Something is changing in the landscape around the northern Nicaraguan city of Matagalpa. But the changes are subtle, nothing like the aftershocks of the disasters that have pummeled this area in recent years: the decade-long civil war, the debilitating droughts of El Niño, and finally the devastation of Hurricane Mitch.
In fact, it takes a person with a trained eye to see what is different in this mosaic of small farms and hilltop forests. Such a person is Marcos Guatemala.
Guatemala, a government employee, and several members of a local nongovernmental organization were visiting farmers who were participating in a new forestry and land management program. Behind the wheel of his pickup, he pointed up to a patch of uniform green set in a mottled background of coffee plots. It was a pine plantation, one of many, it turned out. The areas of dark green vegetation on the crests of the hills were the remnants of natural forest. Until recently, these forests had been cut indiscriminately to make way for cropland, but now they are protected.
He stopped to watch a farmer plowing with a team of oxen. It looked like a scene out of antiquity, except that the farmer was plowing with the contour of the land. In former times, said Guatemala, farmers plowed at right angles to the contour, creating channels for the rainwater to rush unimpeded down the slope, carrying the soil with it.
Arriving at the farm of Jaime Lanza Arauz, Guatemala and the others walked along a hillside of coffee bushes interspersed with banana plants. They passed through a barbed wire gate and greeted Lanza, who was using his machete to clean the debris out of a ditch.
Like many small farmers, Lanza moved here after the civil war of the 1980s as part of a countrywide effort to settle former combatants on new land where they could earn a living and provide for their families. So while the area has the domesticated look of long-established peasant agriculture, the impression is deceptive.
Just a decade ago, this same land was covered in natural forest, which harbored a great diversity of plant and animal life, protected water sources, and performed other environmental services. But after the farmers moved in, the natural cover was forced to retreat higher and higher up the slopes. The result was erosion, dwindling wood supplies, and even local climate change. Many residents claim that the Matagalpa area today is hotter and drier than it used to be. The dryness plus the lack of forest cover has created water scarcities that have already caused conflicts. City authorities in Matagalpa are often forced to cut off water to neighborhoods, angering residents, who then forcibly reopen the valves.
Although Lanza and others like him are part of the problem, they are also part of the solution. During a tour of his two-hectare farm, Lanza showed his visitors how each of his plants, each of his trees, was strategically placed with the goal of preventing soil erosion. When it rains, the water’s descent is slowed by rows of carefully raked dead vegetation, and then blocked by ditches lined with shrubs. The coffee bushes and banana plants also follow the contour of the hill. Even the fences do their part. No mere posts stuck in the ground, these are living trees, placed where they can best intercept the flow of water.
This kind of careful farming is “a lot of work” for him and his family, Lanza admits. But he claims after only two years of practicing conservation farming, he can see improvements in the condition of the soil and better crop yields.
Lanza learned these new techniques from agricultural experts such as Donaldo Tórrez, who works for a nongovernmental organization that is on contract to a nationwide forestry and soil conservation program. Torrez’s group provided Lanza with the fence trees and barbed wire as well as the assurance of long-term technical support built on a foundation of mutual trust. “You always have to take the farmer’s opinion into account,” Torrez said. As one measure of that trust, he and his colleagues have worked with area farmers to establish 18,000 meters of soil conservation ditches.
Overcoming adversity. Lanza is one of 2,300 farmers in the Estelí River Basin who have joined with the Socio-Environmental and Forestry Development Program (Posaf, after its name in Spanish) in an effort to preserve the environment and ensure the future of their farms. Considering Nicaragua’s problems—in particular the war and natural disasters that have made the country the second poorest in the hemisphere—Posaf has a remarkable record of achievement.
First, Posaf has enlisted large numbers of landowners to participate in forestry and soil conservation in a continent where failures outnumber successes. In one country, for example, a watershed protection program designed to stem severe siltation of a hydroelectric reservoir has been unable to prevent farmers from removing forest cover even on land owned by the power company itself, right at the water’s edge. In Nicaragua, a major forestry program optimistically begun a number of years ago with strong international backing now consists of miles of burned trees, punctuated by fire towers in various stages of collapse. Posaf is succeeding where others have failed.
Second, Posaf is a government initiative that conducts itself with private sector efficiency and zeal, a rarity in much of Latin America. In fact, in many places, particularly remote rural areas and city slums, the government is nearly absent altogether, leaving nongovernmental groups with sole responsibility for providing health, agricultural, and other services.
