Socio-environmental change in the Argentine Chaco

Abstract

The Argentine Chaco eco-region is a forest biome of unique importance due to its continuity in terms of area, and biodiversity treasures. In the last decades of the twentieth century, agricultural expansion has represented a growing threat for the ecosystem and for the people who inhabit it. Due to this process, significant ecological changes, and social and demographic transformations, are taking place, in parallel. The aims of this paper are to analyze the socio-environmental change occurred after the expansion of soybean cultivation in the Argentine Chaco in the 1990s, and examine the consequences of such expansion in environmental and sociodemographic processes. To perform this analysis, we examined the relative impact of changes in agrarian production in general and the introduction of soybeans in particular, on demographic, socioeconomic and environmental dynamics, through path analysis. This analysis carried out at departmental level, considering a total of 69 departments of the Argentine Chaco. The development models of socio- environmental change and their interpretation are based on the detailed analysis of the literature, where the main theories of the issue were collected. The analysis consisted in contrast these hypotheses with empirical data to finding a general pattern explaining the process of socioenvironmental change for the Argentine Chaco in the 1990s. The model developed explained a high percentage of variation between departments in the growth of soybean and in its social and environmental effects.