Adaptive Management of Forested Landscapes Transformation.

CARIOLA, LUCÍA; DE LA PEÑA, ANTONIO; HILGERT, NORMA I.

Posadas, Misiones

Conferencia; IUFRO Conference; 2018

Universidad Nacional de Misiones

Industrial forest plantation (IFP) in Argentina has grown 90% in extension between 1970 and 2010, reaching 1.2 million ha today. The Province of Misiones hosts more than 30% of that area. While large and medium-size corporations directly own the majority of IFPs, small-scale producers in Misiones have adopted industrial forest production as part of an adaptive farming management strategy (AFMS). We examine the farming strategies of Colonos (settlers or colonists in Spanish), a specific type of small-scale producer in northwest Misiones that has adopted IFP as a part of historical strategy of mixing commercial crops for the market with an agrobiodiverse management of their lands. The north-western Misiones landscape in which Colonos farms exist is immersed in models of IFPs of different scale. They go form large, continuous blocks that surround Colonos properties, to discontinuous ones owned by Colonos themselves. In this context, we hypothesize that Colono AFMS would be affected by the type of forestry model in which they are located. We show results from 58 semi-structured interviews in 5 communities located in different IFP models on topics related to perceived personal and regional changes in farm production through time. In addition, field visits and interviews with 37 informants were carried out to quantify the richness and abundance of productive spaces in Colono farms under different IFP models. The objective was to understand a possible relation between IFP models and adaptive changes by producers. The results show significant differences in abundance of productive spaces (if we difference the destiny of the production) in farms according to their location in different IFP models. Colonos farms in matrixes dominated by large, continuous IFP blocks show greater multifunctionality of farming and multiplicity of crops both for household consumption and the market. Farms in less IFP dense production models show significant richness of productive spaces, although size of the farm is a variable that requires special consideration.