Paraguay – Chaco region  

The semi-arid Chaco region encompasses the entire western portion of Paraguay, covering 60 percent of this landlocked country’s land area. The vast lowland landscape is home to indigenous communities, producers and an abundance of wildlife, including the endangered jaguar and puma.  

To ensure that the growth of Paraguay’s beef production is conducted sustainably, with minimal impact to the Chaco region, UNDP, through the Good Growth Partnership has been working concurrently at national and landscape level since 2017, to intensify production in a sustainable manner, through good agriculture practices, protection of high-conservation value areas and respect for indigenous communities and their way of life.  

Within the Chaco, the Good Growth Partnership focused on three of the most vulnerable landscapes, including buffer zones and areas adjacent to the Defensores del Chaco National Park, as well as the productive landscape between the Rio Negro National Park and the Cerro Chovoreca Natural Monument. 

The key results achieved are:  

• Strengthened farmer extension services thanks to 1 subnational strategy adopted and based on the learnings from training up to 5,000 large, medium and small producers. 
• Improved land use planning trough the definition with stakeholders of a criteria to identify areas of environmental and social importance in the Chaco. This breakthrough approach allowed the identification of more than 7,000,000 hectares of high conservation value and/or high carbon stock areas in the Chaco.  

These results were complemented at national level by: 1) the facilitation of a national definition of sustainable beef; 2) a multistakeholder dialogue and action for sustainable beef through 1 national platform; 3) the formulation of 12 policy recommendations on sustainable beef production and improved land use planning policy; and 4) supporting the positioning of the Paraguayan beef in the international market thanks to 2 studies conducted to analyse the market and the development of 1 market strategy.   

Learn more about UNDP work through GGP webpage