| Bolivia's threatened forests resuscitated
In the face of growing demand for industrial timber, development workers are helping resuscitate Bolivia’s forests. Their efforts have created the largest sustainably-managed forest in the Amazon basin, transforming Bolivia from a worst-case example to an ideal model for forestry certification.
Bolivia now boasts more than 30 percent of the world’s certified tropical forests, thanks to the Bolivia Sustainable Forestry Management project, a $25-million effort funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Under the auspices of the project, commonly known as Bolfor, Bolivia is on target to claim 2 million hectares of certified forest this year. To put this into perspective, roughly 5 million hectares of tropical forests are certified worldwide, according to the Forest Stewardship Council, an independent body.
Ten years ago, Bolivia’s forests were in anarchy. Timber could be extracted by anyone with the means to do it. And those licensed to log paid no attention to conserving the country’s tropical forests, which cover half of Bolivia’s landmass and contain a wealth of biodiversity.
That has changed. Today, nearly half of Bolivia’s productive forests are regulated under sustainable management plans while the other half is protected and being studied for future management.
These management plans were implemented by groups whose livelihoods depend on forest products, including timber companies, indigenous groups, private property owners, and rural communities.
“Our initial mandate was to find ways to make management of natural tropical forests socially sound, economically viable, and ecologically sustainable,” said John Nittler, a Chemonics consultant and chief of party for the first seven years of the project. “And we had to convince the entire forest sector of the validity of these findings.”
Nittler and his team worked hard at the project’s outset to win private sector support, successfully demonstrating that responsible extraction methods were profitable.
Policy reform posed another challenge. According to Ivo Kraljevic, Chemonics’ supervising manager for the project, the institutional environment was extremely unaccommodating.
“It was a free-for-all,” he said. “Anyone could do what they wanted, whenever they wanted, and yet the people who actually lived in the forests were excluded because they could not overcome the institutional barriers to entry.”
In response, USAID and Chemonics helped develop the country’s 1996 forestry law, which set the stage for structured forest regulation in Bolivia.
While the forestry law virtually rebuilt the institutional framework overnight, Kraljevic said it was not as simple as reordering the landscape. Indigenous and rural communities needed to be trained to manage forests using sustainable practices.
Preston Pattie, the project’s chief of party for the last three years, agreed with Kraljevic.
“These communities had no knowledge of mapping or use of GPS systems in preparing inventories of tree species,” he explained.
Communities had to learn how to survey the land, divide it into parcels, and take evenly-distributed samples of tree size and type.
Under sustainable forestry plans, the area to be exploited is divided into dozens of parcels. One parcel has timber extracted each year before being left alone for decades. The process is repeated in the next parcel, creating a rotation of extraction and rejuvenation.
In addition to this rotation, the oldest specimens of the exploited species are left standing. The branches of these tall trees provide seeds for new specimens and cover from the sun, allowing the forest to regenerate.
The plan mitigates deforestation further by plotting the position of each parcel’s valuable trees on a computer, which then works out the shortest set of roads needed to remove felled trees. Lumberjacks are also taught to fell trees in ways that avoid damaging other trees.
According to Pattie, these techniques are easy to disseminate and replicate, which he contends is the project’s greatest legacy. His team trained more than 4,000 people during the life of the project.
Compared with Mexico or Guatemala, Bolivia is new to sustainable forestry. But the country has made impressive strides in preserving one of its most valuable natural resources.
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