Perched on a mountainside five hundred meters (about 1,600 feet) above the wide, dry Oaxaca valley in southern Mexico, signs of one of the world’s most innovative forestry enterprises are everywhere. The local sawmill, furniture factory, credit union, gas station, food store, water bottling facility, and ecotourism inn—all located in or near the bustling town of Ixtlán de Juarez—testify to the benefits of its sustainable, community-controlled forestry business, known as a community forestry enterprises (CFE).
Ixtlán’s local control over its resources stems from the Mexican Revolution just over a century ago. In successive waves during a span of 70 years, about 60 percent of the country’s forests shifted from private to community and often Indigenous ownership, as is the case in Ixtlán. This level of local control is unmatched anywhere in the world. In addition to fostering collective community decision-making, CFEs have helped create jobs, reduce poverty, and preserve the biodiversity of forests.
After the revolution, local people seized the opportunity to take over their forests, with Mexico’s federal government intermittently providing support through equipment and training in the logging business. Today, of the 21,000 local communities that have gained control over their forests, about 1,600 communities run sustainable CFEs, encompassing over 17 million acres of forest.
Governing by the Community, for the Community
In Ixtlán, the Mexican government granted a private company a logging concession in the 1940s, triggering a 40-year struggle that forced Mexico’s national government to finally renege on the contract in 1982. Ixtlán then set up its own CFE consistent with its local Indigenous-based governance structures. These usos and costumbres (uses and customs) are enshrined in the 1917 Mexican constitution and draw from centuries of community decision-making in local Zapotec culture. Such governance is deeply rooted in the values of obligatory service and participation, which are essential to community membership.
This traditional system runs through a General Assembly of all recognized community members (comuneros) and is the maximum authority for the CFE and all local governance. It is comprised mostly of men, as the role is inherited from one generation to the next through sons. “I am not a comunera, my father is, my grandfather was, and my brother is,” local conservation scientist Guadalupe Pacheco Aquino notes. “But the number of women is increasing because fathers are deciding more often to leave to their daughters both the rights and obligations involved.”
Those obligations are considerable, involving substantial time commitments to participate in decision-making and assume leadership positions (cargos) in running community enterprises. But at the same time, fulfilling these duties brings prestige and esteem to community members from their neighbors.
The emphasis in decision-making is on compromise, where the group is always prioritized above the individual’s needs and elders’ knowledge and experience are venerated. Assembly meetings can last for hours until an agreement is reached. “The Assembly involves all comuneros and elected authorities and uses both voting and consensus to reach its decisions,” explains Pacheco Aquino.
Key to the Assembly’s success is the banning of direct political party involvement, which, historically throughout Mexico, has relied on political hegemony, clientelism, and the marginalization of opposition. Locally, the other key element in every significant decision is the inclusion of forestry expert representatives from all the prominent community families. “This may be time-consuming,” notes Pacheco Aquino. “But it ensures that everyone who must be heard, is.”
For CFE logging employee Dexter Melchor Matías, it can be difficult to adjust to working with so many bosses. “But gradually you get used to it and its advantages for the community outweigh the greater amount of time involved,” he says.
“The focus of the CFEs is not on profit, but rather on creating decent local jobs,” points out forestry expert David Bray, who is based in Mexico. “This means they respond to the market, but they are not driven by it.” Profits from the CFEs and other businesses are ploughed back into the community through investments in local infrastructure, such as schools and roads, as well as profit-sharing payouts to community members. To make this happen, Ixtlán has benefited from supportive state and federal policies, as well as elevated demand and prices for wood. “Nonetheless a permanent tension exists between the hierarchical relationships common in businesses and Ixtlán’s democratic and participatory community governance,” notes Bray.
The local furniture factory is run by forestry engineer Noemí Cruz Hernández, who manages forty employees. The tables, benches, and chairs they produce from high-quality local pine mostly end up as school furniture purchased by Oaxaca’s state government. She hopes the store they have opened in the city of Oaxaca can reduce their over-reliance on government contracts.
The workers earn the country’s minimum wage, which more than doubled under president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (2018-2024). “Reasonably paid jobs are few and far between in Mexico’s rural areas,” explains Bray. According to Pacheco Aquino, the CFE model has helped put many people in the region out of poverty through job creation in forestry and the spin-off businesses like the ecotourism inn and gasoline station.
