Abstract
Poor peasants – particularly rainforest colonists, who were heralded as pioneers until quite recently – are often blamed for the destruction of the world’s remaining tropical forests. This chapter uses a political ecology approach to examine rainforest colonization in the buffer zone of Nicaragua’s Indio-Maíz Reserve and to demonstrate that the “demonization” of peasant colonists is unjustified. It traces historical, cultural, and economic dynamics in rainforest migration and pasture conversion and examines the land use practices of recent colonists in the context of a dominant conservation discourse and a competing peasant-oriented counter-discourse. It attempts to understand the meanings of conservation to peasants themselves and argues that solutions will only be found when peasants’ viewpoints are fully taken into account – requiring integral, multiscale approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
The analysis presented here is based on dissertation research conducted between 1995 and 2000 (see Larson 2001). In particular, this paper draws on interviews conducted during two field visits to the community of San Ramón in 1998 and 1999, including: extensive interviews with key informants in the peasant cooperative Coopesán and in the community, in-depth case studies (semi-structured interviews, including life histories) of 18 coop members from 15 households of varying income levels, and a survey of 21 (out of 50) Coopesán member households and 46 (out of 110) non-member households. Due to mobility problems at the time of the survey, these were not entirely random samples. The author additionally interviewed municipal and relevant central government officers and officials from most of the NGOs working in the region, and also participated in various workshops and meetings with them over a five-year period.
- 2.
It is important to mention that many agricultural frontiers have been long inhabited by indigenous populations prior to the arrival of colonists. This aspect of frontiers will not be addressed in this paper, since indigenous peoples have not lived in the area of this study for over 100 years.
- 3.
The idea of ecological fragility in frontiers often refers to shallow soils that make them unsuitable for repeated agricultural use, though this is not always the case (see Hecht 2005). Such lands often end up being converted to ranching, the ‘sustainability’ of which is disputed (Yatsuda Arima and Uhl 1997). Fragile and unsustainable or not, of course, the paramount social, political and ecological issues relate to the greater ‘value’ placed on rainforests today.
- 4.
I will refer to the river as the San Juan River and the region, which goes by the same name in Spanish, as Río San Juan.
- 5.
Ipecacuana, or ipecac root, is used in pharmaceuticals.
- 6.
Nevertheless, it turned out that much of the land planned for settlement had already been invaded, hence the colonization program became much more of a titling program than a resettlement project (Jones 1990).
- 7.
IAN did finally recognize the problems that ensued with annual crop production and began to promote perennials, but too late to have a significant impact (Jones 1990).
- 8.
Costa Rica was not friendly to the Sandinista government and permitted the use of its border lands to harbor counterrevolutionary forces.
- 9.
There were also clearly land speculators, those who made it a business to exact a price from peasants from other regions looking for land and help them move into the reserve. This appears to have involved only a handful of people.
- 10.
Diversification and percentage of land under forest and pasture are based on the time of the survey; number of trees planted was based on the past three years; and conservation practices were analyzed as a mixture of the present and past 1 to 3 years, depending on the particular practice.
- 11.
Though the size of the coop sample is small, I conducted independent sample t-tests to compare the results and found that the differences are highly significant (at the.01 level). Numerous iterations of the smaller coop sample were compared to smaller random samples of the larger non-member group (Larson 2001).
- 12.
Nevertheless, given that the ecological relationship between tree cover and stream water is a complex one, peasants are not always convinced by the simplistic arguments the environmental NGOs commonly repeat: “the streams will dry up, the rains will stop falling, and the region will become arid” if you cut down the trees.
- 13.
Or more accurately, some families saw benefits but others did not. For example, there were families with orange or other fruit trees who let the fruit rot rather than eat it.
- 14.
Until 2007, Nicaragua’s national development policy considered peasants as little more than a supply of cheap labour, rather than as a group of producers with the potential to develop on its own merits (GoN, n.d.). Policy options include: national policies supporting long-term credit and technical assistance for investments in both out- and in-migration areas (such as for intensification in the former and community forest management in the latter), and the study and support of alternative commodity markets where these are possible and desirable – including payments for environmental services.
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Acknowledgments
This research was undertaken as part of my dissertation research and would not have been possible without generous support from an EPA STAR Fellowship, Fulbright IIE, the Rural Sociological Society, and the National Science Foundation. I also want to thank Wil de Jong, Anja Nygren, Marja Spierenburg, and Laura German for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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Larson, A.M. (2010). The “Demonization” of Rainforest Migrants, or: What Conservation Means to Poor Colonist Farmers. In: German, L., Ramisch, J., Verma, R. (eds) Beyond the Biophysical. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8826-0_3
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