Weaknesses of existing land use practices
There were two specific periods during the post-Conquest history of Chile when the soils of the "secano" were overexploited by large landholders to take advantage of temporary export markets for wheat. The first of these began in about 1687 when the Spaniards in Peru began importing cereals from Chile. Two centuries later, from 1848 until about 1890, the California Gold Rush created a huge and unfailing market for wheat, a commodity which central Chile was well-placed to supply (Aronson et al., 1999). The current state of exhaustion of secano soils in the VII and VIII Regions, where rainfed cereal culture is far more practical than further north, can be directly linked to the unrestrained, short-term exploitation of limited resources, in other words, the "mining" of topsoil and the destruction of natural woodland vegetation.
Another destabilizing factors affecting small scale farming and land management in the interior dryland is the spread of forestry plantation in the region. Most of these plantations benefited from a remarkable 75% subsidy provided under Government Decree No. 701. The above-mentioned subsidy was probably intended to encourage farmers to plant more trees but in fact it has been primarily exploited by large forestry companies that buy land from farmers for the purpose of tree planting. The long-term environmental and socio-economic impact of this rising tide of pines and eucalypts in the region appears to be enormous. Fortunately, one of the predicted risks, an increase in catastrophic fires, has thus far been avoided by the vigilance of the commercial forestry companies.
