The expansion of Soybean frontier. Farmers and peasants of the Gran Chaco against deforestation and agricultural frontier development (1980-2010)

ZARRILLI ADRIAN GUSTAVO

Munich

Conferencia; Coloquium Rachel Carson Center; 2017

Rachel Carson Center Luwdig Maximitient Universitat

The process of expansion of the agricultural frontier in Argentina has been a dynamic movement conditioned by favorable market situations and by the availability of apt and inexpensive lands. Since the last part of the 1990 decade, Argentina almost tripled the volume of its harvests of diverse grains and, at the same time, there was also a remarkable increase in negative social effects such as poverty and indigence, among other issues. In this context of an outstanding transformation, the Pampean region continues to be the great productive nucleus of the country. However, the changes affect other regions ?and, among them, the Chaquean region in particular, where it is possible to foresee a noticeable increase in the agricultural and stockbreeding activities, because of the productive potential of its lands, as well as because of the difference in rent that comes as a result of the price of the fields, which is quite lesser than the price of those in the Pampean region. As a consequence, in the aforementioned region, some processes that generate important and questionable transformations are taking place