Cambodia and Paraguay: two cases of change in forest cover, 2000-2016

These two examples of deforestation, in Paraguay and Cambodia, emerged from analyses carried out by the University of Maryland using Landsat satellite images from 2000 and 2016. The dry forest of the Paraguayan Chaco in the country’s very sparsely populated west (0.5 inhabitants per km2) has the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Local actors, both Brazilian and international (the Moon sect and multinational American firms Cargill and Bunge), are developing soy farming (GMO + glyphosate) for the world market, as well as cattle breeding on farms of between 10,000 and 400,000 hectares (mauve rectangles on the map). Cambodia, a country with 75% of forest cover in 1990, had lost 25% of its forest by 2015; illegal logging, which is tolerated with police complicity, feeds a very lucrative traffic in tropical timber to Vietnam and China, which is doubled by public policies giving forestry concessions to large national and international groups to develop rubber production (50 to 100-km mauve patches in the Eastern part).