TRI Fellows Research Projects, 2005

South America

 Imelda Bacudo

A review of options for conservation finance: the case studies of the Peruvian environmental conservation fund, PROFONANPE and the Caribbean Fund, MARFUND

My research involved the investigation of two conservation trust funds in Latin America--PROFONANPE in Peru, and the MesoAmerican Reef Fund (MARFUND) headquartered in Guatemala. Having been involved in finding ways to support costs of conservation in her work experience in the Philippines, I decided to find innovative models that respond to the problem of financing conservation. These two conservation trust funds, which are a member of the association of conservation trust funds in Latin America and the Caribbean (REDLAC), provided me with some answers in financing national parks and locally managed marine areas.

While in Peru and Guatemala, I worked with the organizations, assisting them with what they urgently needed, while answering my own research questions. For PROFONANPE, I worked with the Ministry of Agriculture's Protected Areas Department and The Nature Conservancy on working out a report on financial gap planning analysis. This particular team tried to produce a financial forecasting instrument to better gauge the costs of national parks. In Guatemala, I initiated two projects with MARFUND which involved negotiating with international commercial cruises to convince them to give support to local coastal resource projects.

The results of my research and direct involvement with the two trust funds will lead to an analysis of the effectiveness of conservation finance mechanisms in Latin America.

 Janette Bulkan

Tracking logs, not loggers in Guiana Shield forests: technological failures in frontier forests

My research in the summer of 1995 focused on trying to understand the log tracking systems that are used by the forestry regulatory agencies in Guyana and Suriname to monitor the provenance of logs, in order to ascertain legality and determine royalty payments due to the State. My preliminary findings suggest that it is futile to track logs while ignoring social dynamics in the Guiana Shield forests of Guyana and Suriname.

Forest Wardens checking logs against a cutting register in a forest concession, Suriname. July 2005

I also began to trace the increasing domination of forests in both countries by Asian timber companies, primarily Malaysian and Chinese, both through direct exploitation of concessions and through covert subsidiaries and sub-contracting practices, resulting in widespread pillaging of commercial timbers from State production forests and from indigenous (Amerindian and Maroon), customary and titled lands through co-optation of village leaders.

I have also started to analyze the role and responses of multilateral and bilateral support projects to the forestry commissions in both countries, exploring the reasons behind the continuing privileging of technological solutions to forestry administration in the face of the evidence of systemic failures, as manifested in an increase in illegal logging, corruption, and continuing forest degradation. I use a political ecology framework in my analysis of the possible explanations for continuing reliance on technological solutions in a social landscape still characterized by top-down approaches to renewable natural resources administration in the post-colonial period.

I also am investigating the global system to which local forestry practices are linked - characterized by a strong Asian demand for tropical logs, the failures of forest certification, and inappropriate approaches to sustainable forestry in the Guiana Shield.

 Oscar Franco

Opportunities in the Land of Conflict: Peasants, Mining and Changing Attitudes towards Conservation in Northern Peru

Huancabamba mountain range, in the northern Peruvian Andes, near the Ecuadorian border.

The remote Huancabamba mountain range, in the northern Peruvian Andes near the Ecuadorian border, is marked by the double feature that characterizes the most moving conservation dramas: it is priceless and is on the verge of destruction. Priceless: it is a key piece in a corridor that connects protected areas at both sides of the border, it is covered by vast expansions of some of the least disturbed paramos (highland grasslands), and holds a population of the extremely endangered mountain tapir (Tapirus pinchaque). Signs of impending destruction: in addition to the never-ending clearing of forest for pasture and crops by peasants, a huge mining operation, still in its exploration phase, looms on the horizon.

But this story has a relatively new element — although an increasingly more common one, as suggested by other TRI fellows’ research in Latin America — an element that radically changes all possible future outcomes: a campesino uprising against the prospective mine. This summer, while doing my field research on the conservation of the mountain range, hundreds of ronderos (peasants organized in rondas) attacked the mining camp — the most important demonstration against mining by Peruvian peasant communities in modern history.

The conflict between the company and the peasants is still far from reaching a definitive conclusion. However, the conservation and sustainable development arguments that filled the revolt leaders’ discourse clearly showed that new opportunities for conservation, ones that simply did not exist before the conflict, had emerged. My aim is to analyze the complex decision process around mining activities in the Huancabamba mountain range, and to develop a comprehensive and realistic conservation plan for the area borrowing techniques from the fields of sociology, conservation planning, and the policy sciences.

 Sarah Price

Examining the Distribution and Reproductive Ecology of Dicorynia guianensis in central Guyana: Potential for Sustainable Harvest?

Harry setting up the fruit traps, which were used to monitor fruiting activity throughout the research project.

Despite the phenomenal plant diversity present within tropical rainforests, forestry in the neotropics generally targets a relatively few number of tree species for selective, commercial harvest. Over time, persistent removal of a limited number of species can lead to stress due to overharvesting and, periodically, to localized extinction of the target species. Recognition of this trend throughout the tropics has led, in some places, to the commercial promotion of “lesser-known” tree species to divert harvest pressure away from the major commercial species. This study was designed to examine the distribution and ecology of Dicorynia guianensis Amshoff (Caesalpiniaceae), or Waramadan, a lesser-known tree species in Guyana, to evaluate the ecological viability of harvesting this tree species in the Iwokrama Forest.

Field Crew heading back to camp after work. From bow to stern, Ewart, Harry, Michael and Rojas. Essequibo River, Guyana.

 Catherine Schloegel

Chocolate dreams: Sustainable alternative development strategies in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest

Ecuador’s Kichwa Indians approach development proposals with an understandably mixed agenda, for they are ignored by national policy while at the same time revered for their in situ petroleum deposits and valuable timber species. Increasingly the Kichwa are seeking to combine the sale of cash crops with off-farm wage labor in order to generate a sufficient income which would allow them to secure access to secondary education and health care. Long integrated into a regional market structure, the drop of international coffee prices forced many Kichwa to abandon sustainable cash-crop production and instead pursue timber extraction or support initiatives to attract petroleum production to the Napo Province. Today, some Kichwa welcome the arrival of petroleum multinationals and the promise of day labor jobs with “the company,” but others have quietly denounced any further environmental degradation and contamination within their communities.

My research explored the economic, social and environmental benefits gained from entrance into the Kallari Cooperative, a for-profit cocoa and handicraft cooperative, as one economic alternative to further resource exploitation and environmental degradation. I conducted my research in Ecuador’s Napo Province, where the Ecuadorian government proposes to develop the petroleum reserves underlying several hundred Kichwa communities. In contrast with past community confrontations against oil production, the passage of new environmental legislation in Ecuador ensures that indigenous communities have greater participation within the national socio-political decision-making apparatus. With increased livelihood options, through their participation in the cooperative, Kallari members oppose future proposed petroleum production within the region. Unlike past conflicts over petroleum production, like those in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, this time the law seeks to uphold indigenous rights allowing communities to choose their own future development. Nevertheless, Ecuador’s conflicting macro-economic desires threaten to weaken this seminal legislation.

Kallari Cooperative’s twenty-two member communities produce cocoa and rainforest crafts as an alternative economic subsistence strategy to petroleum development and further timber extraction. As a volunteer for the Kallari Cooperative, I conducted 83 household interviews within seven Kallari communities in three different cocoa production zones, as well as relying heavily on insights gleaned from participant-observation research. The goal of the interviews was to provide empirical data tracking members’ incomes and experiences since joining the cooperative. The data is being used to identify strengths of and challenges for the cooperative, as well as providing critical base line data on household economies within the region.

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