects, who came here 80 years ago from Canada and the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Paraguayan president. The only way to get there is a boneshaking 7-hour ride up the trans-Chaco highway from Asunción. They raise cattle and speak their distinctive Germanic language. But in recent times they have swapped lives of hardship and fierce discipline for air conditioning, 4 × 4s and big-box shopping stores. Their main town, Filadelfia, is now one of the most prosperous in Paraguay. The Mennonites produce two-thirds of Paraguay’s milk and much of its meat. In the eyes of most Paraguayans, they have ceased to be bizarre aliens in an even more bizarre outpost. They have become the pioneers of a new wave of commercialised cattle ranching.