A Win-Win Proposition for Forests & Local Economy
The success of community forest management can also be seen in reforestation efforts in another part of Oaxaca, the Mixteca Alta. There, efforts driven by effective community governance based on Indigenous uses and customs were a main driver of a 71 percent forest recovery between 1990 and 2018 that reversed centuries of deforestation and forest degradation. However, across Mexico, the benefits of vertical integration in CFEs remain limited to date, with only 294 of the country’s 1600 communities with logging permits running their own sawmills by 2017.
About the size of Indiana, Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It is also the second-poorest state in Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by Mexico, Canada, and the United States in 1994, hit local agriculture hard. This has fueled out-migration. Cruz Hernández notes that Ixtlan’s furniture factory struggles to retain staff. “We put time and resources into training people and then they leave because they think they can do better somewhere else.”
In part to help combat staff attrition, Ixtlán set up a local university in 2005 to train young people in forestry and conservation, and currently, out-migration is lower compared to other areas of Oaxaca. Ecotourism driver Joaquin Aquino said that while many of his high school classmates have left and he had a chance to go to Canada, “the community forestry project meant I could stay to take care of my sick dad.” Aquino also noted that the project has created economic growth in the community. Notably, extreme poverty in Ixtlán has declined sharply to less than half of what it was before 2010.
However, some local people still struggle. Sixteen-year-old Samuel Bautista hasn’t finished high school because the meager income his mother and older sister earn from selling lunches on a street corner means he has no choice but to work. Bautista had to leave school three years early, but he now has a paid job as a tour guide. “I want to keep studying,” he says, “With a focus on all the edible mushrooms we have in our area.”
In addition to reducing poverty in the past decade, deforestation has registered lower in Ixtlán than in Mexico’s strictly protected conservation areas. More carbon is stored in community forests, because carbon is mostly deposited in lumber utilized in construction and furniture. “Conservation alone won’t work well in poor parts of the world because people need income from their forests. Without tackling local development, we can’t slow deforestation,” Bray notes. In places where respect for existing laws is often shaky and government capacities to enforce laws are even more fragile, protected areas are routinely and illegally logged or clear-cut for agriculture. Community forest management can change all that.
The approach contrasts starkly with plantation forests, which retain less carbon and damage habitats and soils. But while they only constitute three percent of the world’s forests, plantations supply about two-thirds of the world’s annual wood production, and that number is only expected to grow. Even when clear-cutting is followed by tree replanting, the resulting forests, often comprised of one or perhaps two commercially attractive species of the same age, leave ecosystems severely compromised and more vulnerable to hot-burning wildfires.
Competing with plantation-grown timber presents a huge challenge for Ixtlán’s CFEs and enterprises like it. Big buyers want certified wood, but Ixtlán can’t deliver huge volumes of single species at low prices. “Because of the way we do forestry, our costs are higher,” explains Melchor Matías.
Community forests can also help limit wildfires. “We’ve never had serious fires here,” continues Melchor Matías, “but because of the current drought and climate change, the ecosystem is highly stressed. For the last 5 years, it simply hasn’t rained enough.”
In contrast, southern Oaxaca (Sierra Sur) has considerably more wildfires than in the northern mountains (Sierra Norte) because greater private ownership has meant less local monitoring and, consequently, more fires, according to Bray. Mexico has been heralded as the stellar example driving a trend that has resulted in Indigenous peoples and local communities managing a quarter of forests worldwide. “These efforts comprise the biggest commercially successful communal property regime in the world,” asserts Bray.
Community forestry generates a degree of prosperity in places like Ixtlán, which had been suffering steady outmigration and the poverty that lies behind it. Tourism continues to expand—most recently, the Mexican government has initiated an off-road walking, running, and biking trail which retraces the walk of 19th century President Benito Juárez from his Zapotec village, just down the road from Ixtlán, at the age of twelve in search of an education in Oaxaca city. Ixtlán proudly bears “de Juárez” in its name to honor Mexico and Latin America’s first Indigenous President.
That pride is palpable when local people talk about their town and its accomplishments. While Cruz Hernández notes that Itxlán still has a lot to do, she says their collective efforts to improve the community make her happy to live in Itxlán. And, adds Joaquin Aquino, “Conserving the forests in the ways we have ensures that we will leave a positive legacy for our children and grandchildren.”
Linda Farthing is an educator and writer on Latin America. She is co-author of four books on Bolivia, and has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, and worked as an issue editor and writer for NACLA. She has also served as the field producer for three documentaries.