Conservación o deterioro (review)

It would seem to be a perfect example of win-win conservation: A poor community in Latin America manages its forest, earning profits from the sale of wood and non-wood products while keeping the ecosystem intact in all of its biological diversity. That's the theory: now the reality. Can mostly illiterate producers of corn or cassava master the complexities of managing a species-rich tropical ecosystem? Can community organizations put aside internal political squabbles and learn how to run a business? Can governments give communities the consistent, long-term regulatory and technical support they need to succeed? In fact community forestry in Latin America is mostly an exercise in holding one's breath. Failure can come at any time, and often does.

Leticia Merino Pérez, a sociologist with Mexico's National Ecological Institute, presents these realities in impressive detail in her new very readable book. Most of the literature on community forestry consists of theoretical discussions, project proposals or mere wishful thinking. But Merino gives this important subject the serious attention it deserves in her unvarnished introduction to six communities in central and southern Mexico.

It is not surprising that such a book should come out of Mexico. While the subject of community forestry is intriguing elsewhere in Latin America, it is central to the future of Mexico's forests. An extraordinary 80 percent of forested lands in that country are controlled by some 8,000 rural communities, an amount far greater than in any other country in the region.

One of Merino's main contentions is that communities have—at least potentially—one major asset needed to carry out an enterprise with the long horizons that forestry demands. This is their social capital, a feature of rural life that is easy to imagine when gazing upon a rural village nestled in a valley. Its people tranquilly go about their business in a climate of trust and shared culture. They are friends and neighbors, generously putting long-term community interests ahead of short-term personal gain. But when Merino looks for social capital in the six communities she surveys, she mostly comes up short. "We question this presupposition and propose, instead, that heterogeneity and social stratification are common in the majority of indigenous and peasant communities in Mexico today," she writes (p.131). In each community she finds fracture lines produced by differences in educational level, occupation, religion, ethnicity, culture, gender and generation.

For example, in one community in the Yucatan lowlands, the government in 1946 brought together a group of chicle gatherers to form an "ejido," an agrarian community that includes communally owned land. Over the years, in-migration and transfers of land ownership created a privileged elite that made decisions on managing the communal forest, mostly for their personal benefit. The results were predictable: By 2001, all marketable mahogany trees had been cut. The forest had lost much of its value, and with it, justification for its continued existence. But despite problems in the countryside, Merino locates the real Achilles heel of community forestry in the nation's capital, in the agencies and ministries that generate quixotic and often contradictory public policy. In one telling chapter, Merino describes a public policy rollercoaster that over many years has left its rural riders confused, demoralized, and in many cases, unable to carry out effective forest management.

She starts in 1926, when the Mexican government carried out an agrarian reform program that put 18 percent of the country's forested areas under the control of the ejidos. But since the communities had neither the money nor expertise needed to manage their forests, they turned to private firms. Unfortunately, these firms were also experts in putting their own short-term profit interests over the long-term needs of the communities. By the mid-1950s, about a third of the country's forests were exhausted. Again, the central government took action. Without the advice or consent of the communities, logging was...