Environmental migrations or expulsions due to extractivism? an analysis in the Southern Lowlands, Argentina

Abstract

In recent decades, migration, and displacement due to environmental reasons have been studied without effectively explaining their causes. The ecoregion of the Bajos Submeridionales —the largest wetland in Argentina—, made up of the provinces of Santiago del Estero, Santa Fe and Chaco, has suffered environmental changes that deepen the cycles of droughts and floods and generate the mobility of peasants and indigenous people to the cities. This scenario, created by the expansion of the agro- industrial frontier, to the detriment of local needs, has transformed this territory and ways of life through a series of infrastructures and logics of appropriation and hoarding. Therefore, in this article we propose to analyze how population mobility is primarily caused by the expansion of the extractive frontier, which deepens socio-territorial transformations, and not by environmental or climatic reasons.