Abstract
As in other developing countries, in Mexico forest and conservation policies are fields of debate and struggle. Among the urban population—which makes up the vast majority of the country—it is generally thought that deforestation is intense, widespread all through the nation; collective property and use of natural resources by the rural poor are regarded as the main drivers. While deforestation and forest deterioration are frequent in many regions, they cannot be explained using simple equations. Simplified perceptions of socio-environmental contexts become foundational assumptions for the elaboration of public policies that often misread local realities and result in dysfunctional panaceas when imposed on local societies and landscapes. Based on the results of empirical research on 103 forest communities, I discuss some of the main demographic, social, and economic characteristics of the Mexican forest communities that safeguard much of Mexican biological diversity.
Complex ecosystems need to be managed by complex governance systems
Elinor Ostrom
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Notes
- 1.
I use the term “community” to refer to both ejidos and comunidades agrarias. When I refer specifically to the later I explicitly call them comunidades agrarias.
- 2.
From 1993 to 2007, the “Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales” (PROCEDE) certified property rights after defining territorial limits. It also certified individual property rights over agricultural plots in those ejidos that agreed to do so. PROCEDE only worked with comunidades agrarias in a second phase and then only to define borders, as the agrarian reform law prohibits the direct privatization of these lands. In order for comunidades agrarias to parcelize land, assemblies need first to decide to become ejidos in order to grant individual property rights with the subsequent possibility of selling them into private lands. In 2007, when PROCEDE closed, 41 % of collective lands in the country remained uncertified. These were mostly forestlands of comunidades agrarias. These lands are not included in the Registro Agrario Nacional (RAN), which consequently reports lower values of the proportion of community property in the nation’s forest cover.
- 3.
The Catholic Church was the main landowner in Mexico by the end of the colonial period.
- 4.
All solicitors of land were registered as members of the official party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) that remained in power for more than 70 years. Often rural members of the PRI were not aware of this affiliation. As party members, their votes were automatically assigned to the PRI in all elections.
- 5.
Second only to Papua New Guinea
- 6.
Constitución General de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Art. 27
- 7.
The majority of the mining concessions in Mexico—granted by the federal government—are currently in hands of Canadian corporations.
- 8.
The perspective of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, distinguishes provision, regulating, cultural, and support ecosystem services.
- 9.
I refer to lack of investment, bureaucratic control, and price controls on the products of small rural producers (i.e., corn, beans, and wheat), which resulted as early as the 1960s in increasing rates of bankruptcy among them. The chronic crisis of the countryside was deepened after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which resulted in massive outmigration from rural and indigenous areas, where illegal cropping is frequently the only viable economic option (Warman A. El Campo Mexicano en el Siglo XX. Mexico: Siglo de Luces y Sombras, Fondo de Cultura Económica; 2000. Robles Berlanga, H M. Apuntes sobre el ejercicio del presupuesto 2007 para el sector rural. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Rural Sustentable Times, Feb 18 (2009):4. Gordillo, Apendini, Bartra, Merino and Scott; 2011. Un nuevo trato para la sociedad rural. Escuela de Administración Pública de la Ciudad de México, México. 2011; Fox, Jonathan y Haight Libby (coord.) Subsidios para la Desigualdad. Las políticas públicas en México a partir del libre comercio, CIDE, México; 2011).
- 10.
During the 1950s–1980s, the country experienced very high population growth rates. These were also years of rapid expansion of the market economy in rural communities.
- 11.
Forest Certification has not grown as initially presumed, as it poses high demands without clear benefits: certification costs, forest management requirements, and quality demanded by export markets, while certified communities have not accessed niche markets with better prices.
- 12.
Canada and the United States (Mexico’s NAFTA partners) are the two largest forest producers in the world. They have strong forest industries and large forest road networks. Mexican community producers—with more limited experience in the forest business, with frequently deteriorated resources, incoherent policy support, and strong barriers to access credit—have found hard to compete with this two commercial partners and other forest product-exporting countries such as Chile, with whom Mexico has also signed trade agreements.
