Galápagos: a different kind of evolution

For years tourism in the Galápagos archipelago seemed like a sure win for inhabitants of the remote islands.

Cruise ships would unload tourists, who admired the volcanic landscape and local fauna that inspired British explorer Charles Darwin to write his theory of evolution.

But for the locals, the Galápagos have also been a source of social and economic exclusion, and controversy.

Few tourists would interact with the local population or spend money acquiring local products and services. Most of the vegetables sold on the islands, located in the Pacific Ocean nearly 1,000 kilometers west of continental Ecuador, had to be imported because the local produce was insufficient and of poor quality.

The giant tortoise, for which the Galápagos Islands were named.

Locals saw no benefit in tourism. Overfishing along the coast and other practices harmful to the environment flourished.

For the past four years, this reality has begun to change for many Galapagueños in the towns and on highlands of the archipelago, which has a population of about 24,000 inhabitants distributed in 4 main islands.

With technical assistance and training funded by the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF, for its Spanish acronym), an autonomous fund of the Inter-American Development Bank that focuses on private sector development, locals have learned how to protect the environment while increasing the quality and the quantity of the food and services they produce.

“The project gave us the knowledge to do things well and the knowledge to preserve our marine resources,” said Pedro Tipán, manager of a cooperative of fishermen in the island of San Cristóbal. “It also gave us an alternative to work with tourism.”

About 100 members of the cooperative, called Copesan, participated in training programs financed by MIF and local partners. The courses offered by the project enabled fishermen to acquire skills to work as crew members on any of the tour boats in Galápagos. The project also allowed them to legalize their working status by meeting the Ecuadorian Merchant Marine requirements. Many too took courses to become dive masters, winning the opportunity to work on scuba-diving vessels.

The project also prepared some fishermen to develop a new tourism alternative related with fisheries: artisanal sports fishery. This new alternative lets fishermen take tourists around the islands, so that the visitors can experience what is a fishing day like, and enjoy a meal prepared with a freshly caught fish. Others also learned how to fish migratory species in deep waters like tuna to supply the local market.

By providing fishermen with alternatives, the program has helped reduce their need to fish sea cucumber and other endangered species near the coast to make a living, complementing efforts by the government and other organizations to control overfishing and protect the environment.

“This project shows that in order to protect the environment we need to promote social and economic inclusion,’’ said Santiago Soler, the team leader for the MIF project, which was approved in 2005 and it will be completed this year. “By improving management, quality, marketing, and technical skills in the tourism, agriculture and fishing industries of the islands, we are allowing them to benefit from sustainable activities and conservation.”

Protecting the Environment

Besides providing locals with an opportunity to work in the tourism industry, the project also seeks to help protect the environment by fostering local sustainable farming of vegetables and native plants. This reduces the risk of invasive species entering the island through imports from the continent and has helped protect and even restore the local flora, Soler said.

Technical assistance and courses offered by the program taught local farmers how to grow produce in greenhouses, allowing them to offer high-quality and a stable quantity of fruits and vegetables for the island’s tour boat operators, restaurants and hotels. They also learned how to more efficiently use fresh water, a very scarce resource in the archipelago, through better collection and storage of rainwater and the use of drip irrigation in the greenhouses to reduce waste.

“With the greenhouses the vegetables grow under a controlled environment during any time of the year, allowing farmers to produce more and better,’ according to Mario Piu, coordinator of project in Galápagos.

At the Unión Santa Cruz association of farmers, production of vegetables nearly doubled in 2009 from a year earlier in the association’s eight greenhouses, according to Piu.

Coffee farmers

The benefits have not been limited solely to the use of greenhouses. Coffee farmers in Isla Florena, for example, have learned how to build nurseries for coffee plants in order to replant them in their land. The farmers are planning a nursery for as many as 30,000 coffee trees that will be offered to those interested in growing local species of coffee.

Reforestation is promoted with native and endemic species, such as Scalesia pedunculata.

Since coffee needs to grow in the shade, this initiative promotes reforestation with native and endemic species, such as Scalesia pedunculata. In this way, the project is actively contributing to the conservation of the Galápagos Islands, restoring plants to their original habitats, Piu said.

