Mention of Peru’s rainforest conjures images of vast, trackless jungle rich in exotic plants and animals. But that image, on which the country’s tourism industry banks, is only half the truth. The jungle is also the ancestral home of thousands of indigenous people whose interests have often collided with efforts to preserve the wilderness.
Although the jungle is sparsely inhabited, indigenous groups have moved freely through the rainforest for centuries, migrating seasonally in search of game or settling in small communities. The rainforest’s enormous biological diversity has made it the prime target of conservation efforts, however, and bans on hunting or fishing in parks have sometimes led to fatal conflicts. In 2000, an Esse’eja man ended his life with a hunger strike after park rangers forbade him to hunt on park land that adjoined his community’s territory in the southeastern department of Madre de Dios.
In the past few years, however, that has changed. New ways of viewing protected areas, clearer demarcation of indigenous lands and efforts to involve communities in park planning have turned what had been antagonistic relationships into alliances. And now park planners and indigenous communities are uniting against a series of common enemies: oil companies whose concessions overlap both nature reserves and indigenous territories, settlers who migrate from the highlands to clear rainforest for farming, and illegal loggers who are pushing deeper and deeper into the jungle in search of valuable timber.
The old animosities “were rooted in the fact that the parks and protected areas were declared by the government without any participation or information,” says Pedro Solano, director of the conservation program of the Peruvian Environmental Law Society (SPDA). “Indigenous people and other local communities were suddenly faced with a new legal situation, new authorities, park directors and park rangers, and that created conflicts. Fortunately, the system of protected areas has evolved substantially in the past four or five years. The current view is to integrate them into a context of development.”
A case in point is the new Otishi National Park along the Apurímac River, just east of the site of the controversial Camisea natural gas production facility. The new park, which covers nearly 306,000 hectares, is in a “hot spot” of biological diversity. It is flanked by two indigenous reserves, the 184,000-hectare Ashaninka Communal Reserve and the 219,000-hectare Matsiguenga Communal Reserve.
Before the park was established, workshops were held with local people to determine their needs and allow them to voice concerns, according to Erick Meneses, a forestry engineer with Conservation International’s Peru office. Meneses said one key goal was to settle any questions about property rights before delimiting the park.
The park protects the fragile ecosystem around the headwaters of rivers in the area. Meanwhile, the indigenous inhabitants of the neighboring reserves can hunt, fish and gather plants on their own lands, and can also raise crops or harvest limited quantities of timber for sale. “For the native communities, the park is a way of protecting their resources, because it will ensure that settlers, oil companies and lumber companies don’t invade their area,” Meneses said. “It’s a good way to help the communities preserve part of their traditional territory and continue benefiting from it, because if the forest disappears, their life will disappear.”
But John Terborgh, director of the Center for Tropical Conservation at Duke University, does not consider Otishi a model that can be replicated in other areas. The park, he said, covers an inaccessible, mountainous area that has never been inhabited. “It’s very convenient to make a park out of a place like that, because it’s not stepping on anyone’s toes,” he said. “Governments like to decree parks at the tops of mountains, but the biodiversity is in the lowlands, and that’s where the people want to live.”
Peru has a total of 56 natural protected areas, covering nearly 16.4 million hectares of land—almost 13 percent of the country. The five indigenous reserves together represent nearly 1.5 million hectares. The country is home to 361 of the world’s mammal species, 1,701 bird species, 297 species of reptiles and some 20,000 species of flowering plants. There are at least nine different categories of protected areas, including national parks, historic sanctuaries, protective forests and communal reserves for indigenous peoples.
National parks, where there are strict prohibitions on removal of flora and fauna, account for more than 5.3 million hectares of the protected land. Two of the largest are the 1.7 million hectare Manu National Park in the Cusco and Madre de Dios departments and the 1.1 million hectare Bahuaja-Sonene National Park in Madre de Dios and Puno.
Terborgh has worked in Manu for years, and sees conflicts looming between conservation interests and indigenous people there. The indigenous population is currently between one and two thousand, a low density given the park’s size, and about half are nomadic people living in isolation. The others, however, now have contact with the outside world—and some services from the Peruvian government. Better health care has decreased infant mortality and led to rapid population growth.
As the numbers increase, “I can see a very large conflict coming in the not too distant future,” said Terborgh, who advocates policies that would encourage indigenous communities to resettle outside the park boundaries in exchange for access to education and jobs. His views do not sit well with indigenous organizations in the area, which have called for granting indigenous communities title to land inside the park. Such a move, Terborgh said, “would be a disaster. It would make the park look like Swiss cheese.” Just as indigenous leaders sometimes accuse conservationists of “caring more about the animals than the people,” as one put it, Terborgh said that indigenous organizations tend to be short-sighted about the park.
Even protected status, however, has not saved Peru’s fragile rainforest from oil prospectors and loggers. A map of oil exploration and drilling concessions makes a checkerboard of the jungle. The Camisea gas field in the department of Cusco is not far from Manu National Park, and critics say the $2.5 billion project threatens both fragile rainforest ecosystems and isolated indigenous people. The production area overlaps the Kugapakori-Nahua Reserve, which was established in 1990 to protect groups of nomadic indigenous people who have virtually no contact with the outside world and are highly vulnerable to diseases and pressure from encroaching development.
A similar reserve in the Madre de Dios department is being threatened by loggers who have publicly questioned whether there really are isolated indigenous groups in the territory. They have asked the government for a study of the reserve. Shapion Noningo, secretary of the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (AIDESEP), an indigenous organization that represents communities in the central jungle, said the move is an effort to open up still more protected land to loggers.