A unique public-private program operating in seven priority areas is helping local people protect their land and remnants of original ecosystems.
In just four years, Posaf has helped to establish soil conservation practices on nearly 75,000 hectares of land in the seven river basin areas in which it works . This is a little short of its goal of 80,000 hectares, but not at all bad considering the ravages caused by the El Niño drought and Hurricane Mitch flooding. In achieving these results, Posaf is working with 8,000 producers—twice the number originally envisioned—providing them with technical assistance and small loans for investments and working capital. Since about 80 percent of the producers are small and medium-scale, it takes considerable more time to bring additional hectares into the conservation program than if the program targeted larger landowners.
In addition, Posaf is providing training in sustainable agricultural practices to some 600 groups, and is working with five municipalities in reforestation, soil conservation, and road improvement. Rather than try to persuade farmers to make drastic changes in production systems, Posaf helps them to improve what they are already doing.
Marcos Guatemala, who has been the program’s forestry technical director since its inception in 1996, is proud of Posaf’s accomplishments. The basis for its success, he says, is due to one factor: autonomy. The program administers a considerable amount of money, and from the very beginning it was recognized that these resources would make Posaf a natural target for political interests.
Therefore, when the IDB agreed to finance the program with $15.3 million loan, the Bank insisted that Posaf have considerable independent authority within the Ministry of the Environment, which administers the program. Posaf was given the freedom to manage its staffing and resources on the basis of technical, and not political, considerations. As a result, Posaf has been able to attract a staff of highly qualified technicians, most of whom have been with the program since the beginning, helping to ensure a high degree of continuity and accountability.
After the IDB loan was approved and the program got underway, the Bank remained committed to Posaf’s autonomy. “Since our founding we have had three IDB representatives in Managua and three project specialists,” said Guatemala. “All have insisted on the same philosophy.”
The IDB and the Nicaraguan government are now discussing how to expand the program. But despite Posaf’s fine track record, Guatemala is not complacent about the future. Although he is hopeful that the program will retain its autonomy, he doesn’t take it for granted. “If things change, we could lose everything,” Guatemala said. The need for continuity is particularly great in the field of forestry and land management, he explained, where the time horizon is long and reverting to bad resource management practices can wipe out the hard-won gains of many years.
Another important fact about Posaf is its minuscule staff of 12 technicians and four support staff. Only three are based in the capital of Managua; the others manage field offices and oversee the private nongovernmental agencies that directly work with the farmers. Only 8 percent of Posaf’s budget goes for salaries, office equipment and vehicles. On-farm productive activities receive 63 percent, and the Ngos the remainder. In contrast, in many governmental agencies in Latin America, salaries claim the overwhelming share of the budget.
Posaf staff members maintain a collegial rapport with both the Ngos and the landowners. “The Ngos respect us and the farmers believe we will do what we say we’ll do,” says Guatemala. “If someone has a complaint, we want to hear about it, so we will know if something must be changed.”
The fires go out. Guatemala got back behind the wheel of his pickup. He followed a twisted, potholed road to the crest of a hill, where he paused to admire the fine view. It was the end of the rainy season, and he remarked on the clear skies. But his point was not the fine weather, but the lack of smoky haze that used to fill these valleys.
In years past, farmers set fire to their land to prepare them for planting. For them, fire was an essential agricultural tool, a low-cost herbicide and pesticide that cleared brush and reduced pests. “If they didn’t set fires, they didn’t plant,” said Guatemala. But the fires also caused long-term environmental damage to soils and encouraged erosion. One of Posaf’s first priorities was to stop the burning. It went directly to the farmers, conducting educational campaigns on the practice’s harmful effects. The farmers were convinced: In a recent dry season, not one of the 2,000 landowners working with Posaf in the Estelí River Basin burned their land. At the same time, the farmers learned to sow their fallow fields with cowpeas. This legume enriches the soil with nitrogen, helping to boost corn production.
The road followed the Estelí River. Now just a gentle stream, in 1998 Hurricane Mitch had turned it into a raging torrent that stripped the land of its soil and left behind a moonscape of gravel and boulders. It could have been worse. A midterm evaluation of Posaf found that reforestation and forest preservation had measurable effects in reducing the impact of Hurricane Mitch. Guatemala agreed that new practices did reduce erosion in the Matagalpa area, at least on a local scale. And in the southern part of the country larger conservation works spared parts of Managua from more serious damage. But he took pains not to oversell the soil conservation measures. The rains produced by Hurricane Mitch were of such magnitude that no amount of forest cover could have prevented extensive damage, he said. He pointed to scars on the sides of mountains where even thick forest growth had not kept the water-soaked earth from crashing down into the valleys below. “Nothing could have held that soil in place,” he said.
