Marcos Glauser (Paraguay) holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. Since 2008 he conducts research and has published articles and books on food and territorial management of indigenous and peasant communities as well as social and environmental impacts of mining, land grabbing and the large-scale soy production in Paraguay. He is a board member of three Paraguayan NGOs that ensure the human rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples.
For his recent Ph.D dissertation, he focused on the responses of the Angaite indigenous people to environmental changes during the last 20 years (2005-2015). The Gran Chaco, in general, and the Paraguayan Chaco, in particular, experienced incredibly high deforestation rates over the past two decades. In fact, the deforestation dynamics in the Chaco woodlands of Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia from the year 2000 to 2012 represented one of the highest rates of tropical forest loss worldwide. The soy boom experienced in the Eastern region of Paraguay in the last decades indirectly impacted the Chaco area because the cattle ranches from the first relocated to the latter.