Quibdo -- The north-western Pacific Coast of western Pacific Coast of South America is catalogued as one of the world's biological "hotspots." A humid land of extraordinary plant and animal diversity, it is largely covered with tropical rain forest and inhabited by Afrocolombians and Indians. The Afrocolombians, who make up 90 per cent of the population here, were first brought in as slave labour during the 17th cent ury, while Indian civilizations along the Pacific Coast date back more than 2,500 years. The region has long been neglected in terms of human development, and now its biological wealth is in danger of being sacrificed for public and private investment schemes of little benefit to local communities.
The plundering has already begun, with industrial logging, intensive gold mining, plantation agriculture, shrimp ponds and roads that bring settlers and cattle farmers in their wake. Aware that a conservation strategy was urgently needed, the Colombian government drew up the "Biopacifico" project in the early 1990s and received a US$ 9 million grant from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to carry it out. The aim of the project is to launch a set of initiatives to protect the eco-systems of the Colombian Pacific Coast, which are part of the larger "Choco biogeographical region." The Choco extends for more than 1,000 kilometres, from the state of Darien in Panama to Esmeraldas in Ecuador (see map, page 12). Although Colombia is the only country so far to move ahead on Biopacifico, another $3 million in GEF funds is available for similar work in the two neighbouring countries.
Unusually heavy rainfall in the Choco is partly responsible for the range and high proportion of endemic plant species - about a quarter of the plants found here are exclusive to the region, and new discoveries are being made all the time. Everything is exuberant, from the great shining leaves, bigger than a beach umbrella, to the' deep red Heliconia along the river bank. There are more than a hundred species of palm trees, which people here eat or use as material in making houses, basketwork, toys , blowguns, musical instruments and brooms.
Birds, butterflies and frogs abound, some of which still await classification by scientists. Among the species that are known, some are in danger of extinction, among them the manatee, the tapir and the great green macaw. Also possibly doomed is the r ich, semi-flooded catival forests of the River Atrato lowlands, which have been reduced to a quarter of their former expanse. There is still time to act, but not much.
The Biopacifico project got started in March of 1993. The first task - and perhaps the most formidable - was to win over communities that have a deep distrust of centralized government programmes and foreign cooperation. "There's a long history of failed projects in the Pacific/' says Fernando Casas, the Colombian coordinator of Biopacifico. "It's slow and difficult, and we have to give people support so they can formulate and reach their own targets. Biodiversity is absolutely critical to their survival and it can't be conserved without their participation ."
In recent years Colombia has been building a framework for greater participation. Several initiatives - the 1991 Constitution, the decentralization of public spending and recent environmental legislation, and a new law giving Afrocolombian communities collective property ownership - all open up new opportunities. Indians and Afrocolombians in particular will have more secure rights to the lands they have traditionally occupied and, presumably, a firmer commitment to looking after their own natural resources. Biopacifico is encouraging such developments with the hope that they will help reinforce cultural values and management practices such as mixed farming, which are environmentally suited to the region.
The typical riverside house in the Choco is made of wood and thatched with palm leaves. It stands on stilts just back from the bank, out of reach of floods . The house is surrounded by useful plants and trees, including oranges, guavas, lemons, plantains, coconuts, sugar cane, chontaduro palms, pineapples, gourds and medicinal herbs. Tied to the bank is at least one canoe, and hidden in the turbid water there is usually a cage made of bamboo for holding fish. Much is provided by the river, the land an d the forest. But the people have other needs too - shoes, notebooks for school, cooking oil, saucepans, medical treatment - which they must pay for, and which force them to take more from their environment than they know is wise.
The project recognizes that people can conserve their resources only if they are given other options, and it is working toward this end. Yet it has already been fiercely criticized, both by residents themselves and by local organizations that had hoped for funds to carry out their own programmes. One question heard repeatedly in Quibdo is: if the project preaches participation, why weren't people here asked to take part when it was originally designed? To remedy this, the first operational plan was widely circulated among gov-ernment, non-governmental and grass-roots organizations for comment, then thoroughly revised.
The Biopacifico project is based in Bogota - another example of centralism , say Pacific residents - but has appointed regional field coordinators who were chosen primarily on the basis of recommendations by local organizations. It falls under the overall jurisdiction of the recently created Ministry of the Environment and is administered jointly by the ministry, the National Planning Department and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A series of agreements with Regional Development Corporations, which are responsible for environmental regulation and conservation under the environment ministry, will help institutionalize Biopacifico, and provide logistical and administrative support in the field.
Four main areas have been defined for action: collecting information on the Choco from sources inside and outside Colombia, along with field studies in the region ; assessing biological resources and developing ecologically- sound systems for agriculture and forestry; building awareness of the importance of biodiversity among local communities and encouraging their participation in preserving it; and integrating Biopacifico's objectives and strategies into national and regional plans.
