Fires detected in Paraguay farms linked to BMW and JLR leather supply

Paraguay is on fire.

President Mario Abdo Benitez declared a state of emergency on 1 October as fires raged across the country, including near the capital Asuncion. The government reported that 50,000 hectares (ha) of the Chaco region in the country’s north was destroyed. 

The presidential announcement came just a day after Earthsight published Grand Theft Chaco; a report detailing how massive legal and illegal deforestation of Chaco forests underpins Paraguay’s burgeoning cattle ranching sector.

The report focused on illegal deforestation in cattle ranches inside the forest reserve of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, the last uncontacted peoples in the Americas outside of the Amazon. Earthsight documented how hides from cattle grazed in the reserve (known as PNCAT) enter the leather supply chains of some of Europe’s leading luxury car firms, including BMW and Jaguar Land Rover.

On 3 October, Paraguay’s Volunteer Fire Department said they suspected 90 per cent of the blazes were lit intentionally for profit. Suspicions of arson were echoed by Paraguay’s Minister for the National Emergency Secretariat, Joaquín Roa, who has charged the office of the prosecutor to coordinate investigations into whether the fires were started intentionally. 

Burning crop residues after harvesting and torching dry grasslands to prompt new growth in cattle pasture is a common activity across Latin America. Paraguay is no exception. 

As news of the government’s investigation into possible arson in agribusiness areas broke, Earthsight checked to see if three ranches operating illegally in PNCAT and linked to BMW and Jaguar Land Rover suppliers were affected. 

Unsurprisingly, they were.

GFW shows nearly 200 further fire hotspots located within PNCAT since the end of September.

More than 150 of these, covering roughly a 30 square kilometre area, were recorded on 14, 15 and 16 October within the boundary of Caucasian SA, another of the ranching firms supplying facilities in BMW's leather supply chain.

These fires occurred within the part of Caucasian’s ranch which Earthsight’s report found had been cleared illegally after the February 2018 suspension of all land use change plans within PNCAT by Paraguay’s forestry institute, Infona.

Satellite images from 14 October show a billowing smoke trail stretching 80km south from the fire areas.

It seems unlikely that Caucasian could have legitimately obtained the necessary permission to carry out these October burns if the clearance itself was illegal, having occurred after Infona’s resolution unequivocally banning all clearance within PNCAT.

Though ranchers typically use fire either to burn the bulldozed remnants of forest or remove scrub regrowth in patches of forest developed for pasture, many of the hotspots in Caucasian’s property also appeared in forest areas outside of previously cleared land – indicating either the accidental or intentional use of fire beyond established pasture.

Imagery from 18 October shows the extensive burn scars associated with these fires, and that they spread into remaining forest in the property.

Perhaps Paraguay’s prosecutor’s office might now investigate whether the burning occurring in ranches in PNCAT linked to suppliers for the German automotive giant were legitimately authorised by local authorities as required under Law 4014. 

Although Caucasian may have been authorised to use fire in pasture management as required under Law 4014, the pastures in which it has used fire were created illegally in the first place, and the signs it lost control of the fires are clear. 

A further four fire hotspots were also detected on 9 October within the property registered to the Mennonite cooperative Chortitzer, located in PNCAT’s north-western corner, again within pastures cleared illegally after February 2018. Grand Theft Chaco uncovered how cow hides from Chortitzer, via its slaughterhouse business FrigoChorti, enter the leather supply chain of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) through the Paraguayan tannery giant Cencoprod. JLR has launched an investigation into its supply chain in response to Earthsight’s findings.

From 8 to 16 October, 89 percent of the PNCAT fire hotspots were in areas Earthsight found were illegally cleared in 2018 and 2019 by the ranches Caucasian and Chortitzer that Grand Theft Chaco revealed as supplying facilities in the leather supply chains of BMW and JLR.

Although the fires in Chortitzer appear to have spread into it from inadequately controlled burns detected on 8 October in its neighbouring ranch to the west, just outside of PNCAT, they appear symptomatic of how Paraguay’s law on fires and the widespread clearance of forest – both legal and illegal – is an environmental and governance catastrophe.