| European
Tropical Forest Research Network |
Table
of contents
News 47/48 homepage
CONTRIBUTION OF INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY LOGGING TO THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS:
The case of indigenous groups in Bolivia
By Diego Pacheco
Since a large proportion of the world’s poor is concentrated in and around forests, the use of forest resources may provide poor forest-dependent people the means to grow out of poverty. For some time, commercial community logging under conditions of sustainable forest management has been seen as one of the most straightforward ways of achieving this. Providing poor people with more options and opportunities to enter into community logging can help to achieve several Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – but only if conditions are right, and practical ways of doing this have not been well-proven on the ground.
Forest governance is being decentralized in Latin American countries, particularly in Bolivia , in the context of an ongoing municipal-driven decentralization process aiming to attain, inter alia , the MDGs. This decentralization comprises political, organizational and fiscal reforms with transfer of responsibilities to lower levels of governance or municipal governments; provision of secure property rights for indigenous people and other small-scale loggers over forest lands; and promotion of local social participation.
The author’s study in Bolivia has shown that decentralization is having a great impact in facilitating commercial timber harvesting by indigenous groups in their recently titled common-property forests, called Original Community Lands ( Tierras Comunitarias de Origen , TCO). There were three indigenous groups harvesting timber before decentralization, now there are 11 and the number of beneficiaries has multiplied by ten. This is in spite of the slow and bureaucratic process of common-property forests legalization: of the 20 million ha to be legalized for indigenous people since 1996, only 5 million ha have been titled so far.
Municipal-driven policies and forestry regulations have not particularly favoured indigenous people’s participation in community logging businesses, since: the forestry sector is still the most centralized in Bolivia ; forestry has not been a priority for municipal governments; and the timeconsuming and costly regulations are still a hurdle for some groups. The most important factors favouring indigenous community forestry logging are the processes of securing common-property rights over indigenous forest lands and the strengthening of common-property organizations and participatory policies at the local level. The effects of these three aspects of the decentralization policies are quite disparate in terms of motivating indigenous people to concertedly engage with the timber business.
Community forestry needs to overcome three groups of problems to become feasible and profitable. First-level problems are ecological and institutional: a forest held by an indigenous group must have some timber potential, and the group must have secure property rights over the forest. Second-level problems are those concerning basic organizational, institutional, and technical capabilities for developing commercial logging. Third-level problems are the lack of external conditions favouring the development of commercial community logging to achieve higher levels of profitability: infrastructure availability, networks of relationships, competitiveness.
A timber user group thus may have secure ownership of a forest with potential but still have second-level problems. Also, a user group may have overcome first- and second-level problems but still have difficulties in realizing optimal benefits of logging because it is facing third-level problems. The problems are not necessarily sequential; they are generally intertwined in indigenous groups’ daily lives. Overcoming all three groups of problems – a difficult and costly process – can make a real difference in raising the earnings from timber harvesting.
Decentralization policies help solve poor forest-dependent people’s first-level problems by securing their rights to forest land, but second-level problems must be solved by people themselves. Family incomes from timber in six Bolivian indigenous groups was related to the timber potential of the managed forest area, the size of the total area devoted to timber harvesting, and the degree of institutional development of the groups. The achievement of higher timber incomes is an incentive for creating better rules for developing timber harvesting – which usually include decision-making rules the people have developed over centuries. Once created, such institutions have another clear effect: more sustainable timber management that preserves forest regeneration.
Indigenous groups in Bolivia are still far from overcoming most of the third-level problems, so while community logging is a feasible livelihood, it is not yet sufficiently profitable. Only indigenous groups aiming for the integral well-being of the whole community with sustainable forest management are likely to be heading for success in the local achievement of the Millennium Development Goals .
Further information:
Diego Pacheco
Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy
Indiana University , Bloomington IN , USA
Email: dipachec@indiana.edu
c. Sanchez Lima 2282, Edif. Da Vinci 3B
La Paz , Bolivia