By Barbara Fraser
LIMA, Peru — Legislation aimed at giving Bolivia’s Indigenous communities the right to extract resources from their forests has solidified land tenure, but conflicts with long-standing forest-management practices, according to a study of the Yuracaré people.
Under land and forest reforms passed in 1996, the Yuracaré, who live in the Amazon Basin lowlands in the Chapare River watershed, secured improved rights to their land, but some of their traditional practices and organizational structures were undermined, researchers said.
By creating a timber-management structure more suited to large-scale, commercial production, the law made it difficult for Yuracaré families to harvest just a few trees to sell when they needed cash. It also required the community to involve outsiders in forest-management decisions that previously had been made only by Yuracaré people in community assemblies.
Published research findings, underscore the view that policymakers should take the needs of local communities, knowledge and traditional forest-management practices into account when designing regulations, said Anne Larson, a principal scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) who studies forest tenure rights.
LAWS CHANGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
About 3,000 Yuracarélive in 18 communities in a territory spanning nearly 250,000 hectares (618,000 acres) in Bolivia’s Cochabamba and Beni regions, according to Rosario León, a sociologist with the Center for the Study of Economic and Social Reality (CERES), the lead author of the study.
The region consists of a combination of upland and flooded forests, which the Yuracaré manage in a way that provides food, building materials, medicines and other products for their families. They traditionally ranged over a large area, but settlers from outside gradually reduced the area they occupied. Although they still hunt and fish, plant subsistence crops and harvest timber and non-timber forest resources, their lifestyle is changing as they have more contact with outside markets, the researchers said.
Before Bolivia’s land-tenure and forestry reforms took effect, the Yuracaré did not produce timber on a large scale, but families sold trees on a small scale, especially to obtain cash in an emergency, according to León and her colleagues, who began gathering data before the reforms were passed.
The reforms consisted of two key laws meant to give indigenous people in Bolivia greater control over their territory and resources.
The 1996 Land Reform Law recognizes the communal rights of indigenous people to their land and the forests on the land, creating opportunities for community forest management, the researchers said.
The Forestry Law, also passed in 1996, gives indigenous people exclusive rights to extract forest resources from their community territories. It also allows them to harvest timber on a commercial scale, as long as they had a forest management plan.
INCREASED PRODUCTION BUT LESS COMMUNITY RIGHTS
Even before the reforms were passed, the Yuracaré managed their forests successfully, León said, although they did not have official land or timber rights.
“Yuracaré communities had already been harvesting and selling timber on a relatively small scale commercially for 30 years without degrading their forests,” León said.
The small-scale operations were fully legal, but they were made illegal under a new forest law.
When the legal reforms were passed, the Yuracaré embraced the new legislation and became one of the first indigenous groups to develop a government-approved forest management plan. They bought a sawmill, hired a forestry expert and began commercial timber harvesting on a larger scale.
Over the next few years, the community quadrupled its timber. The amount of timber extracted and shipped by truck to the Andean city of Cochabamba, increased from 8,700 to 36,000 board feet between 1997 and 2000, the researchers said.
But the new system clashed with the community’s traditional forest-management practices.
Under the new Forest Law, an area was designated for intensive commercial production. The new system, however, did not allow community members to sell trees from other areas, which their families had traditionally managed. Those trees – which were viewed as a source of emergency cash – were off limits.
That change affected the way the Yuracaré monitored the forest. Before the reforms, because families used resources from various parts of the territory, more people kept an eye on the forest to guard against illegal logging or other problems, the researchers said.
Under the new law, however, since families could not sell timber from outside the managed area, there was less monitoring of other parts of the forest.
The new forest-management system also changed the way the community made decisions and handled conflicts over its resources. Before the new system took effect, the Yuracaré made their own decisions about forest management during community assemblies.
Under the Forest Law, however, government officials had to be involved in those decisions, which changed the community’s traditional organizational structure, the researchers said. Disputes over resource use, which previously were settled within the community, also had to be resolved with government authorities, through the courts or other means that could be time consuming or expensive.
Ultimately, the new forest management system proved too complicated and not well suited to local needs, León said. “The requirement that the communities have a formal forest management plan raised the costs and reduced the benefits for the Yuracaré people,” she said.
In 2000, after three years of timber production, the Yuracaré decided to stop commercial harvesting.The law made forest management “a top-down process that largely ignores local knowledge, local needs and customary forms of territorial governance,” León said.
Problems like the ones the Yuracaré encountered in their effort to implement a forest-management plan could be resolved with more flexible regulations that are designed with community participation and take local needs into account, she said.
One solution could be more decentralized regulation, according to Larson. Laws designed for larger-scale timber operations tend to focus on permits for controlling timber extraction, while indigenous communities like the Yuracaré could benefit from regulations that promote good overall forest management, she said.
“Rather than starting from the perspective of government regulation, policymakers should start with communities – what are the local needs and practices, and what potential do they have for sustainable, grassroots forest management?” she said.
Further Reading
Enhancing forest tenure reforms through more responsive regulations
New training manual gives researchers tools to tackle tenure
Despite progress, forest tenure reforms in Latin America still have a long way to go
Tenure Rights and Beyond: Community Access to Forest Resources in Latin America
