By: Alejandro D. Brown, ProYungas Foundation
The traffic light of the Northern Region, an essential tool for managing urban vehicular chaos, is a symbol of progress in many towns in the interior of Argentina. Its colors provide clear guidelines of what we must do, at least that is the theory. It is also used to define actions and restrictions in other human activities such as the Forest Law of our country.
Clearly, this law was designed from the action of bulldozers that enable agro-livestock lands, at the expense of forest areas. Red, stop!; Yellow, reduce speed and see what you must do; and Green, proceed without major issues (don’t forget the environmental impact study!!).
The Northern Region of Argentina represents 30% of our territory, where 20% of Argentinians live, and its relative socio-environmental and productive situation can also be exemplified with the logic of the traffic light.
Social issues are undoubtedly in Red, all social indicators are worse than the country’s average and it houses cities with the highest proportion of homeless people in the country. Poverty, access to health, clean water, education, electricity, natural gas, formal employment, everything is worse compared to the country’s average (which is already quite poor). 75% of Argentina’s indigenous communities are also in the Northern Region as a clear symbol of the indigence, poverty, and neglect in which more than 1 million Argentinians find themselves.
On the other end of the vehicular rainbow, it’s in Green, because the biodiversity (over 80%), the wetlands (over 50%), the rivers (over 60%), the eco-regions (10 out of 15) are in the Northern Region, I repeat, in 30% of our territory.
In the middle, Yellow indicates transition, the color that signals the authorization to proceed or stop, the color that points, in my opinion, to production, to human action that, using natural resources, can get us out of stagnation, poverty, unemployment, allowing the much talked-about foreign exchange and investments to come to us. A Yellow that in the Northern Region sometimes languishes and sometimes becomes bright, luminous.
It’s because in the Northern Region 100% of sugar, cotton, beans, grapes, yerba mate, and tea are produced. Also, 80% of citrus fruits, 70% of forest plantations, 40% of rice, 20% of meat, 10% of soybeans, and 100% of lithium. But all this together represents only 8% of Argentina’s exports. However, there is still room for production and for more conservation of nature’s goods and services.
Undoubtedly, the key lies in how we manage the Green, to guarantee the sustainability of our territorial actions and how the growth of Yellow allows us to reduce the Red that shines today with an intensity that dazzles and challenges us.
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