“FEATURE-The other Amazon: Soybeans drive loss of S. America's second-largest forest”, 05 July 2021

…[I]t is the Gran Chaco, the continent’s second-largest forest, where environmentalists say massive tree loss is being overlooked as the world focuses on the more famous “lungs of the planet”...[T]he forest is being devastated by logging and expanding soybean farming, green groups say, as they call for stronger enforcement of Argentina’s forest law. “The violation of the law implies more climate change, more floods, more diseases, evictions of ... indigenous people and loss of biodiversity,” Hernán Giardini, a forest campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone...The group told Argentina’s supreme court there is evidence of “systemic violation” of the country’s forest law, which restricts tree clearing to only specific parts of the forest...The Greenpeace complaint says that even after a judge suspended logging in jaguar habitats in November 2020, more than 7,800 hectares (19,300 acres) of those forests disappeared between then and April 2021...The communities practice traditional land tenure, without property titles, leaving them vulnerable to forced eviction by land-hungry cattle farmers and soybean producers, Liberatti said in an interview. Ten years ago there were 450 families from various indigenous communities living near Villa Bermejito, he said - but today, there are fewer than 100 families left...The government’s National Forest Directorate did not respond to several requests for comment...