Farmers in Isabela, San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz islands are expected to replant about 114 hectares of land that today is unproductive and occupied by invasive species with coffee plants grown in nurseries in association with native and endemic plants, according to Piu.

The technical assistance provided by the project has allowed Miguel Aguirre, a coffee farmer in Santa Cruz Island, to also use local species to protect the soil against erosion and provide the shade he needed for his coffee trees. Thanks for the project, he was also able to obtain a certification that his coffee is organic, which has helped him get a better price for his beans and attract tourists to buy his product.

Aguirre says organic coffee prices are as much as 20 percent higher than regular coffee.

“The program helped us add value to our product,” says Aguirre, who is also president of the Santa Cruz association of coffee producers.

Investment in water treatment

Tourism companies are changing the way they do business after the project began a pilot program to create a seal of quality in tourism in the Galápagos.

At Hotel Mangle Rojo, one of 36 small companies participating in the pilot project, new measures have been implemented to use water and electricity more efficiently with technical assistance from the program. For example, the hotel has cut water consumption by more than half by waiting to have a full load of napkins and other types of household cloths before turning on the washing machine, according Roberto Dager, the hotel’s manager.

Mangle Rojo, which is located in the island of Santa Cruz and it has 14 rooms, is also investing $50,000 in water treatment equipment that uses natural chlorine, to treat waste water produced by the hotel. The seal has helped the hotel attract more environmentally conscious tourists, he said.

“This investment will allow us to help preserve the mangroves,’’ said Roberto Dager, manager of the hotel, which had to fulfill requirements from a list of more than 60 items in order to win the seal from the program.“ Thanks to this pilot project, people here are changing their views about investing in preservation.”

More than a certification, the Tourism Pilot Project seeks to build a local culture of quality, with the implementation of principles related with customer service and sustainable tourism in the Galápagos Islands. The Tourism Pilot brought up the interest of provincial authorities, so that key institutions such as the Ministry of Tourism and the Galápagos National Park have become partners in this initiative.

Aiming high

Besides helping locals produce more and better, the project also offered a diploma in sustainable tourism for 60 people in tourism enterprises and government offices involved in the design and implementation of policies for the tourism industry.

“We realized that many people involved in policy making didn’t have the background on sustainable tourism and we offered this course to ensure decisions are made on a technical basis,’ said Oscar Aguirre, executive director of the Galápagos Tourism Chamber, which is executing the project.

Moreover, the project also enhanced the role of cooperatives in the islands to help members to improve their marketing and processing of products.

Tipán said the MIF project helped the cooperative organize its account books and improve the relationship with members. With the technical assistance offered by the program, fishermen now apply best practices in the handling of the fish they catch so that it can reach the market with a better price. The cooperative is now seeking funding to begin processing the fish in its facilities and export it to the continent.

For the coffee growing association of Santa Cruz, business prospects are better than ever, according to the association’s president, Miguel Aguirre. For the first time in his 30 years of growing coffee in Galápagos, his association has been directly approached by foreign buyers willing to taste the less acid drink produced by the beans growing in the island’s rich volcanic soil.

His association is seeking $600,000 to set up a coffee processing facility to free itself from having to sell to intermediaries. Soon, it will launch its own coffee brand, “Galápagos Evolution Coffee,” specially tailored to the international market.

”We are now close to selling our coffee directly to the continent. This is something that is giving me great satisfaction,” said Aguirre, 40, who has been growing coffee since he was 10 in a farm that he later inherited from his father.

The blue-footed booby is an impressive representative of the Galápagos avian fauna.

MIF approved a $1,863,000 grant to the Galápagos Provincial Tourism Board to help finance a program to improve the capacity of small and medium-sized local enterprises to establish links with tourism in archipelago. Local counterpart financing for the project totaled another $1.1 million.

During this project, the MIF has worked in close coordination with the Ecuadorian and local government authorities as well as international agencies engaged in common goals in the Galápagos, including the World Wildlife Fund (WWW), the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation, Charles Darwin Foundation, Conservation International, and the Fundación para el Desarrollo Alternativo Responsible (FUNDAR).

“With the knowledge acquired with the project, we have contributed to build a more sustainable way of living in the Galápagos Islands,’ Soler said.