In September and October, Yann will be heading back to the Pilcomayo River basin in Paraguay to continue working on reconstituting the history of land use and livelihoods prior to the arrival of the cattle frontier. The area has experienced important transitions over its history, from a territory dominated by mostly nomadic Manjui and Nivaclé people before the Chaco War, to one where they cohabited with Guaraní and Argentine criollo families as well as  military posts and some large estancias after. Recently, the massive expansion of large cattle ranches has again transformed the region. With this new visit, Yann hopes to shed some light on remaining questions about that history, and on the recent land conflicts that have arisen from the expansion of the cattle frontier.

Olivia's paper 'A framework for understanding land control transfer in agricultural commodity frontiers' is out in the Journal of Agrarian Change! In that paper, Olivia In it, reviews the strategies used by different actors to secure control over land prospected for agricultural commodity production worldwide. She then presents a framework for examining the dynamics of control transfer in these often-conflictive 'frontier' moments, that builds on the analytical structure of ‘breaking down’, ‘building up’, and ‘holding on to’ control. The paper is freely accessible here.

This summer, Michelle worked as a Summer Student with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa while working on her thesis (“Understanding Discourses around the Sustainability and Morality of the Alberta Beef Industry”). Michelle worked on gender equality and social inclusion issues and provided support to IDRC-funded programs throughout the Global South that work to help build equitable, inclusive and sustainable food systems in the context of climate change.

All summer long, Olivia has been conducting interviews and workshops with criollo smallholders in the province of Santiago del Estero in the Argentine Dry Chaco, in order to better understand dynamics of land control, migrations, and social-ecological feedbacks for her PhD research. She is collaborating with the Instituto de Ecología Regional of the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán.

In August, Patrice submitted MSc thesis investigating changes in rural populations' access to surface water in the Pilcomayo Basin due to the expansion of large-scale agriculture. The thesis takes a close look at water access in the Pilcomayo Basin, a part of the Gran Chaco. Being able to access places with water is hugely important for smallholder livelihoods in the Chaco. Patrice deployed advanced techniques to map the presence of surface water and then analyze changes in the ability of smallholders to access that water, as more and more of it gets enclosed by large farms. With her thesis complete, she used the rest of the summer to relax and enjoy lots of time outdoors (and occasionally hang out with some small, winged visitors). At the start of the fall term, she began editing her thesis for publication, so she remains active in the lab as an alumna - stay tuned for a paper to come out of this!

Marie-Claude spent the summer conducting her Master's fieldwork in the indigenous Emberá community of Ipetí in Panamá. There, she asked people about the history of their livelihoods and about their relationship to a reforestation (REDD+) project that took place in the community. With this information, she is hoping to answer questions about land-use and livelihood change in the community, and about the impacts and possible side-effects of the reforestation project. Stay tuned for her results!

Led by our collaborators at Humboldt University Berlin, this new paper to which Yann contributed develops a set of metrics to characterize agricultural frontiers, in addition to proposing a new high-resolution reconstruction of land-use/cover change in the Gran Chaco 1985 to 2020. The analysis shows that nearly 30% of Chaco woodlands were lost since 1985, with a  major increase in deforestation during the pandemic. It also shows that post-deforestation land-use changes are widespread (mainly cattle ranching to cropping) but that many deforested areas are never used for agriculture. The study shows how frontier metrics can capture and structure this diversity to uncover major patterns of human–nature interactions, which can be used to guide spatially-targeted policies. The paper can be found here.

This June, Patrice visited the Paraguayan Chaco to learn more about how people use surface water bodies, in the context of her M.Sc. thesis. Patrice has been using satellite images to understand the distribution of surface water in the Pilcomayo basin, and how the ability of smallholders to access that water has changed over time with the expansion of large ranches. With this visit, she was able to get a better feel for the context and improve her understanding of people's relation to water.

Yann spent part of May and June talking with indigenous and criollo inhabitants of the Pilcomayo basin to better understand their livelihood and land-use history, and their current outlook on the development of their region. This is an area that has experienced massive deforestation in the last decade, and people who lived there have often been forced to leave their houses or to change their livelihoods for lack of space. Yet we don't know very much both about how these changes are experienced at the local level, and about what people's lives looked like before big ranches arrived. Through his fieldwork, Yann is collecting stories of these changes.

Our new paper is out in the Journal of Rural Studies! In this study led by lab member Olivia del Giorgio, we take a look at the different dimensions of smallholder access to examine the livelihood impacts of the expansion of agricultural commodity production in the Gran Chaco. We analyze changes in livelihoods in relation to the portfolio of access mechanisms deployed by smallholders, the relational access pressures they face, and the degree to which access to space is restricted for different activities. By disaggregating the effects of these different dimensions of access to land and resources, we show that it is possible to unpack the link between access and livelihoods, allowing to capture more-nuanced impacts for smallholders that might otherwise go unnoticed. We find that changes to the dimensions of smallholders’ access differentially impact their ability to engage in activities critical to their livelihoods, productive issues which are likely enhanced by a weakening of smallholder social networks. Our results highlight the need to assess smallholders’ access to land and resources, rather than merely the availability of resources, in order to better understand the impacts of commodity agricultural and properly target policy to reduce smallholder vulnerability.

Paper link: https://t.co/wezO1GFUdE
Versión española: https://t.co/z9zkFA1Joe
Photo Credit: Olivia del Giorgio