Over the past few years, private conservation has covered close to a million hectares in the South of Chile, surpassing the forest areas under regulated community land tenure, and making it comparable to the previous expansion of pine and eucalyptus plantation companies, today exceeding 2 million hectares.

Unexpectedly, as an explosive phenomenon led by corporate executives and organizations mainly originating from the United States, Chilean society has witnessed the appearance of a private land conservation movement that has spread to large national companies and other groups of Chilean society.

In the surroundings of this land recently acquired for conservation, the communities observe their new neighbours without knowing what to expect. Previous waves of change in land tenure have made them understandably mistrustful.

The challenges for the forest newcomers include overcoming the category of enclaves or conservation strongholds that protected forest areas established by the Chilean State are considered to be. It has taken the National Forestry Corporation a long time to change its image vis-à-vis the neighbouring communities, but it has eventually come to recognize that national parks are not viable if they have neighbouring communities as their enemies, or if they exclude them from conservation plans.

Beyond national parks, from the standpoint of conservation at a landscape scale promoted by international organizations, a set of protected areas, like islands in the sea shared with tree plantations and communities with degraded forests, is not a viable proposal.

According to a report commissioned by WWF on community forest management, conservation without people has shown itself to be unsustainable. This is the situation in wide zones of inhabited forests in the South of Chile and is in no way any exception in the Latin American context. The slogan at the recent World Parks Congress held in South Africa was that benefits must go beyond the limits of protected areas. The active involvement of local and indigenous communities in planning, implementing and managing protected areas must be ensured and the benefits generated by these areas must be shared.

Now, this seems clear, but how is it implemented? What mechanisms should be put in place to make conservation effectively benefit communities that depend on forests? And what incentives are effective to encourage communities to join conservation efforts?

Probably single and simplistic formulas are not the solution; usually a problem as complex as this has many solutions. The way to find them starts by informing and strengthening the communities and their organizations, generating conditions for the establishment of real negotiation, both at local level and at national level, involving community representatives, private conservation promoters and the governments.

Support to communities in these negotiation processes cannot be given from the perspective of the myth of the "good savage" defending the intrinsic conservationist role of forest inhabitants, but rather from the perspective of backing organizations defending the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and their essential role in the implementation of conservation strategies.

A point that requires special attention in this process is that of the different perceptions of conservation, from the standpoint of the communities and from the standpoint of private conservationists. It is probable that for the inhabitants of forests and forest zones, conservation would appear to be difficult to detach from sustainable use, materialized in community forest management.

Where should private conservation meet community forest management? In conservation landscapes in which community rights are respected and where these communities share forest-generated benefits.

By: Rodrigo Catalán, e.mail: catalan@terra.cl

- Colombia: An example of a community-managed forest

The Uitoto peoples in the Araracuara region, in the mid course of the Caqueta River show some common socio-cultural characteristics, among which a production system based on the sustainable use of three spaces: the forest, the river and the “chagra” (a clearing in the forest used for poli-culture plantation).

This system is established on the basis of an organization of knowledge handed down from generation to generation, over thousands of years, on the structure of the forest, alternating with the use of different landscape units, the sowing of a large diversity of species and the indigenous people’s own land-use techniques.

The establishment of the “chagra” culminates after a five-stage process, demonstrating all the knowledge of the indigenous farmers regarding the forest around them. These stages in order are as follows:

1. Election of the soil according to what will be sown
2. Elimination of lianas, small plants, etc.
3. Felling of large trees
4. Burning of the remains of vegetation
5. Sowing of the various traditional species

The forest production and use system is composed of areas with transitory crops, usually for periods of less than 2 or 3 years, known as “chagras,” and areas of stubble in a stage of regeneration.

The community has a production for subsistence and self-consumption, mainly based on traditional crops, hunting, fishing and gathering fruit from the forest. The system is characterised by the presence of a great diversity of species and varieties that they establish in the ecosystem in a staggered way. The result is permanent availability of food and material for other uses.

