Sustainable agriculture in the gran chaco debated at AAPRESID’s 30th congress
Panel brings together the leaders of three projects now supported by the Land Innovation Fund in the Gran Chaco biome.
On Wednesday, August 10, a panel discussion on "Innovation and alliances for sustainable agriculture" was held at the 30th "open field" Congress of Aapresid (the Argentine No-Till Farmers' Association). The yearly gathering of leaders and experts on Argentine agriculture was back to its face-to-face format in the city of Rosario, Santa Fé, with thousands of participants debating recent trends in innovation and technology. The panel focused on the three projects from the Land Innovation Fund's second round of funding for projects in the Gran Chaco biome, all aimed at fostering innovation to transform the soy supply chain, with a focus on farms and farmers.
The director of the Land Innovation Fund, Carlos E. Quintela, spoke at the meeting, along with the leaders of initiatives now underway in the region: Sebastián Malizia, from the Fundación ProYungas, Gustavo Idígoras, from CIARA-CEC, and Federico Fritz, from AACREA. In each of their presentations, they highlighted the importance of working with farmers through a systemic outlook on production, to ensure good management and respect for conservation measures, care for the soil and protection of biodiversity.
Carlos E. Quintela presented the Fund's objectives in the region and the relevance of initiatives and partners to provide a setting for innovation in sustainable agriculture. The Gran Chaco is one of Latin America’s largest forest regions, where expanding agricultural frontiers threaten the conservation of native vegetation and undermine the carbon balance, with negative environmental and economic impacts for the region and the entire world. In this context, in its second round of funding projects, the Fund selected seven innovative projects that promote a sustainable soy supply chain, deforestation-free, with no conversion of native vegetation, three of which are led by Argentine institutions.
The Executive Director of the ProYungas Foundation, Sebastián Malizia, presented the guidelines of the project entitled "From theory to practice: good agricultural practices and carbon sequestration to improve conservation and restoration in the Gran Chaco", carried out jointly with Aapresid and the Moisés Bertoni Foundation. The project combines two successful approaches to working with farmers: "Protected Productive Landscapes", a management model promoted by ProYungas and coordinated by the Moisés Bertoni Foundation in Paraguay, and Aapresid's Chacras System methodology. In Malizia's words, "the executing institutions have joined forces to promote the adoption of best agricultural practices and the conservation and restoration of native vegetation on soy farms in the Gran Chaco. This is how we help mitigate climate change, obtain value from standing forests, and generate new business opportunities in line with growing international demands for sustainable, deforestation-free agriculture."
The next speaker, Gustavo Idigoras, president of the CIARA-CEC, gave the background on the VISEC, the Gran Chaco Monitoring Platform, a joint public and private system to curb deforestation in the biome's priority conservation areas. Launched in 2019 and promoted by The Nature Conservancy, CIARA/CEC, Peterson Consultancy and Tropical Forest Alliance, the platform is funded by the Land Innovation Fund for further development until 2025. Its goal is to integrate diverse players in the soy value chain, from the point of origin and processing to marketing, to "promote collective actions for the local and global recognition of Argentine soy as a sustainable product, the fruit of a competitive, socially and environmentally responsible, transparent and economically viable value chain," in the words of the president of CIARA-CEC.
The final speaker, Federico Fritz, a member of AACREA's Research and Development team, presented the initiative "Tools for environmental and productive sustainability on soy farms in Argentina's Chaco systems", carried out by AACREA and ACSOJA. The project's main objective is to define and evaluate agricultural production systems in Argentina’s Gran Chaco, including soy crops, with a focus on socio-environmental performance, by sharing knowledge and information among farmers. With a three-stage implementation schedule from 2022 to 2024, the initiative will first identify production models in the region, followed by an awareness-building period on the outcome, the tools and the solutions needed to improve the performance of soy crops and environmental conservation, and concluding with an evaluation exercise.
To conclude, during a exchange with the audience, major concerns of the agricultural sector in the Gran Chaco region were raised, and how these projects aim to address them, considering production and conservation as allies and the importance of telling the world how the region's grain is being produced in a sustainable manner.
As the panel adjourned, moderator Alejandro O'Donnell, Aapresid's International Program Director, pointed out that the growth of production needed to meet global food demand will come from innovation and technological solutions, which lie at the core of each of the projects presented in the panel.
Second Round Projects | Gran Chaco:
The three projects selected for implementation in Argentina are in addition to four other initiatives chosen from 47 proposals received by the Land Innovation Fund's second round of funding for South America.
ENVIRONMENTAL AND PRODUCTIVE SUSTAINABILITY IN THE CHACO: This project by the Argentine Association of Regional Agricultural Experimentation Consortia (CREA) aims to create innovative and sustainable agricultural production models for the Gran Chaco region, in partnership with the Argentine Soy Supply Chain Association (ACSOJA). The initiative, with at least 100 farmers working on about 250,000 hectares of the biome in Argentina, aims to establish and validate agricultural ecological intensification models to maintain or increase farmer incomes, reduce crop losses, conserve natural areas within farms, restore degraded soils and environments, and apply environmental indicators, especially soil carbon and biodiversity.
VISEC MONITORING PLATFORM IN THE GRAND CHACO: This proposal by the Argentine Vegetable Oil Industry Chamber (CIARA), in partnership with Peterson-Control Union (PCU) and the Rosario Board of Trade, will establish an innovative traceability and monitoring platform to assess environmental, social, and economic impacts of soy and other commodities grown in priority areas of Argentina, starting with the Gran Chaco. The VISEC platform is a single system to monitor and verify Argentina’s entire soy production, consolidating all the sustainability parameters and requirements relevant to the marketing of soybeans. The initiative entails the contributions and participation of many different stakeholders, from growers to exporters and NGOs, and aims to generate transparent, reliable, and publicly accessible data, to help grow and market essential goods in an environmentally sustainable way, especially soy and its by-products.
BEST AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES AND CARBON SEQUESTRATION: The ProYungas Foundation, in partnership with the Argentine Association of No-till Farmers (AAPRESID) and the Moisés Bertoni Foundation, will support the adoption of best agricultural practices and stimulate the conservation and restoration of native vegetation on soy farms in the Gran Chaco biome, to help mitigate climate change and enhance the value of standing forests. The project will be carried out on five pilot soy farms in Argentina and Paraguay, covering at least 50,000 hectares. It will quantify the carbon emissions of the production activity; evaluate the carbon stock of the native vegetation; classify the farms by category (whether carbon emitters, carbon neutral, or carbon sinks); develop an internationally accredited carbon offset project for the native vegetation area; and develop an online information platform to ensure project transparency.