Project Overview
Paraguay is one of the leading producers of soybean and beef worldwide. These commodities represent 65 percent of the country's exports and 25 percent of its gross domestic product. Unfortunately, the increase in these commodities' production has been at the expense of forest and biodiversity loss, requiring more land areas. Soybean production has mainly driven deforestation in the Atlantic Forest of Alto Paraná, a biodiversity hotspot. Livestock activities are concentrated in the Chaco region, where deforestation rates have increased substantially to 255,000 hectares a year. Despite multiple existing legal and policy frameworks aimed at protecting forests and addressing these commodities-related activities' environmental impacts, commodity expansion motivated by favorable market conditions continues to drive deforestation, fragmentation, and forest/land degradation. The government of Paraguay seeks to improve and implement efficiency and environmental sustainability practices across the soybean and beef value chains.
Sites:
Mariscal Estigarribia, Filadelfia, Loma Plata, Fuerte Olimpo and Bahía Negra districts in the Chaco region, and San Juan Nepomuceno, Tavaí and Abaí districts in the BAAPA (Alto Paraná Atlantic Forest).
Commodities:
Beef, soy
Area Covered:
160,000 hectares
Executing Partner and GEF Implementing Agency:
United Nations Environment Programme
Project Features
Goals include creating an integrated landscape management system, gender-sensitive capacity building programs aimed at strengthening governance and technical knowledge.
Protocol for the effective operation of national multi-stakeholder dialogue platforms, including gender considerations for sustainable beef and soy supply chains building on Sustainable Beef/Soy Roundtables.
Some 40 percent of the project's total direct beneficiaries will be women.
The project will lead to the development of gender-sensitive capacity building programs on integrated landscape management systems aimed at technically strengthening public stakeholders at the national and local levels to design, implement and monitor integrated land use plans.
It will include designing and implementing an integrated information system for sustainable land use management.
Additionally it will involve Improvement of coordination between national and local government levels to implement sustainable beef and soy production policies and schemes.
Tree at Lake Capitan, Chaco, Paraguay. By Andrea Ferreira. Used under Creative Commons license.
