South America’s second forest is vanishing into soy and cattle
The Gran Chaco sprawls more than a million square kilometres across Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and bits of Brazil—the continent’s second-largest forested ecoregion after Amazonia. Quechua chaqu means hunting land; today ranches and soy are clearing that cover fast.
Wedged between the Andean foothills and the Paraguay River, this hot lowland has some of the continent’s highest temperatures. Tradition splits it into the Chaco Austral south of the Bermejo River, the Central Chaco between the Bermejo and Pilcomayo, and the Chaco Boreal to the north, whose western Dry Chaco is sparse while the east supports taller grass and woodland. Multi-layered dry deciduous forest dominates; in the west white and red quebracho form the canopy, and in the humid east forests grade into Brazil’s wet woods, rich in lianas and epiphytes.
Biologists count roughly 3,400 kinds of plants there, along with some 500 bird species, 150 mammals, and 220 reptile and amphibian species. Quebracho supplies tannin processed in dedicated factories, and palo santo is another valued timber. Much of the centre and north has fertile, phosphorus-rich sandy soils, but rainfall of 600 to 1,300 mm a year and heat make farming demanding.
Nomadic peoples, notably the Guaycuru, resisted Spanish control from the sixteenth century into the early twentieth. The territory was disputed from 1810; landlocked after losing its coast in the War of the Pacific, Bolivia wanted the Paraguay River as an outlet for oil. Mennonites arrived in the Paraguayan sector from Canada in the 1920s and from the Soviet Union in the 1930s and after the Second World War, founding prosperous towns, and the Trans-Chaco Highway was built in the 1960s.
Population estimates range from about four million to over nine million, including Wichí, Qom, Pilagá, Guaraní, and Ayoreo communities. Fire-led clearing, illegal logging, and conversion to ranches and soy have been rapid; Argentina’s portion alone has lost about seven million hectares of native forest. Bolivia’s Kaa-Iya National Park, sustainable-use projects, and Indigenous stewardship aim to slow the loss, but weak enforcement and legal gaps blunt them.
Source: Gran Chaco