Early on, it was clear that one of the major issues would be the compilation - and intellectual ownership - of biological and botanical knowledge. The recovery of traditional knowledge and the systematic organization of scientific data on the region, which are central to Biopacifico's aims, have already begun. However, what was intended to be a dialogue between scientist and sage has already run into sticky arguments.
"First it was timber and gold ... now it is our biological wealth," says Alberto Achita, an Embera Indian and leader of the OREWA regional Indian organization. "This could be the second great looting of our resources and knowledge."
Achita adds: "This form of scientific investigation does not benefit our people, but rather the pharmaceutical companies of other countries. Will Indian knowled ge be recognized, and who will get the income if biological resources are exploited?"
OREWA was to sign a contract with Biopacifico for studies of Indian lands , leading to the demarcation of areas suitable for conservation, farming and other activities. Achita explains: "We want to define with our communities what resources exist in order to lay the basis for a sustainable development plan. We want to do it our way - respecting our cultures - and we have been working on this for years and years. But there is a clause in the contract awarding intellectual property of all this information to the state. We wouldn't even have the right to use it!"
Fernando Casas says it is understandable that the Indians are worried. "A new form of contract is being designed in consultation with UNDP, which distinguishes between the ownership of knowledge about biodiversity, which is what OREWA wants, and the biodiversity itself," he says. "This is important for Colombia. We need to ensure that community interests and rights are defended. There's an international trend towards exploiting biodiversity. We are in a key region and we need legislation - the project will play a role in this."
Downstream from Quibdo, in the Afrocolombian village of Tangui, the women say that a real dialogue is beginning. As a first step, Biopacifico sponsored a workshop. "We went out collecting plants and naming them and putting them in a notebook' says Juana. "It was not just them asking us what we know. We found out the scientific names and the way plants are classified. We collected stories and information about the plants, what they're used for. Some of us know about some plants and others know about different ones, so it's interesting for us too."
The women point out a borojo fruit tree nearby. "You can eat borojo or make it into juice. It's good for back-aches and for stopping burns from blistering." A booklet compiling such traditional knowledge will be published and made available to schools; the plant collection itself is being kept in a herbarium at the university in Quibdo. A study of local production systems is also under way.
Like most communities in the Pacific region, Tangui depends mainly on fishing and farming - especially plantain, rice, sugar cane and fruit trees -and forest resources. Rodents, armadillos and turtles are eaten, though they have become scarcer since the first chainsaws reached Tangui. "The land is our sustenance," says Florentine Mosquera, president of the middle Airate peasant association known as ACIA. "If the environment is in a bad state, then so are we."
The Colombian Pacific region, from the westernmost Andean watershed to the coast, extends over l0 million hectares and encompasses 83 municipalities with a total population of nearly one million. The coastline is a maze of tidal inlets weaving through mangrove forests; the rivers are highways that penetrate to the cloud forest of the foothills. Everyone in the Choco seems to paddle or pole a canoe, from toddler stage to old age: children going to school, women wearing large straw hats with turned up brims taking fruit to market, families moving house, men going fishing.
It is an area too vast, with too many different ecosystems, for Biopacifico to cover effectively; in fact, many believe the project is too ambitious to produce anything but superficial results. One solution has been to divide the area into "ethno-biogeographical transects" for much more detailed study. The transects run from the Andean mountains through sub-Andean climates to the coastal lowlands, embracing several different social and biological zones.
A pilot project in the Citara transect involves the establishment of a regional centre for biodiversity conservation near the headwaters of the Atrato and San Juan rivers. The aim is to coordinate work among local government authorities, forming a ne twork of field stations and researchers in the area. A comprehensive picture of the flora, fauna and ecosystems, as well as current and potential use of natural resources , will be put together with local communities taking part. In the Naya transect there is a plan to form a bio-ogical corridor connecting the Munchique Natural Park with the Farallones Natural Park via lands under concession to the University of Cauca.
Biopacifico is also interested in providing information to influence high- level policy decisions; a useful case study of the Darien region and the proposed PanAmerican Highway route has been carried out for this purpose. A gap of just over 100 kilometres of road separates South America from Central America and would complete the connection from the tip of South America to Alaska. There is strong pressure to finish the highway despite the protests of environmental and Indian organizations and the spectre of social and ecological devastation wrought by roads in northwest Colombia. The planned route, subject to an environmental study, would go across the lower Atrato wetlands and straight through Colombian and Panamanian national parks on either side of the frontier. These parks are well preserved islands in a region heavily exploited by lumber companies, by coca and marijuana farmers and by cattle ranchers from Medellin laundering their fortunes. They not only shelter a great variety of animals and plants, they also provide valuable evidence for the study of biological links between North and South America via the Darien land bridge. The Biopacifico report pin-points priority areas for conservation and suggests a different route for the road, along the Caribbean coast.
