Yann le Polain

“Dream brokers” and the moral economy of frontier investments Agricultural frontiers continue to expand rapidly in multiple parts of the world, with massive social and ecological consequences. As awareness of the…

Angela Kronenburg García and I just published a new paper on the moral economy of frontier investments!

It explores the discursive work that goes into realizing the "dream" of new investment frontiers, based on interviews in the Gran Chaco and in Mozambique.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Systemic sexism in academia: an early-career viewpoint Over the past years, a theme has recurrently popped up in conversation among us (the present authors): Discussions over Zoom, at conferences, on bumpy road

Just published a piece in BioScience with @mariapiquerr.bsky.social, Gabriela Fontanarrosa, and Silvia Lomáscolo on what systemic sexism looks like for us as early career researchers.

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

🐄🐂 Putting landless cattle on the map! 🐄🐂
New paper in Env. Research Letters on mapping cattle intensification from space - across South America's dry diagonal doi.org/10.1088/1748... @erc.europa.eu @matthiasbaumann.bsky.social @pedrofernandez91.bsky.social #SystemShift @biogeoberlin.bsky.social

Putting land claiming on the map reveals that the footprint of agricultural frontiers extends far into seemingly ‘intact’ forests.
New paper by @o-delgiorgio.bsky.social in PNAS @pnas.org
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
@matthiasbaumann.bsky.social
@tkuemmerle.bsky.social
@yannlepolain.bsky.social

...but securing land tenure for those families that are still on the land but do not have titles and providing legal support to those currently facing investor claims on their land should be the absolute priority for any entity seeking to support the region’s Criollo population.

It is late to alter course, as most of the land in the Paraguayan Chaco has already been appropriated and converted by large-scale actors...

Today, those who are not driven out of livestock herding altogether are forced to fundamentally change their production systems to adapt to an increasingly scarce land base.

These responses are shaping the Chaco landscapes even where the land has not yet been converted to large-scale agriculture by investors. People used to rely on an extensive, forest-based livestock herding system for a living.

Faced with constant pressure on land from outside actors, Criollo smallholders are responding in a variety of ways, including some contestation and resistance but also forms of everyday cooperation, intensification of production, livelihood diversification, and relocation.

Paraguay is experiencing tremendous pressure on land. In the Pilcomayo River basin, in the borderlands of Paraguay with Argentina and Bolivia, small-scale Criollo livestock herders are being squeezed out of their traditional livelihoods by outside investors.

‘Who defends us?' Criollo livestock herders amidst commodity frontier expansion in the Paraguayan Chaco The expansion of large-scale cattle ranches and commercial crop farms into the Gran Chaco woodlands is displacing forest-based smallholders at an alarming rate. In this paper, I use the case of Cri...

In a new article in the Journal of Peasant Studies, I discuss how Criollo smallholders have dealt with large-scale land deals in the Paraguayan Chaco. The upshot: they are doing all they can, but in the face of immense power imbalances, that is often still not enough. See doi.org/10.1080/0306...

Now that so many people are on blue sky I want to rehype this amazing paper by Leonie Hodel, @yannlepolain.bsky.social, & myself. I really found this to be one of the most interesting papers I have participated in during the last years.

It is an outcome of @glp-earth.bsky.social OSM4!

Agricultural expansion in the Chaco leads to the marginalization of Indigenous peoples and other smallholders through limiting access to surface water --> doi.org/10.1016/j.ap... Paper led by Patrice Matthews & Yann le Polain de Waroux at McGill University with @biogeoberlin.bsky.social

Frontier Constellations: A History of Land-use Regimes in Paraguay’s Pilcomayo River Basin The Paraguayan Chaco is increasingly known for the extreme rates of forest loss caused by the rapid expansion of cattle ranching and crop farming over the last few decades. Knowledge of its twentie...

New paper out! In "Frontier constellations", I use the notion of land-use regimes to frame a discussion of long-term land-use transitions in the Paraguayan Chaco, based on oral histories and historical documents.
Check it out here! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its mitigation. However, appropriately consider…

Land-use typology for conservation in tropical dry woodlands published in Global Environmental Change 
By Marie Pratzer, @tkuemmerle.bsky.social, Patrick Meyfroidt, Natasha Ribeiro, Jayshree Ratnam, Mariana Rufino, Yann le Polain, Maria Vallejos and more! 

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How to be more nuanced about land use in conservation? We identify land systems, focused on actors, that represent key threats and conservation opportunities - across the tropical dry woodlands.