The world needs to wake up to what is happening to Bolivia’s forests
New report by NGO CEDLA explains why Bolivia's deforestation rates are one of the world's highest
I’ve just come back from more than three weeks in eastern Bolivia making a documentary film about deforestation for the UK-based not-for-profit newsroom The Gecko Project. For kilometre after kilometre in the Santa Cruz region it was the same, sobering scene: cattle ranches and soy fields where until recently tropical primary forest stood, or the charred, just-about-still-standing forest through which a fire had just ripped. As of 30 September more than 10 million hectares of Bolivia - including 5.8 million hectares of forest - were estimated by the NGO TIERRA to have been impacted by fires, making 2024 the year of one of the biggest environmental catastrophes in the country’s history.
In recent years only Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have lost more tropical primary forest than Bolivia - a much smaller country with far less forest, it must be emphasised - and the vast majority of that devastation has occurred in Santa Cruz. Move over Brazil, DRC, Indonesia etc. Despite the “Mother Earth” legislation passed in 2010 and 2012 for which it has become somewhat famous, Bolivia seems to have quietly become the new “Bad Boy” of global tropical deforestation - while very few people have been paying attention.
I say “quietly”, but actually it hasn’t been that quiet. Over the last few years the US-based NGO World Resources Institute has consistently exposed Bolivia’s high rates of forest clearance, and last year, at an “Amazon Summit” held in Brazil bringing together various Heads of State of Amazonian countries, the BBC reported that a proposed 2030 zero deforestation goal had been “resisted above all by the President of Bolivia, Luis Alberto Arce.” In addition, Bolivia is not one of the 140+ countries to have signed the “Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use” which emerged out of the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow in 2021 and committed signatories “collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.”
But why are things so bad in Bolivia? NGO Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (CEDLA), based in La Paz, has just released a report partly answering that question. Here is a brief summary of its top seven deforestation drivers:
1 A beef boom fired by exports to China since 2019 and expectations of other countries such as Chile being opened up too, as well as various technological advances in production. Playing a key role are investors from Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay “looking for new opportunities in Bolivia where environmental regulations are much weaker and the price of land is much lower.”
2 New Mennonite colonies. Many Mennonites - Anabaptist Christians tracing their roots to the 16th century Protestant Reformation - are veritable experts at rapidly bulldozing enormous areas of primary forest and converting them into monoculture crops, especially soy, or pasture for cattle. In certain parts of Santa Cruz the only people you see farming - intensively, at industrial scale - are Mennonites. According to CEDLA, Bolivia’s Mennonite population doubled between 2013 and 2023, and the deforestation rates in colonies established in the last 15 years are especially high. Soy is easily Bolivia’s most cultivated crop - and much more profitable than cattle-ranching, CEDLA says.
3 Expansion from the naturally fertile Santa Cruz plains eastwards into the Chiquitanía region, where soils are generally much poorer. This has happened over the last 5-10 years, CEDLA says, with most of the deforestation being done for cattle-ranching, and Mennonites appearing to be the largest producers of soy.
4 Bolivian in-migration. In recent years huge numbers of people have moved to Santa Cruz from other parts of the country in order to obtain land and cultivate it, usually at large-scale. They are often affiliated to Bolivia’s largest campesino and government-connected trade union, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), according to CEDLA, or are what are known as “intercultural communities.” These migrants have obtained title to 1.5 million hectares of previously public land in the Chiquitanía alone, estimates CEDLA, and have a tendency to settle where they shouldn’t - “restricted areas”, “protected areas” and indigenous territories.
5 Brazilians, Argentinians and Paraguayans. CEDLA speaks of a kind of “deforestation leakage” - from Brazil in particular: i.e. deforestation occurring in Bolivia that would otherwise have happened across the border. This has “probably” been intensified by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returning as President in Brazil, CEDLA says, and could be made worse by new laws expected to have a big impact there, like the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
6 “Land trafficking.” Companies are being formed solely to buy land and knock the forest down, which boosts its value, often by more than double, before being sold on again. “Deforestation in itself is a very profitable business,” CEDLA says.
7 New laws and government policies, particularly from 2013, aiming to boost production by expanding the agricultural frontier. According to CEDLA, this has been done in all kinds of ways, including pardoning deforestation that was previously considered illegal, permitting deforestation in areas where it used to be prohibited, allowing “controlled burning” of forests, and simplifying legal and administrative processes.
CEDLA concludes its report with numerous recommendations, mostly to the government. Among the most eye-catching are the calls to “reorient national development policies with the philosophy behind Bolivia’s Constitution and the Mother Earth Law”, and to “re-think beef exports, which generate relatively little benefit to Bolivian society compared with the damage they cause.” If things aren’t turned around quickly, CEDLA warns, the future looks very, very bleak.