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PENEWS 4/2006: PEN studies how Christmas celebrations may help farmers

CONTENT: Taking stock at year end and looking ahead, two good readings on deforestation and poverty and on fuelwood, and two Central American PEN projects on baboons and Christmas trees!

1. TAKING STOCK AND LOOKING AHEAD

A year end is always a good time to take stock and make a few plans (and promises?) for the new year. The murder of one of our PEN partners, Vanessa Sequeira on 3. September in Acre, Brazil will forever remain the darkest day in the PEN history. Another PEN partner, Jacob Chengedzeni, had to discontinue his fieldwork in South Africa due to security threats. These are reminders about our vulnerability and the security issues facing everyone doing fieldwork.

But, more than 20 PEN field studies are now on-going or completed (4). 2006 became the year when fieldwork really took off, and PEN will indeed become the large-scale and tropics-wide data collection that we have envisioned! The research tools are well developed and in active use. The interaction by email (and in some cases field visits) between PEN partners and CIFOR researchers (advisors) is good.

A few challenges lies ahead. The funding situation is still uncertain, with two applications rejected in 2006, while another two are pending. The PEN type of global level basic research has proven more difficult to sell than we thought, as many donors want to see visible impacts in specific countries. Another challenge for many PEN partners (and the global PEN project) will be to move from data collection to data analysis and paper writing. How to make sense of all the numbers? How to use the PEN data to answer interesting research questions?

With a steady stream of new publications, good synthesis and overviews are invaluable for researchers to formulate such questions. Below are two recent studies on deforestation and poverty, and on fuelwood that may help in this process.

2. GOOD READING 1: AT LOGGERHEADS?

Is there a trade-off between poverty reduction and environmental protection? A new comprehensive World Bank report, At Loggerheads? Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction and Environment in the Tropical Forests, by Ken Chomitz et al. addresses this question, and identifies opportunities for win-win policies. Using recent spatial poverty and land use information, it demonstrates how deforestation and poverty often overlap, but that the causal links are more complex. The report introduces a stylized forest classification, which is useful to structure a diverse reality: (1) Forest-agriculture mosaic lands, (2) frontier and disputed areas, and (3) areas beyond the agricultural frontier. These correspond roughly to different zones of increasing remoteness, or alternatively: level of development. The report is downloadable at: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510
&searchMenuPK=64187283&theSitePK=523679&entityID=000112742_20061019150049&
searchMenuPK=64187283&theSitePK=523679

3. GOOD READING 2: THE CHANGING PERSPECTIVES OF FUELWOOD

The most common forest product in many PEN study sites is fuelwood and its cousin - charcoal. An excellent synthesis of the fuelwood debate and the many studies is given by Arnold, J. E. Michael, Gunnar Kohlin, and Reidar Persson. 2006. Woodfuels, livelihoods, and policy interventions: Changing Perspectives. World Development 34 (3):596-611. The article is based on a more comprehensive CIFOR report, available at: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/Publications/Detail?pid=1197 Among their findings: most of the ‘fuelwood gaps’ analyses were flawed and exaggerating the crisis, fuelwood demand increase with higher income among poor but not among middle income groups, fuelwood scarcities rarely trigger investments in maintaining the resource base, but declining access to supplies or markets can raise significant problems in some areas.

4. PEN PROJECT 1: MIRIAM WYMAN (UNIV. OF FLORIDA): CONSERVATION INITIATIVES, LAND-USE DECISIONS, AND FOREST COVER IN THE COMMUNITY BABOON SANCTUARY, BELIZE.

Village names like Double-Head Cabbage and Scotland Half Moon make you wonder if you have entered the world of Tolkien. But, they lie within the Community Baboon Sanctuary (CBS), a small protected area (4 800 ha) of 7 villages along 33 km of the Belize River. Established in 1985, CBS landowners agreed to protect one of the few black howler monkey populations (Alouatta pigra) in Belize. For 20 years CBS residents have been participating in two conservation initiatives: nature-based tourism around the howler monkey, and a voluntary, written pledge to protect riparian forests and forested corridors, important howler monkey habitat. My dissertation research will assess the effectiveness of these initiatives at protecting riparian forest cover, and how to improve these initiatives for conservation and community benefits.

An issue I encountered with the PEN survey concerned unprocessed forest products. When residents only responded about timber I would follow-up with questions about other forest uses, such as hunting, medicinal plant use, firewood, fruits, etc.; then I got answers. The general lesson: ask again, and in different ways to tease out the information. Additionally, building trust and rapport with families can never be stressed enough. There is a time investment but in the long run, building these friendships increased the likelihood of families participating in multiple surveys. Also, often in friendly conversation before interviewing I would get valuable additional – often sensitive – information.

An interesting finding is that over 1/3 of the households interviewed receive remittances from the US. An important forest product is the Cohune Palm nut (Orbignya cohune). Although not used as extensively today, Cohune nut is still highly valued for cooking oil production. In the village of Flowers Bank nearly every household produces Cohune oil for home use and/or sale in other villages. This laborious process is reflected in the sale price of $5 US / quart. Cohune Palms are also often left in cleared fields as shade for livestock. Lastly, during Iguana season (March) before the female Iguanas lay, I found that primarily boys would hunt Iguanas, which fetch between US $2.50 – $5 each. And did I eat Iguana while in Belize? Well, as the saying goes, “When in Rome…”.

5. PEN PROJECT 2: PABLO PRADO: CHRISTMAS TREES AND LIVELIHOODS

Can a popular Christmas tree - an endangered endemic fir - be part of a conservation-by-cultivation strategy and help improve rural livelihoods? This was one of the questions the research team from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala & KVL (Denmark) asked, and one year of fieldwork is soon to finish. Poaching of the Guatemalan fir (Abies guatemalenis Rehder) was serious, thus any policy recommendations had to deal with the threat of extinction. We also wondered if its cultivation – to satisfy an increasing demand from Guatemala City for Christmas trees - could play a positive role in the local peasant economies. Even though we have not started to analyze the data yet, several findings have helped us understand how complex and challenging our rural reality is.

Along the way, we realized that this species plays a minor role within local peasant livelihoods strategies, and those who do poach its branches during the Christmas season are motivated by a ‘pull’ factor: every year the illegal harvesting of branches for decoration purposes entails a good source of fresh cash to be spent during the festivities. They are not ‘pushed’ by their lack of other income sources. In short, it’s the demand from the capital city and not local poverty that drives poaching. We now want to test using PEN data the hypothesis that the poorest segments of these rural communities are barely affected by the market dynamics of this species. By the same token, those middle-income Christmas trees producers might benefit from a captive market during the Christmas season.

A particular obstacle for our survey was the national government decision to authorize mining operations in the nearby areas, and the concomitant suspicion from the villages to provide any information to outsiders. During fieldwork we used both BSc students and local enumerators, and the former helped both with the language barrier and in building trust and reciprocity with the selected villages. Despite the reluctance of some households to participate in every round, the number of drop-outs was kept at a reasonable level. All in all, our survey will surely allow us to draw well-founded conclusions and build on what other organizations are currently doing in the same areas. Hopefully, we will come up with sound recommendations that will eventually help those marginalized rural communities to ‘celebrate Christmas as well’.

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Green Christmas greetings and the very best wishes for 2007,

Arild Angelsen
PEN Coordinator