Argentina

  On 26 November 2004, the Province of Santa Fe legislature adopted an emergency environmental law placing an absolute moratorium on land clearing, logging, deforestation, burning or destruction of woodland and native forests for a period of 180 days, which can be extended a further 180 days by the executive.

The Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention on Climate Change will be meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina this month. Through the media, the public will receive the good news that the Kyoto Protocol has been approved in spite of the refusal of the world's main polluter -- the US -- to ratify it. Most people will thus feel relieved, thinking that the climate crisis will now be averted.

Ever since Western forestry science defined forests as predominantly wood-producing entities, efforts have concentrated on increasing productivity of one single product: wood. Diverse forests were simplified, by weeding out all the species that industry was not interested in, while promoting the absolute predominance of "valuable" trees in the forest.

The Mbya Guarani are an ancient forest people with their roots in the Amazon. In Misiones, a province in the northeast of Argentina, they have 74 communities and a total population of approximately 3,000 people. Their culture is as rich as the biodiversity of the Paranaense forest that they have always used and protected.

The Yaboti forest, 300 km to the east of Posadas in the Province of Misiones, was designated as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1995. In addition to its importance for biodiversity, it is the only refuge and means of subsistence of two communities of the Mbya Guarani ethnic group (Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’I Yvate), peoples who only recently got in touch with the outside world and who are now threatened by the interests of the Mocona Forestal S.A. company.

According to a recent official report, Argentina has lost 70 per cent of its native forests: out of 105 million hectares of forests, only 33 million are left today. Those most affected are the native forests in the northern and central regions of Argentina in the Provinces of Santiago del Estero, Salta, Chaco, Formosa, Misiones, Entre Rios and Santa Fe. It should be stressed that in a sector of the Province of Salta, the annual deforestation rate is three times higher than the world average.

Argentine Patagonia is a vast region covering 800,891 km2, encompassing a great variety of ecosystems. Topographically, two environments may be identified: the Andean area (comprising the Southern Andes Cordillera, with forests, lakes and rivers) and the extra-Andean area (steppes and plateaux).

Pachamama is a Quechua term, which stands, basically, for Mother Earth. The Quechua, an Indigenous People living in a large part of the Andes, believe that the Earth is a mother which cares for people as if they were her children.

On 4 December, thousands of people from cities and villages in the Provinces of Chubut and Rio Negro again marched together with the neighbours of Esquel to say “NO to the Mine.” This reaffirmation by the people took place in the midst of a new mining encroachment, as personnel of these corporations are scouring the outskirts of Cholila (in Chubut, a few kilometres from the Los Alerces National Park). If mining activities continue, various lake systems and the Patagonian Andean forest will be endangered.

The Hoktek T’oi community of the Wichi People (Province of Salta, Argentina) has just won a resounding victory in the court action they brought against the Provincial government for the permit granted in 1996 by the Environmental Secretariat to the Los Cordobeses S.A. company, for the deforestation of 1,838 hectares of the community’s traditional territory (see WRM Bulletin 49).

Like so many other countries in the South, Uruguay has been convinced (by FAO, the World Bank and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, among others) that it should promote large-scale tree plantations. From the start, it was very clear that the objective was to produce sufficient raw material for pulp production and for this reason, fundamentally, the plantation of eucalyptus was promoted.

The struggle of the people of the town of Esquel, in the Argentine Patagonia, against the intentions of the Canadian mining company, Meridian Gold Inc. to exploit a gold mine in Cerro 21, have been going on for over seven months now. Ranging from mobilizations to "escraches" (mass demonstrations outside the homes of those responsible for the mine), from a plebiscite and legal action to the symbolic closing down of the access to the camp, from the graffitti and murals to the parliaments of the Mapuche People and the "No! Forum".