Untouched wilderness being wiped out to make way for foreign beef

It's now the centre of a huge land grab and the indigenous people are suffering the most.

"We came out of the forest when I was seven, I'm now 46. An Indian sent by a Christian priest came to the forest one day to bring us out," says Carlos Etacore, an indigenous leader, next to a cluster of tin-roofed wooden shacks that form his community.

"He told us that in the city where whites lived there was lots of water, food and medicines. He promised many things but they were all lies. Three years later my mother died of measles."

This is the tiny village of Ijnapui in the heart of the Paraguayan Chaco, a small island of forest hemmed in between massive cattle ranches - one of only three communities of Ayoreo people who have returned to what remains of their ancentral lands. Some 200 people arrived here five years ago from miserable townships that have sprung up mainly around white Mennonite Christian colonies, in the region where most people are unemployed and child malnutrition is rife.

They scrape a living by producing charcoal from burning trees, which is sold for $1 a kilogram, while the women make small bags and bracelets which they try, mostly in vain, to sell.

"This is the only remaining bit of forest. Everything around us has been wiped out. They're clearing the forest right now," adds Mr Etacore in a resigned voice.

British naturalist Sir David Attenborough has described this forest of thorn scrub, so violently hot and inhospitable that not even the Spanish Conquistadors were able to penetrate, as "one of the last great wilderness areas left in the world".

But a 21st century land rush has cleared a million hectares - or nearly 10 per cent - in just four years, according to satellite imagery. These modern settlers include Brazilian ranchers crossing the border and European private investors mainly from France, Germany and the Netherlands. They burn and bulldoze the scrub to turn it into prairie-style grasslands to raise cattle for Europe, attracted by sky-high meat prices and land being a tenth of the price of that in neighbouring countries.

"In Paraguay our forest law is very obsolete and dates back to the 1970s, permitting up to 75 per cent of a plot of land to be deforested and the legal system is very weak," says Elias Pea, a prominent Paraguayan scientist, who warns that at this rate most of this forest will disappear within 20 years.

"This allows a landowner to deforest, for instance, three-quarters of a 100,000-hectare plot. He then sells the remaining 25,000 hectares to someone else who can then deforest another 75 per cent."

Local authorities admit that a land rush is taking place, but consider it key to the economic development of the region. Walter Stockl, the governor of Boqueron, the largest Paraguayan province in the Chaco, accuses foreign NGOs of exaggerating the problem to undermine Paraguayan beef exports.

But a senior government official told The Scotsman that deforestation was out control despite greater compliance with environmental laws in the past two years. Regulations, the official said, are inadequate and need to be urgently changed.

Even local farmers are concerned. Heinrich Dueck, 58, is a Mennonite Christian farmer whose family arrived with the initial wave of Mennonites in the 1920s. The land rush took him by surprise, prompting him to buy 2,100 hectares more of land for fear that in the future he will not be able to afford to expand.

He said: "Four years ago I paid $70 per hectare for my new plot, 15 years ago I would have paid $20, now you could get $200 a hectare and some are even pay $500 - I think prices will keep going up."