Víctor López Illescas, Program Officer, Natural Resources and Climate Change, Ford Foundation talks about how the people of the Maya Biosphere Reserve created one of the most successful and longstanding examples of community-based sustainable forest management in the world
He can laugh about it now, but for years Marcedonio Cortave couldn’t bear to think about the afternoon in 1995 when he was humiliated before his fellow Guatemalan farmers and chicle tappers.
The setting was a meeting involving the Maya Biosphere Reserve, an 8,340-square-mile expanse in the northern Petén department that the government had set aside five years earlier to preserve its pristine rainforest and resident jaguars, pumas, tapirs, and 300-some species of birds. Cortave was there as part of a delegation of forest community representatives. Together, they had made the case that their communities should remain living in the forest and continue sourcing fuelwood and the milky latex that had provided their livelihoods for as long as anyone could remember. But the industry executive who spoke after him had a different idea.
After playing a slick video juxtaposing smiling employees tending state-of-the-art tree nurseries with local campesinos chopping down trees and setting the forest aflame, the executive told the assembled crowd that what the communities of the Petén needed was investment and technical capacity – neither of which a lowly chicle tapper would be able to provide. “If you were to take any one of these community representatives,” he concluded, turning his gaze toward Cortave and the modest community leaders, “and hold him upside down, you would see that no money falls from his pockets. Could these guys even afford the bus fare back to their villages?”
Now, 25 years later, Cortave – who admits that he was so poor back then he sometimes survived on a couple of bananas a day – proudly serves as executive director of the Association of Forest Communities of the Petén, or ACOFOP, one of the most successful and longstanding examples of community-based sustainable forest management in the world.
Since the founding, two years after that harrowing meeting, the Indigenous and forest communities of ACOFOP, which the Ford Foundation has funded since 1999, have protected their forests from illegal logging and other threats while forging cohesive and lucrative enterprises in the process.
In an age of climate change, ACOFOP’s success serves as a win for us all. At the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions, we will reach the climate tipping point within 20 to 25 years. To mitigate climate change, we must both protect and restore the world’s forests, which capture and reduce emissions, and decarbonise and abandon fossil fuel. While fires routinely rage across much of the Reserve, forests managed by ACOFOP’s communities suffer less tree loss and sequester more carbon than other forests, including those under government protection.
Sergio Izquierdo: Tree tops and the sun streaming through the clouds can be seen in an aerial view of the Maya Biosphere Reserve.
There is also the Coronavirus connection. Over the last year, a global alliance of Indigenous and forest communities, of which ACOFOP is a member, highlighted how the same forest destruction driving climate change is also driving the rise of pandemics. Deforestation and human activity have disturbed the natural ecology of the world’s forests, increasing the risk of animal-to-human transfer of diseases and disrupting forest management.
Yet a quarter-century into their existence, the ACOFOP concessions remain dangerously under siege, threatened by outside forces and by a highly volatile institutional context, where any government may or may not choose to defend their continued existence.
A fraught history, with a long shadow
Beginning in 1960, inequities in Guatemala’s land distribution – combined with a long history of discrimination against the Indigenous peoples who account for 43 percent of the country’s population – culminated in a devastating civil war. The unrest went on for 36 years, taking some 200,000 lives – Cortave’s brother among them – in the process. (It’s for this reason that my own childhood was spent outside my Guatemalan homeland.)
Much of the fighting took place in the Petén, where, due to previous government policies, the indigenous Maya peoples were living uneasily alongside transplants from across Guatemala and neighbouring countries. The 1996 Peace Accord included provisions for land reform, and Cortave and the forest communities were determined that their vision for community-managed forests should find a place among them. While most conservationists argued that the country’s forests should be declared national parks and overseen by strict government protection, they believed people residing in and deriving a living from the forests had the strongest incentive to protect them.
Cortave and the leaders spent painstaking years cultivating colleagues and forging alliances among a population so traumatised by war and riven by classism, extreme poverty, and racism that most people weren’t inclined to engage at all. At the same time, they plead their case with government officials, including those from the National Council for Protected Areas, or CONAP, which oversees the Biosphere Reserve. By 2001, ACOFOP had managed to secure 12 forest-concession contracts from CONAP. The 25-year agreements, which entrusted forest management of the land to the diverse communities residing upon it, covered a total of 500,000 hectares, about a fifth of the entire Reserve.
Most recently, Guatemala’s government has stated their support for the ACOFOP model, with two of the nine concessions already renewed. As the renewal process continues, ACOFOP is advocating to gain more concessions for community groups in the Reserve. “We have to do everything we can to make the concessions more secure so that the communities can just focus on defending their forests,” he said. “Because defending the forest is a huge task.”
Source: Ford Foundation
