Paraguay has a total of 40.6mn hectares of land. But according to soil surveys, forecasters have projected that only one fifth of the area is suitable for normal agricultural production.
According to the 1981 census of agriculture, 7 percent of land devoted to crop production, 20 percent for forestry, 26 percent to livestock, and 47 percent for other purposes. These figures indicate the vast agricultural prospective that remained in Paraguay in late 1980. One of the most important trends in Paraguay agriculture was the increase in the percentage of cultivated land, which was only 2 percent in 1956. Livestock activity altered significantly in the course of the years 1970 and 1980, but has generally increased, passing over the land use of 22 percent reported in 1956. Better consumption of agricultural resources as a result of improved colonization, constructive cost movements for cash crops, mechanization and improvement of infrastructure connected with the product markets.
For agriculture, the country can be divided into three regions: the Chaco, the central region and eastern region. The semi-arid Chaco enclosed widespread grazing lands that support forty percent of the nation's livestock. Though the Chaco area covers sixty percent of the nation’s land mass, which contained only three percent of the populace, representing less than two percent of crop generation? With the exemption of the Mennonite colonies in the central Chaco, there was small agricultural bustle. A more appropriate for crops was the central area in the environs of Asunción, where conventional crop generation had conquered since peasants were pressed toward the capital at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance. But government strategies since the 1960s had preferred breaking smallholdings in the central area and the establishment of bigger, more competent farms in the fertile eastern border area, which is gifted with rich soils, varied and well dispersed yearly rainfall and millions of acres of hardwood forests. Together these areas cover about 16 million hectares, 40 percent of the country's land and approximately 98 percent of cropland in the country. Agricultural assessments in the east, the new approach to agriculture, have determined that thirty percent of the area is appropriate for exhaustive agriculture, forty percent for livestock, twenty percent for moderate agriculture or livestock use, and ten percent for forestry.
The country’s land use tainted quickly in 1970 and 1980, foreign investment, Brazilian and Paraguayan colonists, the construction of Itaipu, the cost of commodities, and new infrastructure have contributed to the incursion of the eastern dense. Rising prices of soya and cotton from the 1970's tainted the Paraguayan land more significantly than any other factor. In late 1980, soybeans and cotton accounted for more than 1.1mn hectares, or over forty percent of all cropland and has contributed more than 60 percent of exports. Though government strategies preferred export crops, the quick exploration of cash crops in large part a direct response that Paraguay's free-market economy led to increased international demand for these products.
