Ongoing Projects

Economic Empowerment through Reforestation (EER)

The backbone of all of Camino Verde’s activities is EER, whose goal is quite clearly to discover and implement ways for conservation and reforestation to become economically viable, productive, and finally desirable alternatives to short-sighted agricultural techniques more commonly employed in the Amazon today.  Because of the ecological importance of trees to the health and sustenance of environmental and human systems and communities, our aim is to draw attention to and help develop the marketability of tree crops including fruits, nuts, medicines, lumber (with truly sustainable management of planted, non-virgin trees), crafts products, and more.  We believe that in Peru’s “developing” economy, great economic opportunities still exist in overlooked and underexploited tree-based resources ranging from cashew to copal.  By searching through the “food forests” of Mollison and other permaculturalists and beyond to tested agroforestry strategies for greatest economic yield, we have begun to discover many possibilities or kinds of reforestation, the most important being the following:

1. Food Forests.  As described by Bill Mollison, food forests are productive orchards that provide products for consumption and for sale.  In addition to primary tree yields (specific kinds of prized or valuable fruits and nuts either for sustenance or for market), secondary yields are also obtained in the form of firewood, forage, habitat, shade, and much more.  Though these orchards are decidedly human-designed and for human benefit, they are still very much forests, made up of trees that nonetheless produce oxygen and absorb atmospheric carbon.  Economically important food forests are becoming more common in Madre de Dios, where the planting of certain key species for yearly market crop is quickly becoming a popular supplement to the more widespread practice of annual grain cropping for income.
2. Reforestation.  In the parlance in Peru as in so much of the forestry literature, the word reforestation only occasionally is used as a general term for the replanting of trees in areas that have been deforested but more commonly is used as a term for one specific kind of reforestation practice with a decidedly economic slant.  In some extreme and undesirable cases, areas are in fact deforested in order to be reforested, meaning that primary (“virgin”) forest systems with their phenomenal biodiversity are replaced by monocultural (single species) or few-species systems that provide greater economic returns in terms of a single product (usually lumber, though occasionally paper pulp, fiber, food, etc.) but whose biodiversity profile becomes drastically impoverished.  Some studies by the Peruvian government have shown that overall sustainable economic production from fruits, craft materials, and other sources in a patch of virgin forest will over a longterm period outperforms—economically—an equivalent patch of pure lumber trees which only provide a single harvest in five, ten, or fifty years.  Even so, monoculture reforestation is common throughout the tropical third world and is backed by many conservation groups as a lesser of evils.  Here in Madre de Dios, where biodiversity represents an unequaled resource, such monocultural plantations are somewhat inexcusable, especially given the lack of enormous deforested tracts so common in Brazil and other parts of the tropical world.  Fortunately, reforestation is more commonly practiced not as a replacement of virgin forests but as a productive use for pioneering secondary forests some years after these latter are created by slash-and-burn agriculture.  Put more sequentially:  a farmer clears a patch of primary forest and plants corn or rice or plantains.  After one or at most three harvests on this particular land, the plot is abandoned and a different patch is cleared and farmed.  Meanwhile, the first plot begins to regenerate; a secondary forest of pioneering soil-improvers, short-lived “weed trees,” go about restoring the devastated soil.  Little by little, seeds from longterm and hardwood trees filter in from nearby healthy forests thanks to wind and animals.  As the soil is improved and favorable niches are created, more and more of these longterm trees take hold.  With time, something approximating a virgin forest is established.  Remarkably, in the typical scenario in Madre de Dios, in which exhausted agricultural lands are not turned over to livestock for grazing but are simply left to grow back, within a few years we begin to see many hardwoods taking root and fighting through the ephemeral pioneer trees.  Reforestation, in the sense that we encourage and implement, means intervening in secondary forests at just this point when more valuable trees are already begin to infiltrate anyway.  Narrow paths are cleared through the secondary forests and planted with valuable species such as cedar and mahogany.  In twenty years these trees finally beat out the now old-aged pioneer trees and form a more permanent canopy.
3. Silviculture.  Though cited in many theoretical models for sustainable management of resources in the Amazon, silviculture, or reforestation in the virgin jungle itself (rather than in secondary forests) is rarely practiced in Madre de Dios.  With great evidence suggesting that silviculture produces healthier, faster growing trees, we hope to help make silviculture implementation a reality in this region.  Using a simple cart track (all too common in the lumberjack jungle) a row of valuable trees is planted in an easy to look after setting.  Growth is improved and sped up by the dense canopy of the forest, which causes the young trees to grow straight, tall trunks desirable for lumber in much less time than under full sun.
4. Plantations  We use the word “plantations” to refer to settings where ground-up strategies are required to rehabilitate exhausted soils, usually in the case of pasture lands for livestock.  Here, unique systems are being developed that draw from agroforestry and permaculture models and that encourage the fastest possible establishment of economic viability in the system.  In this case, our center in La Joya serves as the testing ground for these intensive strategies, whose end products would include areas of food forests and reforestation zones.  Because of the terrestrial nutrient deficiency in over-exploited tropical grasslands, multi-tiered and multi-species systems are needed to revitalize soils so that more valuable and biodiverse forest systems can be established.

The selection of these four kinds of tree-based agriculture are the initial core of the EER project’s tool kit.  The project itself consists of four phases of development: (1) research and preparation, the amassing of informational tools and technologies; (2) the implementation of EER system models, meaning the creation of “model farms” at Camino Verde’s two centers; (3) establishing infrastructures at both centers to prepare for the sharing of our models with a broader population of local farmers, including the creation of plant nurseries to spread “plant technologies” and sustainable construction of meeting spaces, lodging for students, visitors, and volunteers, etc.; (4) finally, the ongoing life’s work of Camino Verde is in the patient, deliberate process of sharing sustainable agriculture with the local population and bringing tree-based agriculture to the most people and on the most land possible.  We hope to help local farmers penetrate new markets and proliferate new products through cooperative efforts and truly fair trade.  Ultimately, it is our ongoing commitment to fulfill our project’s name, to show that economic stability and empowerment through reforestation are possible as a favorable alternative to the current hand-to-mouth destitution of third world farmers everywhere.