The director of the Biodiversity Foundation, Ana Leiva, has travelled to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina to see in situ the progress of some international cooperation projects that the Foundation has helped to implement in the area.

The visit began at the “Los Lapachos” farm, located in Paraguay’s great soybean ‘patch’, a place where the original forest has been drastically deforested. In “Los Lapachos”, however, the Atlantic Forest of the Upper Paraná (BAAP) is being conserved and a project of the Biodiversity Foundation and Cytasa (Colonization and Agrarian Transformation SA), a public company of the TRAGSA group, which seeks to combine the protection of the forest with the survival and improvement of the quality of life of the peasant and indigenous population.

In this depressed rural environment, it is also intended to highlight the important role of women in rural development. The initiative seeks to start from an approach that, respecting the indigenous cosmogony and its cultural heritage, supports the search for territorial food security, through the generation of family gardens and the diversification of activities compatible with the conservation of the BAAP, among others.

The program of the visit includes the monitoring on the ground of two other sustainability initiatives, in this case, around the Iguazú National Park. One of them is part of a more ambitious project developed by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID): the Araucaria XXI Atlantic Forest Regional Project, which includes actions in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

This broad project ultimately aims to improve the quality of life of local populations, through the conservation of the natural and cultural heritage of the region, as well as its environmental goods and services, promoting the processes of integration of environmental management between the three countries.

The Biodiversity Foundation collaborates in these cross-border interventions, one of whose missions is to support the self-development of the Mbyá Guaraní indigenous culture, ancestrally linked to their environment, and, therefore, to strengthen educational processes, implementing environmental communication and interpretation strategies aimed at the population and local institutions.

On the other hand, and to contribute to the sustainable development of the Iguazú National Park, in Argentina, work is being done with local people settled in the buffer areas of the park and other provincial protected areas, also included in the scope of the Araucaria XXI Atlantic Forest Regional Project (financed by AECID).