Of the 12 million hectares (46,000 square miles) of native forest that Argentina’s Córdoba province possessed at the outset of the 20th Century, just two million remained by 2009, and only 600,000 of that was in a good state of conservation. So said an appraisal issued that year by the Native Forest Land Management Commission, a panel created by the province’s Environment Ministry to propose native-forest-protection legislation. The commission’s 2009 report estimated that deforestation over the three previous decades, carried out mainly in conjunction with farm-sector expansion, proceeded at a 6% annual clip—“one of the highest [rates] in the world,” the panel said. The next year, Córdoba provincial lawmakers prohibited conversion of the surviving two million hectares of woodlands, designating them... [Log in to read more]