Busy, Busy Mennonites; 10% Of Paraguay's Primary Dry Forest Cleared By Farmers In 4 Years - Guardian

[hatrack]

Hitler was said to have fled there, the Spanish conquistadores failed to penetrate it, and the only uncontacted tribe outside Amazonia lives within its borders. But now the vast Paraguayan wilderness of thorn trees, jaguars and snakes known as the Chaco is being transformed by a Christian fundamentalist sect and hundreds of Brazilian ranchers.

Worldwide food shortages and rock-bottom land prices in Paraguay have made the Chaco the last agricultural frontier. Great swaths of the virgin thorn forest once dubbed Latin America's "green hell", are being turned into prairie-style grasslands to rear meat for Europe and grow biofuel crops for cars.

Recent satellite imagery confirmed that about one million hectares, or nearly 10%, of the virgin, dry forest in northern Paraguay has been cleared in just four years by ranchers using fire, chains and bulldozers to open up land. By comparison, Brazil claims to have nearly halted its deforestation of the Amazon. Landowners in the Chaco, the second-largest South American forest outside the Amazon, must by law leave trees on 25% of their land but the region's remoteness and the government's lack of resources for monitoring or prosecuting law-breakers has encouraged rampant, illegal felling of the dense, slow-growing forest.

EDIT

"We intend to expand in the Chaco as much as the law allows. Not just physically but by making the land more productive," said Heinrich Dyck, finance director of the Neuland co-operative of Mennonite farmers based in Filadelfia, the largest Mennonite community, of 4,000 people. The co-operative is one of Paraguay's largest meat and milk exporters and owns the country's biggest slaughterhouse. Dyck added: "Religion is at the heart of everything we do. The Christian faith is fundamental to us. God made it clear in the bible that we should take care of the land and use it as a source of sustainability and production.".

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/05/chaco-paraguay-deforestation

See? It's OK, cuz Gaw-duh told them they could.

[Octafish]

1. Paraguay's where Rev Moon built his redoubt to ride out the End Days.

He invited his closest friends and supporters to be neighbors.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3183814

[bananas]

3. Don't forget Ken Lay

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x186861

[ocd liberal]

2. BFEE is set up in Paraguay too, right?

Didn't Bush Sr. & Jr. purchase tons of acreage in Paraguay so they can control the world's water someday?

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Fundamentalist Mennonites?

Most of the Mennonites I know are political Progressives and pacifists. And living in Pennsylvania, I know plenty.

This is a disturbing development on more than one level.

--d!