Every year, in the heart of South America, chained bulldozers knock down and flatten hundreds of hectares of forest a day. Those felled trees become charcoal and tannin, an extract used to tan leather. On the bare soil left behind, farmers plant soybeans or raise cattle. Much of what's produced travels to the European Union, Asia and North America. Consumers there are increasingly aware of the environmental damage that can hide behind what they buy, and their governments are trying to set rules so these products don't come bundled with deforestation. Our question was simple: do those rules actually work?
To get closer to an answer, for more than ten years we have been studying why forests are lost and degraded in the dry Chaco, one of the largest dry forests in the world. Knowing where and how much forest disappears is fairly easy today, thanks to satellites. The hard part is understanding who authorizes that loss, and why. So every year we drive hundreds of kilometers of dirt roads through the Impenetrable, in the Argentine Chaco. We visit fincas -properties spanning thousands of hectares, controlled by large companies- and puestos -the homes of peasant families who often live on land whose ownership is disputed. There, we talk with producers and residents, and start building hypotheses about what's really going on.
Because this problem links different scales -local, provincial, national and international- looking at the ground alone was never going to be enough. In parallel, we closely tracked the policies being designed far from the Chaco. We interviewed key people at public and private initiatives working to keep deforestation out of supply chains -the journey a product takes from the field to the supermarket shelf. That's how we found a critical fact: almost all of these initiatives rely on the same criterion to decide whether a product is "clean": the one the provincial authority itself uses to determine which forest clearing is legal. That raised an unsettling question: if that provincial criterion has flaws, does the entire control chain collapse with it?
To find out, we needed to dig into the exact middle ground: the political and economic decisions made at the provincial level, between what happens on the ground and what gets decided in Brussels or Beijing. That's where we ran into the biggest obstacle of the whole investigation. For years, it was practically impossible to access the official records that distinguish legal clearing from illegal clearing. Together with environmental activist groups, we filed public information requests with the government of Chaco province, again and again: we wanted to know who received permits to use the forest, over what areas, on which properties, and how much wood they were authorized to extract. Only in 2024, under pressure from a federal criminal case, did the provincial authority finally hand over these records -records a public official once described as the province's "best-kept secret."
With that information, we thought we could finally finish the puzzle. If we cross-referenced the forest-use permits with the guides that authorize transporting the wood, we could trace every log from the property where it was cut to its final destination: a sawmill, a charcoal plant, or a tannin factory. But the Chaco's best-kept secret wasn't handed over so easily. Unlike some Brazilian states, where permits and transport guides are linked within a single public system, the province gave us two separate databases, in PDF format: one with 15,042 permits and another with 127,362 transport guides. They shared no common field that would let us link them automatically. We had to draw on our own knowledge of how the provincial forestry administration actually works, along with plenty of ingenuity and patience, to manually match a substantial share of those permits with their corresponding guides.
That painstaking work confirmed what we had suspected for a long time, based on conversations with producers and peasant families across the Impenetrable, interviews with people involved in international supply-chain initiatives, and years spent monitoring how forest laws are implemented at the national and provincial levels. The official data, once carefully analyzed, finally let us describe in precise detail the concrete mechanisms that explain why deforestation keeps advancing in the Chaco, even under the watch of increasingly strict international policies.
This story shows something we think matters to any reader, no matter where they live: understanding complex environmental problems like this one takes more than satellite images or well-written laws on paper. It takes combining disciplines -ecology, political science, economics- with environmental activism sustained over time. In countries like Argentina, where accessing public information can take years of persistence, that combination isn't an academic luxury. It's the only way to know, with certainty, what is really happening to the forests that all of us, one way or another, end up consuming.