Guatemala drove through a landscape dominated by coffee plantations and occasional warehouses with signs promising farmers the best prices for their crop. This is Nicaragua’s foremost coffee producing area, and Posaf is helping small-scale farmers to switch from traditional varieties to one that is more gentle on the environment. The problem with traditional coffee is that farmers must use large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, since it grows best on soils newly converted from natural forest, farmers have a strong incentive to keep extending the agricultural frontier. The ideal alternative, Guatemala said, would be organic coffee, which has a minimum impact on the environment and which commands good prices. But organic crops are too difficult and expensive to raise for small farmers, and it is too costly to get the needed international certification.
So Posaf is helping the small farmers to take a middle road by introducing an “agroforestry” variety of coffee. Easy on the environment, it can be planted under less-than-ideal conditions, such as on former pastureland. It thrives interspersed with other crops and shade trees, and needs comparatively little fertilizer.
Tree farmer. Arnuldo Corrales’s house was backed by slopes covered with coffee bushes and fruit trees, and above that with pine trees. Although he and other Matagalpa-area farmers do not come from a forestry culture, they have been forced to recognize the serious effect deforestation has had on their water supplies and soil quality. Many farmers who just a decade ago had cleared their land of natural forest are now having second thoughts.
Large-scale farmers can afford to let the process of reforestation take place naturally, letting denuded areas lie idle to allow nature to reestablish a full complement of native species. But smaller farmers such as Corrales, who has 18 hectares, must put every bit of space to productive use. They regard naturally regenerating land as wasteland. For them, reforestation means planting a crop of trees, in this case the tropical pines that are indigenous to large areas of Central America.
With a spryness that belied his white hair, Corrales helped his visitors squeeze under a barbed wire fence and then guided them up a hillside so steep that progress could only be made by using tree trunks as handholds. These trees, only two years old, were already two meters high. But despite the plantation’s promising start, Corrales anxiously showed the visiting technicians several specimens that were starting to turn brown. The damage was caused by the larvae of an insect that lays its eggs inside the trunks, said one of the technicians. He advised Corrales to burn all diseased trees to prevent the infection from spreading.
It will be years before Corrales’s trees reach sawmill size. But he is not looking for near-term profits. He regards his three hec-tares of trees as an investment in the future. He also values them for the important environmental services they provide, particularly in helping to protect his farm’s water supply.
Agents in the field. Over the years, Lanza, Corrales and the thousands of other farmers that collaborate with Posaf have developed a relationship of trust and mutual respect with the Ngos that carry out the program’s work. Without Posaf, the Ngos and their highly qualified technicians would not get the contracts they need to survive, and the farmers would not receive the support they need to improve their production. Far from being advocacy or volunteer groups, these organizations act as nonprofit consulting firms, carrying out activities that would normally be performed by governmental agencies.
One such Ngo is the Local Ecological Development Agency (ADEL, after its name in Spanish). Operating throughout Central America in the early 1990s, it began with help from the United Nations Development Programme to purchase vehicles, office equipment, and working capital. Today, in Nicaragua alone, ADEL employs 17 technicians, 15 of them consultants. In addition to technical assistance, ADEL manages a credit program that boasts a 98 percent repayment rate, even though it does not require collateral from the borrowers.
Juan Carlos Martínez, who heads ADEL’s technical department, acknowledges that his Ngo and others like it exist because their government does not provide equivalent services. “We have reduced our government to a minimum,” he said. The agriculture ministry used to be particularly strong, he said, but today it does not have the material, human or financial resources to meet the farmers’ needs. A farmer knocking on the door of an extension office often finds it locked “If an extension agent is there,” he said, “he probably won’t be able to visit his farm.”
Not that Martínez disdains the idea of working for the government. In fact, he dreams of the day when he could work for a ministry that was “efficient and strong and depoliticized.” He was emphatic about this last point. “No politics—that would be the indispensable condition,” he said.
He continued: “It is beautiful to work for ADEL. The farmers never know what political party we belong to, and we don’t know what party they belong to. To us, the farmers are citizens, and we judge the projects that they propose to us on strictly technical grounds.
“The cows and the plants don’t understand politics, and I don’t either.”