Iris Andoque describes the process: “One plants cassava over all the 'chagra' (sweet cassava, wild cassava and manicuera); manicuera (this is a type of cassava used to prepare a slightly sweet beverage of the same name) in the lower part, the sweet cassava in the middle because of the animals, and the one to grate on the river banks to be picked quickly. Then we have vegetables: sweet potatoes, beans, old cocoyams (taro), new cocoyams (yautia) and dale dale. These are planted where the land was most burnt and there are ashes. Coca has to be planted in furrows in the high part and transplanted after 3 years. Pineapple is also planted apart. One always organizes work; you have to start at the bottom and work up, never from the hill towards here, at the bottom there is canangucho (a type of palm, Mauritia flexuosa) that does not dry up the sources of water, then tobacco in the damp part and also manicuera, in the middle, grapes, guacure and other fruit trees, up on the banks there is no problem, on the hill go and plant chontaduro (a palm with edible fruit)”.

Forest management is regulated by their own ecological calendar, adjusted to annual cycles, the phases of the moon and environmental changes - climatic and hydrological changes - showing the capacity for observation possessed by all the indigenous peoples.

The forest is a space that may culturally be defined as the centre for settlement, experimentation, learning, transformation and adaptation of the ethnic peoples who live in the region.

Hernando Castro says: “From the beginning, all things were created and ordered by a father creator, reproduced and harmonized by mother nature and administrated by human people. The creator handed us the word of how to look after and manage it to avoid imbalance”.

According to the indigenous vision, the forest originates from the air, the clouds, water and tree-grass, which leads to the traditional knowledge of the Uitoto world, an east, a west, a down (south), an up (north); dimensions that require spaces such as the forest and the river for their definition.

Aurelio Suárez adds that “According to the principles of each ethnic group comes reality; the origin has a single beginning, but the tradition depends on each ethnic group, the clans, it is different; tradition brings management most of all of the soil, the ecological part depends on the tradition of the ethnic group; the origin is one, both for animals and for humans; naturally mother nature guides, administrates and cares for the knowledge part, the human part is what is guided here”.

For indigenous peoples, all is interrelated, all has an origin, a history and a management that must be known and practiced. The animals and plants are intimately related as one comes from the other, making them complementary, and a relationship that is impossible to break because it would attack the vital balance that enables the environment to operate adequately and to prevent diseases from coming.

The capacity of the indigenous groups in the region to obtain their food support from a strip of transformed forest, where they have learnt to manipulate and benefit from seeds, soils and environmental conditions, is yet more evidence of their millenary knowledge, very rich and useful in the context of sustainable forest use.

The indigenous vision of temporal land use makes it possible for species of fruit trees or other species to be found long after the chagra has been installed, even in mature forests, showing the inhabitants' phased management of their surroundings. Diversity is conditioned to the species with most significance and advantages, but even so, there are numerous varieties of fruit-trees to be found in the stubble lands of an indigenous family. This makes them farmers with wide knowledge and very considerable agricultural experience.

The different species are sown year after year in order to obtain a range of plants at different stages of growth; they also intervene on regeneration processes, making them farmers that enrich the forest.

The presence of fruit-trees in the forest in the stage of regeneration is not by chance; the replacement of their wild equivalent is a typical characteristic, responding to the need for reciprocity with nature in the hope of a good yield.

Hernán Moreno says that “When one is going to make a “chagra”, one asks for permission, it is like an agreement. In the forest, there are wild grapes, forest calmo, guamo, chontaduro de monte, which is a thorny coconut palm; these fruit-trees belong to the animals. One says I am going to fell and then replace the trees I felled by domesticated fruit-trees, if I cut a wild laurel tree, I plant laurel, if I cut down palm trees I plant canagucho or chontaduro. So, when these trees grow in the stubble, they are shared with the animals”.

The selection of seeds, the techniques for sowing and distributing the trees in the plantation are the contribution of indigenous farmers to enable these species to be useful resources to the family and the means for the forest to be enriched after it has been restored.

In words of Hernando Castro, “Within the indigenous cosmo-vision, the relationship between human beings and nature is fully appreciated; the territory is our mother, we are her children and therefore we take care of it with the word, the inheritance of our forefathers and food for knowledge, growth and development of life in harmony with nature. The recovery of the traditional knowledge of our elders as to the use of natural resources, taking them to different designs, it is what the elders say: make the word dawn”.