- 13.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the administration of forest activities was under the responsibility of the Secretaría de Agricultura y Recursos Hidráulicos (SARH), which became Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería (SAGARPA) in 1994. Water policy, fisheries, and forest policy became the responsibility of SEMARNAP. In 2006, fisheries management was returned to SAGARPA, and SEMARNAP became SEMARNAT (Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales).
- 14.
PROCYMAF was initially called “Programa de Conservación y Manejo Forestal”; during a second phase, the name was changed to “Programa de Desarrollo Forestal Comunitario” but kept the original acronym.
- 15.
Comisión Nacional Forestal
- 16.
Created in 2001
- 17.
Implemented as rents paid for the nonuse of forest lands
- 18.
Mitigation of global emissions of greenhouse gases through the maintenance of forest carbon sinks
- 19.
Adaptation to respond to the local impacts of global climate change
- 20.
The Direction of Community Silviculture within CONAFOR
- 21.
Pine, pine-oak, oak, fir, and cloud forests
- 22.
The direct sale of the lands of comunidades agrarias is still prohibited; in order to sell their lands, the assemblies need first to decide to become ejidos.
- 23.
Rights holders in comunidades agrarias
- 24.
I understand “forest management” as the whole of planned interventions in forest systems, with diverse purposes: harvest, protection, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, etc.
- 25.
The productivity of sun-grown coffee is on average three times higher than “shade-grown coffee,” but it has much higher environmental impacts as it is based on forest removal. Shade coffee grows under the forest canopy, maintaining biodiversity and other environmental services.
- 26.
Since the 1990s, many communities in southern Mexico practice shade-coffee cultivation, maintaining the forest cover, and getting certification as organic and/or sustainable producers. This was not the case in the 1970s and 1980s when sun-coffee cultivation, based on forest removal, was promoted by government programs.
- 27.
A full description of the methodology followed for the construction of the indices and the full results of the survey are available at www.ccmss.org.mx and in Merino, Leticia, and Martínez, Ana Eugenia, 2013; “A vuelo de pájaro, las condiciones de las comunidades con bosques templados en México.” Mexico D.F.: CONABIO.
- 28.
The variables used to build the indices were as follows: Index for Pressure on Forests—presence of illegal logging, forest fires, and pests; grazing in forest areas; and deforestation. For the Index of Local Protection and Conservation, the variables were monitoring to prevent forest fires, forest pests, and illegal cutting; practices for fighting forest fires, forest pests, and illegal cutting; and presence of community conservation areas. For the Index of Organization and Social Capital, the variables were frequency of community meetings; strength of local governance systems; participation in community meetings, in local governance and voluntary communal work; and communities’ rules for forest harvest and protection, monitoring and sanctioning related to local governance, resource management, and forest protection/conservation. Finally for the Index of Community Forest Economy, the variables utilized were vertical integration of forest production chains, level of diversification of forest uses, productive forest assets owned by communities, and financial assets.
- 29.
For the construction of the indexes, a numerical value was given to each variable. The total value of each of the indexes was classified in five categories: very high, high, medium, low, and very low.
- 30.
In some cases, the abandonment of agriculture has stopped forest clearing, which also corresponds to the lower numbers of forest fires, as frequently mountain agriculture was based on slash and burn practices.
- 31.
As life expectancy has grown in Mexico, ejidatarios have considerably aged without passing their property rights to their children. In the cases that they have, they can only inherit rights to one heir. This also happens in comunidades agrarias, but to a lesser extent, as in this tenure type assemblies have the legal right to accept as many new members as they decide.
- 32.
From 2000 to 2005, the Mexican currency, the peso, lost only 10 % of its 2000 value in relation to the American dollar.
- 33.
Using 1990 as the year of reference.
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Merino-Perez, L. (2013). Conservation and Forest Communities in Mexico: Experiences, Visions, and Rights. In: Porter-Bolland, L., Ruiz-Mallén, I., Camacho-Benavides, C., McCandless, S. (eds) Community Action for Conservation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7956-7_3
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