Basant Al-Sharqawi
Posted on: Thursday 20 August 2020 – 10:43 AM | Last update: Thursday, August 20, 2020 – 10:43 am
By March 25, 2020, the Corona pandemic had already crossed much of the world, leaving behind a streak of death and despair.
Argentina was no exception, as the government announced five days ago that the country had entered a period of mandatory social isolation to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, but the crisis did not prevent loggers from continuing to cut down on the Argentine Plain of Gran Chaco.
The satellite images captured in Formosa province in northern Argentina, bordering Paraguay, show bulldozers working to open paths within forests 10 meters wide, while the cut trees appearing about 7 kilometers from Bermigo, according to the site “Mongabe” for environmental sciences. .
Ricardo Teddy, an Italian physicist who has lived in the Gran Chaco Plain for many years and is a member of a citizens’ platform called “We Are the Forest”, said: “It is clear that what they do is illegal. Our platform defends the ecosystems and forest dwellers of the Gran Chaco, and that does not include compliance with quarantine. “Any activity that involves a change in land use must be subject to a previous public hearing,” he said.
Bulldozers were considered a common sight under current conditions in the Argentinian Gran Chaco Plain, where local forests were relentlessly eroded, including areas that should be protected under the Forestry Act of 2007, until Argentina’s forests lost 12.4 million acres of fertile land during the first two decades of the first century. Twenty.
According to the Argentine Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, the Gran Chaco forests represent the largest forest in South America after the Amazon, with 87% of all forests in Argentina.
The cleared land forms part of the huge La Fidelidad farm, and until the death of its previous owner in 2011, the hill occupied a total of 250,000 hectares, or 618,000 acres, on both sides of the Bermigo River.
The large farm has a high level of biodiversity, and the efforts of many environmental organizations have transferred 316,000 acres, from their southern sector, which is located within the Chaco Province, into a national park, yet 247,000 acres of the northern sector were left without protection, which is the main reason for the exposure of The area for bulldozers now deployed there.
It is reported that on May 20 of this year, two images by NASA, of Gran Chaco, showed her in December 2000, and in December of the year 2019, they showed the extent of the destruction of the forests during that period.
–