The Pan-American Highway is just one of many infrastructure investments planned for the Pacific. Others include ports, hydro-electric schemes and more roads, all part of the economic thrust towards the Pacific arena. Grassroots communities, although they are among the poorest people in Colombia, are ambivalent about such projects. They have already seen the ecological havoc left in their wake, by single-crop agriculture, mangrove cutting and the dredging of river beds for gold.
One particularly damaging environmental crime was perpetrated by a lumber company extracting wood along the River Patia during the 1970s. In order to transport logs to sawmills at Bocas de Satinga, the company built a 1,000-metre-long, one-met re-deep trench joining the Patia to the River Sanquianga, which flows past Bocas de Satinga.
The result was that the River Patia changed course and nearly all its water comes down the Sanquianga now," says Georgia Castro, who had to rebuild his house five times as the river grew in force and width. "You used to be able to throw a guava across the Sanquianga, now it's 30 times as broad and we've lost most of our farmland. We have to live off the forest, cutting wood, and the trees we cut are smaller and smaller every day." Bocas de Satinga, a town of over 5,000 people, may disappear completely if the current process of erosion continues. At one of BiopacificoD5s educational workshops, held last June in Guapi, a participant described the situation on the River Guajui, listing environmental problems such as diminishing fish and game, diseased fruit trees and erosion. "Our environment is still in a better state than on other rivers," he said, "but maybe people who've destroyed their environment live better than we do - they're not as poor."
However, another participant, from the River Micay, concluded that development had brought greater poverty and forced emigration. Referring to the proposed construction of a hydro-electric dam and a road, he said: "We don't want outsiders imposing projects on us. What's in it for us? The energy generated is for the interior of the country." This goes to the core of the region's problems: the fact that the dominant economic model in Colombia is extractive and the Pacific has resources to exploit.
Gustavo Wilches is a Colombian environmentalist and occasional consultant to Biopacifico. He has given talks to private sector groups, which are not as closely linked up with the project as the strategy suggests they should be. "The whole country must learn that the Pacific Coast needs its own special development models, and that saving the communities is an integral part of saving the coast, and vice versa," h e explains. "We have to show businessmen that it's actually better value to save the region . And we have to give communities the tools to justify their position in economic and political terms." Helping the people of the Pacific to understand and to defend the importance of biodiversity for their future is crucial to Biopacifico's success -indeed this alone would justify the project. Numerous meetings and workshops have been held all over the region; contracts are being signed with non-governmental organizations as well as grassroots movements and universities based in the Pacific; local governments are giving weight to environmental variables in their programmes; and appropriate education and training materials and methods are being developed.
Although the relationships between land, culture and biodiversity underpin the philosophy of the whole project, they are especially important in the mobilization process. During a June workshop in Cali, representatives from more than 25 popular organizations laid the foundation for a local communications network with biodiversity as a central theme.
Nearly everyone at the workshop spoke about land rights, ethnic roots, cultural traditions and home-grown education programmes; most of the organizations hoped one day to have their own local broadcasting system. The range of talent was impressive, from storytellers spinning yarns based on Pacific folklore to dramas and skits about social or environmental problems they face. All sang, improvising clever rhyming verses about biodiversity on the spur of the moment.
Like the communities themselves, the Biopacifico project is percolating with ideas at the moment when Colombia is in the throes of designing its overall environmental policy. "With a recent change in government, new legislation and a new environment ministry, there are new opportunities as well as complications," says Mauricio Ramirez, a programme officer at UNDP in Bogota.
"Still," he adds, "Biopacffico is setting standards for other biodiversity projects around the world. It's blazing a trail on questions such as the use of genetic inf ormation and intellectual property. What's also new is the degree of involvement of the community. Other countries have been creating isolated reserves, cutting them off from the population. But you can't tell people not to use resources when they have n o other way to subsist. According to Ramirez, UNDP itself is also learning a lot from Biopacifico and the Guandal forestry project (see page 14). The two initiatives are to be more closely integrated under a formal agreement. Biopacifico has had to be flexible: for example, aquatic systems were not included in the first phase, yet Pacific society is largely amphibian and water is essential to understanding biological processes. This has changed, and greater importance is also being given to the Andean watershed . The project is sandwiched somewhat uncomfortably between the local communities and government and private sector developers, trying to achieve a consensus on rather abstract-sounding subjects. But this immersion in the Pacific region's land scapes, peoples and resources will help lay the basis for a national strategy to conserve biological diversity, a process which, in Colombia at least, is off to a promising start.
Brazilian-born journalist Sarita Kendall is a correspondent for the Financial Times. She lives in Bogota, Colombia.
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