With legal frameworks already providing limits on land uses, and with globally negligible carbon emissions, it’s understandable that Paraguayan beef producers sometimes struggle to see why they should raise their sustainability standards – especially when that investment may not always be recognised with better returns from the international market. However these are the kinds of barriers and bottlenecks the GGP sets out to identify, in order to help Paraguayan producers improve their operating environment, in terms of local and global economics, socio-political agreement, and ecological stability. Through our Integrated Approach, we engage with supply systems as complete units, seeking out complexities like contradictory policy, market imbalances, or fiscal incentives. Change requires sensitivity, understanding, and the capacity to offer attractive, compelling, and workable alternatives to the status quo. Just like fomenting change in Brazilian soy, or Indonesian and Liberian palm oil incentives (or blocks) in legal frameworks, markets, finance, perception, and relationships need to be created to motivate change in beef production. Demonstrating to producers the benefits they can get by adopting more sustainable practices including higher productivity and increased resilience to climate events has been a central contribution of the GGP, changing the attitude of producers from a defensive to a constructive approach on sustainability issues.

To achieve this, we have been supporting policy and governance, as well as pioneering efforts to better understand the beef supply chain system, and working in advocacy, training, and support at the levels of production, demand, sustainability definitions, and finance. Despite outstanding work in the private sector, traditional approaches to addressing deforestation and sustainable agricultural practice have often neglected the need to develop effective land use governance and policy frameworks. The GGP has helped facilitate engagement between the private sector, government, and civil society, through multi-stakeholder platforms which build trust and a shared vision, despite multiple interests which frequently diverge.

One of these platforms, in the Paraguayan Chaco, developed a Beef Action Plan. Stakeholders are now working together to implement the plan, which includes actions to strengthen policy, as well as improving the producer support system for sustainable production, keeping in mind the diversity of producers present in the Chaco, from indigenous communities to large cooperatives. The GGP also helped provide the foundations to strengthen the enabling environment for sustainable beef production, by supporting the development of policy reform and improvement of existing regulations, so that they allow and incentivise better land use allocation and protect endemic Chaco biodiversity. Part of the GGP’s work here has also involved clarifying and defining which areas of production landscapes need to be protected, and how to create the frameworks to do so in a healthy, sustainable economic setting. To this end, we have been working with public and private stakeholders in Paraguay to define regional criteria to identify areas equivalent to High Conservation Value (HCV) and/or High Carbon Stock (HCS)[4], so that planned agricultural expansion can avoid important conservation areas. Some more information on concrete results can be found in this Impact Brief Overview and its interlinked Impact Briefs.

We have also piloted an exercise to map and better understand the Paraguayan beef supply chain. The process has helped to identify areas where deeper engagement and collaboration can have a high ripple effect, as well as issues that need to be better understood because they make change difficult. Two key variables in the system map were ‘attractiveness for investors to purchase land for agricultural production’ and ‘ability of government to change or enforce laws on sustainable production practices’. Both are integral to the perceived value of protecting forest, as opposed to converting it to other purposes. Effective, workable laws require a strong understanding not only of what needs to be protected, but also what needs to be produced, within a mutually supportive, ‘sustainable’ society. Understanding which legal or fiscal frameworks are promoting imbalance between economic, ecological, and social sustainability helps identify areas for improvement which benefit many stakeholders. For example, under current regulations in Paraguay, natural forest has no financial value – fiscal structures mean that cutting trees down is more profitable than protecting it. Knowing where to focus efforts and resources to change that is tremendously powerful, and the GGP’s Integrated Approach helps identify those intervention points.

[4] The High Conservation Value (HCV) and High Carbon Stock (HCS) Approaches aim to identify and protect areas important for conservation and livelihoods – and to support no deforestation commitments. The HCV Approach is a methodology to identify, manage, and monitor important environmental and social values in production landscapes – across any ecosystem or habitat type (including aquatic ecosystems, grasslands and other non-forest ecosystems). There are six categories of HCVs covering biodiversity, rare ecosystems, ecosystem services, landscapes, and livelihoods and cultural values. The HCS Approach is an integrated conservation land use planning tool to distinguish forest areas in the humid tropics for conservation from degraded lands that may be developed while ensuring the rights and livelihoods of local peoples are respected. There are four main classes of HCS forests which range from high to low density forests and young regenerating forests. Different areas within a landscape can be attributed with one or more HCVs, as applicable; there is also a high degree of overlap between HCS forests and the location of HCVs. More information here.