“Logging is a serious cancer in Peru,” Solano said. “People are going into the forest—into protected areas, private property, concessions, anywhere—marking trees, cutting them down and hauling them out along the rivers. It’s happening at incredible speed. And it’s absurd to think that two policemen, a park ranger and a forestry expert can do anything against a boatload of 80 armed men.”
Protected areas like the Otishi National Park are meant to help stem the tide, but it will be an uphill battle. The pipeline from the Camisea to the coast passes near the southern tip of the park, and environmentalists worry that settlers and loggers could move into previously inaccessible areas along the pipeline right-of-way.
Complicating the picture is the pressure on indigenous communities to sell their timber rights to small-scale loggers, who often are working as virtual debt laborers for large logging companies, according to environmentalists and defenders of indigenous peoples’ rights. Critics say government authorities often turn a blind eye to illegal logging, although Solano points out that some loggers have killed park rangers who tried to stop their activities.
The temptation is great. Scarcity and the new forestry laws have doubled the price of mahogany, according to Lily la Torre, a lawyer with the nongovernmental organization Racimos de Ungarahui, which defends the rights of indigenous communities. After expenses, a family doing small-scale, informal logging can earn about $800 a month, she said. In contrast, an indigenous family, forced by poverty to find some way of making money, may sell a first-growth mahogany tree to those loggers for as little as $30, according to Noningo. And in a biologically diverse forest in which there might be only one mahogany tree per hectare, every tree counts. “When you look at it from that standpoint, the impact is significant,” Meneses said.
La Torre pointed out that logging brings both environmental and social problems. Logging roads attract settlers from the highlands who clear the jungle for farming, while the loggers set up floating stores that provide tools, gasoline, liquor and sex workers.
One way to combat the illegal logging—besides policing parks—is to help indigenous communities develop plans for managing their forests, Meneses said. The plans should include thorough studies of the local flora and fauna and recommendations for ways in which communities could diversify their use of resources—harvesting medicinal plants, for example, or making high-quality handcrafts destined for specialty markets. Meneses believes that international consumer interest in purchasing wood certified as being from a sustainably managed forest could also give indigenous communities an advantage by making it possible for them to receive higher prices for legally harvested timber.
While environmentalists are actively seeking alliances with native peoples, however, some indigenous organizations are still wary. “Some nongovernmental environmental groups have good intentions, while others have mixed intentions and divide us,” Noningo said. “They want to control the process [of creating and managing parks] and don’t let us participate. We have to be able to participate actively, because these are resources that we have historically managed.”
According to Noningo, indigenous communities still worry that their traditional use of land for hunting, fishing, gathering plants and harvesting trees will be limited when protected areas are established. “We’re afraid that the government will restrict our rights, and we don’t see that the political will exists to implement alternative projects,” he added.
Indeed, the lack of public funds and political interest may be the greatest threat to Peru’s protected areas. “The government lacks resources and doesn’t reach these areas,” Meneses said. “In addition, its development programs are aimed more at solving problems related to subsistence agriculture using traditional crops. They’re not aimed at solving problems related to the subsistence activities of traditional populations that depend on the resources of the forest.”
The government funds earmarked for parks are barely enough to pay rangers and don’t cover other important activities, such as scientific research and education, Solano added. As a result, priorities in those areas are often driven by the international aid agencies that provide funding.
The abundance of oil drilling concessions in parks reflects the “lack of political weight given to protected areas,” Solano said, adding that the newest threat is to the remote Cordillera Azul park in the northeastern jungle, which was created just two years ago, where Occidental Petroleum is seeking exploration rights. “We keep thinking of Peru as a country ripe for mining or agriculture, when right in front of our eyes we can see that Peru is a country of great biological diversity. The whole world is talking about biological diversity today, but here it’s seen as merely a curiosity,” he said.
According to Terborgh, the greatest peril to Peru’s rainforest is posed by the ultimate symbol of progress: the road. Vast areas of Peru’s Amazon basin are protected largely because they are inaccessible. That is beginning to change, however. Programs aimed at encouraging peasant farmers to switch from growing coca, the raw material from which cocaine is made, to other crops often include road construction on the grounds that the products must be transported to markets. Also on the drawing board is an interoceanic highway from Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic coast. While the journey is possible now, many of the roads are in poor condition, and government officials would like to see them upgraded.
For Terborgh, that would be a death knell for the jungle: “The concern is that the Brazilians will pour into Peru and deforest it on an industrial scale. If you look at the satellite images of the Peruvian side of the border and the Brazilian side of the border, it’s a difference of night and day,” he said.
The key to the conservation and sustainable use of Peru’s resources lies in dialogue between conservationists and local communities, as well as farsighted policies, investment and political will. “As for protection, I think Peru’s doing a pretty good job, given the extremely limited resources they have. They’re making a conscientious effort and doing the best they can with what they’ve got,” Terborgh said. “It’s a poor country and they need external help. And they’re getting it.”
Solano sees a need for a systematic study of efforts that are already under way, with indicators that make it possible to measure and evaluate the results. He also believes private investment in conservation can help offset the lack of government funds while reducing dependence on international conservation organizations that sometimes promote their own agendas. A private, community-managed conservation area already exists on the northern coast of Peru, and a Lima-based environmental organization has the contract for managing the Cordillera Azul park in the northeastern jungle.
“These are new tools, but people are starting to use them,” Solano said. “When they become more common and people start to see benefits coming from a source other than international cooperation, they’ll start to think, ‘This represents a real opportunity.’”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara J. Fraser, bfraser@amauta.rcp.net.pe, is a former associate editor of Latinamerica Press now working as a freelance writer based in Peru.
