MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Paraguay's Glasgow pledge “a mockery,” says British environmentalist website

The publication also called on EU and UK to pass their own laws “to halt deforestation embedded in their supply chains”

A leading British website dedicated to environmental issues has denounced Friday that Paraguay's allegiance to Glasgow's climate goals did not match President Mario Abdo's government policies regarding emissions and that the South American country intends to keep allowing deforestation.

According to www.earthsight.org.uk, “Paraguay’s climate pledges mask plans to green light rising deforestation until 2030.”

The website also labeled Paraguay as “one of the world’s worst countries for tropical deforestation” and insisted its change of heart at Glasgow was purely due to “public criticism.”

“Paraguay has persistently failed to stamp down on industrial clearance of the protected forests of an ‘uncontacted’ indigenous group for cattle ranching. Earthsight’s research has revealed how leather from cattle reared there has been making its way into luxury cars, including those made by BMW and Jaguar Land Rover,” the publication went on.

“Pledges by Paraguay to slash greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and support new initiatives to protect biodiversity ring hollow as its government looks willing to accept emissions from deforestation will continue to rise until at least 2030,” Earthsight insisted, because “Paraguay’s government is signalling to industry and the international community that it is acceptable for its already world-high deforestation rates to keep rising.” which “makes a mockery of its pledges to reduce climate emissions and protect biodiversity.”

Earthsight claims Paraguay’s forests are disappearing more rapidly than any other on earth and that in the last three decades, the country lost an area of forest larger than Switzerland. But all this is based on “some estimates” which were not disclosed. The website also denounced that Chaco forests belonging to the Ayoreo Totobiegosode indigenous people “were illegally cleared for cattle.”

The Ayoreo people have withdrawn from all negotiations with Abdo's administration despite the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights' mediation.

Earthsight linked the leather from the cattle bred in Paraguay to luxurious cars built in the northern hemisphere and called on markets such as the EU and UK to pass their own laws “to halt deforestation embedded in their supply chains” and regretted that the EU Commission’s legislative proposal to be published this month does not include leather in the list of commodities to be covered.

Paraguay was initially a signatory to the new Forest, Agriculture and Commodity Trade (Fact) dialogue which proposes to implement a roadmap to reduce commodity-driven deforestation among 28 major producing and consuming nations. Run by the UK and co-chaired with Indonesia, Fact will focus on transparency and traceability, trade and markets, smallholder farmers, and research and innovation. But Paraguay was surprisingly absent from the list of 28 signatories to the Fact roadmap of action unveiled this week.

The publication also regretted there were no indigenous representatives as part of Paraguay’s delegation at Glasgow, which did include three delegates from agribusiness lobby groups.