Delsa Espinoza Miranda sees herself as a good farmer but she
has gone against the grain of Costa Rican farming for the past
three decades. Instead of clearing the land to grow crops, she
planted trees.
"Thirty years ago, she was seen as a weirdo," says Steven Price,
vice-president, World Wildlife Fund Canada, a group working in
the area. Her neighbours cleared land and snickered as she built
steps for cows to climb the eroding hillsides.
Today, her land is productive and shielded from the driving wind
- a small island of green surrounded by overworked and stripped
land.
"You can stand there in her pasture and see the neighbouring one
which is brown. It has all the same species of plants but they
are not thriving as they are on this farm."
While 30 years ago Espinoza was a pioneer of
sustainable agricultural, now her farming techniques may also
prove important for the protection of wildlife reserves.
Espinoza
farms in the Arenal Conservation Area that stretches some 200
thousand hectares along the northern spine of Costa Rica. It
buffers 90 thousand hectares of protected wildlife zones such
as the monteverde Cloud forest and the Arenal volcano.
While there is general agreement that human access to sensitive
wildlife zones need to be controlled, there is not the same
agreement on buffer zones farmed by people like Espinoza.
|
Classical Approaches
Flawed
|
To conserve these protected areas, the classical approach would
have forced Espinoza and everyone else out of the buffer zone,
says Dan Janzen, a biologist with the University of Pennsylvania,
who spends much of his time in the forests of Costa Rica. But
the idea is flawed, says Janzen.
Low-use and abandoned land generate secondary growth species
that crowd out the forest along the borders, creating a "deep-edge"
effect: "The forest cannot go through its normal ecological
process. If your reserve is small, the whole thing is edge,"
says Janzen.
"Sociologically, it also treats the neighbours as if they are
some form of ants, uncontrollables, savages, uneducated, uninterested
in conservation. The idea is that you put this buffer between
us and them."
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Keep the land
by using it
|
But a new approach is emerging that is based on the idea that
"you keep the land by using it," says Janzen. The best neighbour
for protected zones is sustainable and ecologically sound agriculture.
It provides a habitat for migrating wildlife that represents
a large portion of the creatures living in protected zones.
Looking around Espinoza's farm, the significance of her trees
for the nearby protected areas becomes apparent. "They are filled
with a wide variety of birds and wildlife," says Price of the
WWF. Her farm is an example of the value of sustainable agricultural
practises in creating habitat for many species that migrate
outside protected areas.
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Less than half
of habitats in national parks
|
And it is crucial for habitats to exist in agricultural areas.
"There are 23 major habitat types in Costa Rica, says George
Powell, a biologist with the RARE Centre for Tropical Conservation
in Philadelphia. "If you analyze how they are represented in
national parks, it turns out only about half are well represented."
For example, the resplendent quetzal of the Arenal volcano
and monteverde Cloud forest region, is a colourful, long-tailed
bird that depends upon wild varieties of avocado. It will migrate
from protected zones to agricultural zones depending on where
the avocado is currently in season.
|
Less than half
of habitats in national parks
|
Costa Rica has developed a multi-million dollar industry around
the resplendent quetzal. By not addressing the needs of the quetzal
in the buffer zones, they will drive it extinct. The local economy
that has developed around it will also go extinct"
This is a crucial issue for Costa Rica. Its parks and reserves
attract thousands of visitors from around the world, making tourism
the country's biggest earner of foreign currency. With 208 species
of mammals, 860 species of birds, 160 species of amphibians, 220
species of reptiles, 130 freshwater fish and 350,000 different
species of insects, the protected areas of Costa Rica boast an
extraordinarily rich biodiversity.
To Costa Rica's credit, it has made serious attempts to save its
resources. It began protecting land in 1913 and now has more than
230 protected wildlife areas nationwide. The government even convinced
lenders to swap debt for conservation programs in the 1980's.
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Deforestation
is staggering
|
But deforestation of nonprotected areas is staggering. Costa Rica
has one of the highest deforestation rates in all of Latin America
- more than 148 thousand acres of land is cleared each year by
cattle ranchers, illegal loggers and miners, and a growing population
seeking new land.
Increasingly, these parks look like islands of green surrounded
by deforested land. And as the deforested areas grow, the more
they impact on protected reserves by undermining their watersheds
and eroding their soils.
Significantly increasing the number of protected areas is impossible.
Twenty-five per cent of Costa Rica is already in conservation
zones or reserves. In reality, the future of nature reserves are
dependent on working with neighbouring farmers to support ecologically
sound agricultural.
Costa Rica has taken steps. It created the National System of
Conservation Areas that bolsters the buffers zones by providing
support for sustainable agricultural practises.
With the Canadian International Development Agency, the WWF is
working in the Arenal Conservation Area that buffers monteverde
to promote strategies that integrate conservation practices with
viable economic development.
Price stresses that the real threats to Costa Rica's parks are
not farmers poverty. He says, it forces farmers to use unsustainable
agricultural strategies and shift from region-to-region with few
options but to clear new land as the old degrades.
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Income generating
projects
|
Through the Canadian project, many small-scale, income generating
projects have been introduced on a trial basis, such as improved
dairy pasturing, animal husbandry, local handicrafts, coffee
roasting, tree nurseries, fruit canning and drying, organic
farming, ecotourism and a medicinal plant nursery.
The aim is to help break the cycle of poverty and environmental
degradation, and foster the idea that conservation and social
and economic well-being go hand-in-hand.
As for Delsa Espinoza Miranda, she simply continues her work.
Since 1989, in collaboration with the WWF and Costa Rican conservation
groups, she has expanded the reforestation of her land - three
more hectares along with an experimental area for native species
that protect the monteverde watershed. No one snickers any longer.
Espinoza is now called upon by touring international visitors
who want to witness what she has always seen as sound agricultural
practice.
January/February 1996 Volume
22 Number 1
