Twenty-Five Years of Community Forestry in Mexico

Version II-corrected table of contents and bibliography The Rise of Community Forestry in Mexico: History, Concepts, and Lessons Learned from Twenty-Five Years of Community Timber Production By David Barton Bray and Leticia Merino-Pérez A Report in partial fulfillment of Grant No. 1010-0595 The Ford Foundation. September, 2002 This report is a draft for limited circulation and comments are extremely welcome. Dr. David Bray is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Florida International University, Miami, FL USA ([email protected]). Dr. Leticia Merino is a Researcher with the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM ([email protected]). Many thanks to Rosa Cossío-Solano for assistance in research and manuscript preparation. Executive Summary Mexico presents a virtually unique case where much of the nation‟s forests were placed in the hands of communities, in successive degrees of actual control, beginning in the early decades of the 20th century, as a little-noticed result of the Mexican Revolution. Today, Mexico‟s common property community-managed forests, and associated community forest enterprises (CFEs) in both temperate and tropical areas, appear to be at a scale and level of maturity unmatched anywhere else in the world. It is thus a national laboratory for studying the social and ecological benefits of delivering forests to local communities. Mexico‟s forests have rich biodiversity, including one tenth of all terrestrial vertebrates and plants known to science. Although deforestation has been a serious problem throughout the second half of the 20th century, a recent national study suggests that forest losses have been at the low end of estimates over the last two decades. Nonetheless there are few substantial intact forest masses left in Mexico, and some of these appear to be in areas where community forest management is a dominant land use. Estimates of communities that are managing their forests for the commercial production of timber in Mexico have ranged from 288 to 740. Preliminary research for this study found 533 community logging permits in just 5 states, suggesting that the number of CFEs may be beyond the upper end of current estimates. With this large universe, there have been several recent efforts to classify CFEs by degree of vertical integration and other characteristics, and a new 5-level classification is proposed here, that also expands the definition of what constitutes a CFE. The Mexican experience forces a reevaluation of many theoretical concepts which have been used to analyze community forestry elsewhere. Contemporary common property regimes have been defined as those that have endured and those that have emerged, but Mexico is neither. It is a massive, state-structured experiment in common property management that has been growing in size throughout most of the 20th century. Some 40% of Mexico‟s forest natural assets were transferred to community hands between 1950-1980 alone, reaching an estimated 80% of Mexican forests in community hands. Mexico‟s CFEs are virtually unique in the world in having mounted community enterprises for the commercial production of timber on the basis of a common property regime. Given Mexico‟s strong regulatory framework, the Mexican case may also be thought of as a form of co-management as it occurs in Asia, but on the basis of a privately held common property rather than public property. Mexican forest communities are found to have large stocks of relational and traditional institutional social capital, but that government and other actors have done much to create new organizational social capital on the traditional foundations. In asset building the Mexican experience forces the focus of attention away from the accumulation of household assets and towards the accumulation of assets in the CFE and in community infrastructure and social welfare programs. In ecosystem management, Mexican CFEs are seen to be moving progressively towards a more ecosystemic view of their forest resources. 2 The substantial Mexican CFE sector has emerged from a 70-year history of policy initiatives and struggles by communities and civil society. The Mexican Revolution, predicated on a massive and ongoing distribution of land to groups of peasant farmers in two main categories of agrarian reform (ejidos and indigenous communities), had the consequence of giving communities important natural assets on their community lands. Thus, the idea that communities should be in charge of producing timber from these community lands, just as they were in charge of agricultural production on their lands, took root very early. However, there was another major current very early that felt that communities did not have the skills to manage timber production on their lands, and that the Mexican constitution called for state intervention to organize timber production. After early efforts in the 1930s to establish forest cooperatives, which quickly fell into corruption and state tutelage, forest policy in Mexico from 1940-1970 was dominated by logging bans and logging concessions in a context of import-substitution industrialization, with virtually no attention given to CFEs. Beginning in 1970, however, two different strategies for the promotion of CFEs emerged. One, linked to a government agency called FONAFE, attempted the large-scale creation of CFEs that were forced to sell to concessionaires. The second, seated in another government agency, the DGDF- SFF, worked outside the concession areas in promoting CFEs that were freer to operate in the marketplace. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, reformers in the DGDF were able to enter several different regions of Mexico and the “first golden age” of community forest promotion began (1974-1986). After the passage of a pro-community forestry law in 1986, government support of CFEs went into a decline until the late 1990s. In the early 1980s, grassroots mobilizations and civil society actors also banded together to create a new wave of resistance to government concessions. In the late 1990s, two new government programs emerged, PRODEFOR and PROCYMAF, that gave new support to CFEs. This period marked a sea change in community control of forests and logging in Mexico, and was a major advance in social and economic equity and a more democratic distribution of the benefits of forest resources. Another unusual social capital feature of Mexican CFEs is the large number of second and third-level organizations which have emerged over the last 25 years. These organizations, which have usually banded together around the provision of the forest technical services (FTS) required by Mexican law, have frequently suffered the defections of the largest members because the perceived costs of collective action are higher than the benefits for them. Innovative models for managing the FTS problem without defections and for using second-level organizations to achieve vertical integration for small-volume ejidos are discussed. Third-level or national organizations have presented a special problem in the creation of social capital in the sector, and have been heavily reliant on government and foundation funding. It is found that traditional social capital in local communities can both provide a firm base for the construction of a successful CFE but can also serve as “communal fetters” that inhibit the emergence of a more efficient and productive CFE. Many CFEs are also plagued by internal conflicts over corruption and control by local elites. The construction of CFEs and their associated social capital has proven to be a powerful force for mitigating social conflict in the Costa Grande of Guerrero. The principal role of foundations in creating a stronger national 3 presence for community forestry than would have otherwise occurred, and in assuring the survival of the more economically precarious experiences in tropical forest management in Quintana Roo. CFEs have been based on a wide variety of arrangements for apportioning the stocks and flows of the common pool resource. This suggests that the exact conformation of the stocks and flows should be left up to the creativity of individual communities and that there is no one right way to handle this issue. Community enterprises in Mexico require the meshing of traditional governance structures with enterprise management Challenges that this meshing produce include managerial rotation, questions of authority and labor administration, issues of participation, and corruption. Communities have particularly struggled with issues of community interference in rational enterprise administration and corruption. The various organizational structures that have emerged in CFEs are analyzed and it is concluded than an organizational innovation based on a tradition from Oaxaca known as the Council of Elders is a unique feature of some CFEs and has served to separate enterprise administration from community politics in some cases. The emergence of “work groups” which represents dissolution of the CFE in favor of smaller enterprises is a genuine grassroots organizational response to corruption. CFEs are found to be highly profitable at all levels of vertical integration. Compared to small business start-ups in other countries, few CFEs appear to fail entirely. There is a clear relationship between size of forest and vertical integration. Finished product communities have on average some 11,000 ha of forest, sawmill communities 7,500 ha, roundwood communities 5,000 and stumpage

Load more