4 of deforestation activities allowed, although the law proved ineffective over the first decade. The Forest Law should receive 0.3% of the national budget annually, but, as of 2020, conservation efforts receive less than 5% of this amount, and deforestation continued in areas where it was prohibited by law (Ocaña, 2020). The government is hesitant to enforce the law because funding the law implies acting against the business sector. Additionally, penalties are not strong enough to dissuade violators. Deforestation in Argentina is significant as livestock and the transforming of forests to arable land are responsible for more than half of the greenhouse gases that Argentina emits, and deforestation threatens to dramatically reduce biodiversity (Larmer, 2019). Researchers, NGOs, and civil society are collectively concerned about the future effectiveness that the Forest Law will have on lessening deforestation. Studies on the impact of the Forest Law show that it was effective in reducing deforestation overall since the nationwide deforestation rates decreased. Nevertheless, deforestation continued in areas both where it was forbidden and where it was permitted (Camba Sans et al., 2018). Several grassrootsorganizationshavebeen created by those impacted by land grabbing to fight for their rights. There are some laws at the national level that were enacted to protect the indigenous people and to prevent eviction from land, but the legislation proved unsuccessful in combating land grabbing (Busscher et al., 2018). One organization, Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero–Vía Campesina (MOCASE), has been working over the past decade to resolve an increasing level of disputes with agribusinesses that have deforested Santiago del Estero, a province in northern Argentina, and evicted peasant families in order to expand soybean production (Lapegna, 2013). MOCASE has the goal of moderating agribusiness corporations that attempt to expand their soybean production by evicting the peasant families that occupy the land, and MOCASE has been highly successful in achieving this goal for the past two decades. The Argentine economy is heavily reliant on support from foreign investors, so the government often puts international business interests ahead of the rights and needs of some of its own people, undermining the efforts of these grassroots organizations. The current economic impacts of these grassroots organizations are not individually significant, but they collectively represent an important trend within the country. These organizations collectively are increasing the levels of social and political awareness in the country, and that heightened consciousness will help garner support for reforms, similar to how one million petition signatures helped to create the Forest Law. Consequences of the Soybean Industry Decreasing Smallholder Farm Area As the global population and the need for food increase, the expansion of the soybean market in Argentina has become increasingly driven by the international market and tends to ignore the concerns of some segments of society to promote a better economy. One of the consequences of the increased demand for arable land is land grabbing, which entails “the capturing of control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms and forms involving large-scale capital that often shifts resource use to that of extraction, whether for international or domestic purposes” (Borras Jr et al., 2012). Social repercussions of land grabbing include indigenous people and peasants losing their land because of the “accumulation of dispossession,” which involves the “appropriation of land, generally by private actors, for commodity production in regions where local communities have precarious land tenure” (Camba Sans et al., 2018). This phenomenon occurs when land use shifts from being focused on family farming to the more centrally leveraged, multinational agribusinesses, resulting in the smallholders losing their land. The smallholders can be forced to leave their land in two manners: direct, meaning violent evictions; or indirect, which involves the people voluntarily leaving due to an adverse condition being introduced, for instance, when farmers’ crops close to genetically modified crops are exposed to harmful chemicals used on the genetically modified crops.
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