We create bonds with the communities near our operations, promoting local development and ensuring that their residents sustainably improve their quality of life.
We commit to maintaining and protecting the natural ecosystems of our heritage by developing procedures and best practices to eliminate or mitigate negative environmental impacts.
Various instances where we showcase our internal team, our forestry operations, and our sustainable management system, and we also present the results of our monitoring efforts.
We contribute to developing knowledge through workshops focused on organic food production, environmental management, waste management, entrepreneurship, tourism, and more. We are also an important source of quality employment.
Not only do we preserve important cultural values such as the Jesuit heritage remnants within our properties, but we also organize talks and workshops to highlight them for local communities.
We continuously monitor the impacts of our management, both negative and positive.
We generate genuine local employment directly through our service companies and indirectly through local input suppliers.
We contribute to generating economic dynamism in the communities within our reach, based on the multiplier effect of forestry activity and the development of local suppliers.
We maintain a local employment policy, promoting the hiring of local labor among our service companies. This policy has allowed us to increase the percentage of local labor year after year, currently being 75%.
We operate within the national labor legal framework and also adhere to international agreements such as those of the ILO (International Labour Organization). We require and monitor conditions of formal employment, with freely negotiated contracts between the parties, fair wages, and provident payments.
Through our Hygiene and Safety Plan we identify the risks of our operations and define actions to mitigate or eliminate them. We monitor compliance with current legal regulations in the field of occupational safety and generate training and ongoing training opportunities.
We provide high-standard housing conditions to our service companies, in terms of food, hygiene and complementary amenities for the permanence of our collaborators in the field, when activities require it.
A training and education program is periodically updated and is the guarantee to maintain the quality standards and continuous improvement that the company sets for itself. It includes environmental, social, operational and hygiene and safety aspects.
Our training program focuses on the continuous improvement of the technical skills of our direct and indirect collaborators, from a comprehensive vision of professional development.
We adhere to the labor skills certification program provided through the Argentine Forestry Association and the Ministry of Labor, training and motivating operators to undergo skills evaluations to prioritize their work through a certificate that accredits it.
FORESTAL ARGENTINA sells wood placed on trucks, with the clients being responsible for transporting it to their industrial centers. For this reason, it has a Forestry Operations Center that coordinates logistics and information to and from clients. From there, production information, transportation flows, operating schedules and monitoring of possible impacts on the community are managed.
The use of public roads through which we transport the wood we generate represents a point of common interest with local communities, we generate awareness-raising instances with our clients' logistics providers regarding the speed and responsibility of circulation, we prohibit circulation in rainy days and we mitigate the effect of dust in dry times and we invest in its maintenance permanently.
Forest fires represent a point of interest and concern in common with local communities and neighbors. That is why our fire management plan includes coordination processes focused on prevention.
We have a fire prevention and combat plan, we maintain internal brigades made up of operators from our service companies permanently trained in fire fighting who annually combat outbreaks within the company's assets and neighbors.
Our resources include early detection towers, operation centers that centralize and coordinate operations on the ground, combat equipment appropriate to the scale of our operations, an efficient communication system and emergency response procedures. We carry out communications and awareness workshops regarding fire prevention. The company has provided and makes air runways and firefighting personnel available to the province when required.
The responsibility of our management is focused on environmental protection, involving a commitment to comply with the regulatory framework, the implementation of conservation practices, and/or improvements to the natural resources we operate with.
Conduct periodic monitoring to ensure the conservation status of biodiversity, water, and soil.
These are used in forestry operations for the functioning of forest equipment and machinery. Responsible management is conducted in accordance with regulatory frameworks in the handling and storage processes in the field.
The agrochemicals used by the company are low impact, permitted by official control agencies and by FSC®. They are exclusively aimed at controlling weeds and ants during the first 2 years of the plantations' age, after which no chemicals are used during the remaining 16 to 20 years of growth.
Applications are carried out by trained operators, and their safety is monitored through supervision and audits that control the use of necessary personal protective equipment during operations. We have internal regulations that govern the handling of chemicals, constantly ensuring that no contamination occurs.
The environmental risks of using these products are identified and analyzed through socio-environmental impact assessments, from which mitigation and risk elimination measures are defined. Buffer zones or no-application areas for agrochemicals are implemented from planting areas to conservation areas.
We have procedures for the responsible management and disposal of the different types of waste generated during forestry operations, ensuring that no environmental impacts are associated with these processes.
The separation of organic and inorganic waste is promoted, and differentiated management is conducted for their final disposal.
Wildfires represent a point of common interest and concern with local and neighboring communities. Fire prevention involves not only an effort to protect our forest assets, our natural conservation areas, and the biodiversity they contain but also a contribution to preventing local-scale fires beyond our properties.
Therefore, our Fire Management Plan includes coordination and collaboration processes with various stakeholders focused on prevention, as well as having the infrastructure and resources for this purpose.
We have a prevention plan that involves raising awareness about the risks of fires both within the internal and external community, constructing and maintaining firebreaks, and investing in infrastructure such as airstrips and firefighting equipment.
The biggest challenge in fire prevention is early detection and rapid response in the initial stages of fire development. To address this, we have detection systems using towers, cameras, and detection systems, while maintaining ongoing contact with local stakeholders for joint action in cases of need. Quick and effective combat actions involve controlling hotspots within the company’s assets and neighboring properties.
All these efforts and resources are fully available to assist in combating fires in neighboring properties, in other companies, or through agreements with local authorities.
