When the December rains hit, the towering Brazil nut trees swell with moisture and decide it’s time to unload their bountiful burden. Nuts the size of grapefruits crash to the ground, burying themselves in the soft earth.

And so the Brazil nut season begins: tens of thousands of people head to the forest to collect, crack open, and carry out the prized nut. It is a three-month frenzy of activity that provides 12 months of survival for many poor families.

Just like the Brazil nuts they produce, the forests themselves are now landing in the hands of local communities. To help these communities benefit from the newly-acquired riches of their forests, and to prevent conflicts over them, CIFOR is providing training in a range of areas.

Greater community involvement in Pando’s forests followed the wave of land reforms that began in 1996 and saw the dismantling of large forest estates, known locally as barracas. Now that they have legal status, rural communities can request up to 500 hectares of forest per family. With this new status and the benefits it confers come new responsibilities. The question is: are the communities ready for it?

Recently the price of Brazil nut has skyrocketed, putting more than a few pennies in the pockets of many Pando villagers. This is good news for local livelihoods. But as with any good story, there’s always the flip side of the coin. Because of the high demand for the nuts, the forests now swarm with people seeking their own fortune.

As a result, communities in Pando are struggling under internal conflicts and rivalries. Locals are taking Brazil nuts that don’t belong to them and the promise of a quick buck is attracting swarms of outsiders. Dealing with such challenges is beyond the ability of the traditional and informal approaches to land management that worked in the past.

Without adequate tools such as maps, resource inventories, family registries, and rules of access, the communities are finding it difficult to defend their rights and serve as effective custodians of their forest.

For example, the village of Palma Real in the municipality of El Sena is in the process of receiving title to almost 9,000 hectares of forest. When CIFOR researchers arrived, they found the villagers had no map of their forest - only a letter-sized printout of their borders provided by the government.

They also had no formal documentation about their community, forest, Brazil nut areas, streams and roads. As it turned out, even the border points on the government printout were wrong. But because they had never been trained in reading maps, the community leaders were unable to verify it.

To help resolve the dilemma, CIFOR worked closely with the community. Using the CIFOR-developed method of Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment (MLA, the researchers helped the community to record a range of important data. This included a GPS map of the forest and community, transects of vegetation, a survey of local views about their natural resources, inventories of natural resources and a household census.

Workshops were organized to leverage the experience of the community members. According to one of the CIFOR researchers, Kristen Evans, training the most knowledgeable community members helped other villagers improve their ability to identify vegetation and trees.

“Through the workshops we were able to rapidly collect data using local knowledge and teamwork”, Evans says. “The community members trained each other how to use a GPS to record reference points for their map, and then they did all of the work themselves. They became the researchers. It was amazing how quickly we completed the map using this method.”

The villagers of Palma Real were ecstatic with the results. They used their new map to substantiate their claims and point out border discrepancies. They negotiated with the National Land Reform Institute to have missing territory added to their lands.

CIFOR also organized meetings for the community members of Palma Real and San Roque, another community where CIFOR implemented MLA, to present their work to municipal government officials and other community leaders. The meeting was followed up by a workshop where the leaders of Palma Real trained other community members how to use the techniques.

“Palma Real is now exporting technicians”, proclaimed one community member proudly.

By building the capacity of local villagers to manage their forests, CIFOR is helping many of Pando’s rural poor to find secure livelihoods through sustainable forest management.

CIFOR’s MLA research in Pando, Bolivia, was supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. KE, GC