Las Gaviotas

I've been intending for a while to talk about Las Gaviotas, a sustainable rural community located here in Colombia. Here's an NYT article about the village. Basically it's a village started by a man named Paolo Lugari, where they've planted 8000 hectares (almost 20000 acres) of Caribbean pine in the Colombian eastern plains. From this plantation the villagers harvest resin that they sell and process for paints and other industrial products. They cut down pine trees occasionally to thin out the forest, and they use these trees for paper pulp and lumber. The plantation has also increased rainfall in the area and allows the extraction of drinking water for local use and for sale in Bogota. The village is in the process of expanding its model of ecologically-benign development to another village called Marandua, where a collection of displaced people and ex-members of armed groups will live and prosper in the shadow of a socially responsible airforce base. The eventual aspiration is to extend Gaviotas-style forest villages across the 6.3M hectares of plains in Vichada department.

It seems that a big part of the business model to fund such an expansion is through selling carbon offsets to companies in the rest of the world. Carbon offsets are when a company that wants to limit its carbon emissions (either due to a sense of corporate responsibility, or because the law obligates it) buys credits from a project that is actually absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hence between the two companies there is a net zero emission. It's an interesting concept, though at best a compliment to on-site emissions reduction strategies. There are some valid concerns about fraud in the offsets market, i.e. some phantom project in India selling false offsets to gullible or corrupt Western companies, but Gaviotas's offsets program seems like a valid model.

Sounds good, right? (Except for the sort of reptilian appearance of Gunter Pauli, one of the project's European fans). I certainly would like the creation of stable rural communities in the sparsely-inhabited plains of Colombia. But I've a few concerns. First off, I don't like the project's characterization of the eastern plains as a barren wasteland wishing it could be a forest. The plains aren't a cut-rate version of tropical forest, they're a different ecosystem altogether. Supporters of the Gaviotas plantation claim that the area used to be a forest, but they're talking about one million years ago. The Andes mountains didn't even exist back then! To put it another way, in the past million years my home region of Chicago has cycled between near-tropical conditions and glacial ice cover, and everything in between. We don't describe the forests of southern Wisconsin as a bastardized version of the rightful, one million year ago vegetation.

This brings up another point. If the plains aren't a degraded forest but rather an ecosystem in their own right, then converting the area into a forest implies a major ecological tampering. This isn't necessarily bad--replacing relatively unproductive plains with forest that houses endangered wildlife, produces economic products for people, captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and increases rainfall, can certainly be justified on many levels. But let's acknowledge that we're proposing a major ecological alteration, justified as it may be.

The Caribbean pine that is the foundation of the villagers' reforestation plan is not native to the plains of Colombia. It's not necessarily invasive, and is actually native to an area relatively close by, but planting thousands of acres of non-native trees in a strict grid pattern is not usually what I think of as an ecological project. That said, according to the claims of the project supporters, an unexpected but welcome effect of the plantations is that over time other, native trees begin to grow under the canopy of pines, eventually resulting in a diverse tropical rainforest. So if we accept that it's desirable to turn vast swathes of the plains into tropical rainforest, plantations of Caribbean pine seem to be a decent path to attaining that goal. In newer plantations the Gaviotas project adds oil palm, rubber trees, and cashews into the mix. This seems to me a sensible diversification, and both rubber trees and cashews are in fact native to the Amazon region that borders Vichada. Oil palm is not native to America and is usually associated in Colombia with large monocrop plantations whose owners terrorize entire villages to steal their land. Presumably there would be no forceable land-clearing in the Gaviotas project, and they have an explicit philosophy of devoting no more than 15% of their plantations to oil palm. The reasoning is that since various palm species represent no more than 15% of a natural Amazonian forest, palms shouldn't comprise more than that proportion of the villagers' "reconstituted" forests.

Basically the Gaviotas model seems sound to me on an ecological level. Obviously I have some misgivings about the plantation mentality of the project, but I respect what they're doing. There's only one remaining thing that worries me about the project, and it's a big issue. According to all the articles I've read, Las Gaviotas is home to 200 people and 8000 hectares of trees. That means that there are about 40 ha for each person, or 150-200 ha per family. I assume this proportion is what's necessary for each family to have a decent income, and hence for the community to be economically viable. 150 hectares is a lot for one family, almost 400 acres. In the States that isn't so much, and in fact on the sparsely-settled plains of Colombia it's not that outrageous of a figure either. But if the desire is to expand the Gaviotas model of development across the plains of Colombia, this represents a problem. If the model doesn't allow for an increased population density than that already present in the plains, that means it can't accept any newcomers. Perhaps it would raise the living standards of the current residents of the plains by allowing a better income from forest plantations than that obtainable from the traditional regional vocation of ranching, and it would certainly be attractive to the rest of the world if the Amazon rainforest with its carbon-absorbing nature were expanded beyond its present boundaries. But in a country with a huge population of internally displaced and landless people, I think that any viable model for large-scale development has to include the landless of other areas.

In light of the low population density accommodated by a Gaviotas-style model, the prospect of expanding the project to 6 million hectares takes on a rather foreboding prospect. If each worker in Gaviotas requires 40 ha, then an expansion of the model to all of Vichada would only create 150000 jobs or so. That's paltry considering the amount of land involved, and even more so considering that the conversion of grasslands to forest would eliminate thousands of current jobs in ranching. And what if some current residents of Vichada want to keep their grasslands, and not convert them to forest? Throw in the Colombian president's enthusiasm for the idea, and participation of big foreign companies, and it takes on the sinister foreboding of so many prior agro-industrial megaprojects promoted by the government. Millions of hectares with plantations instead of people, producing industrial products for export (even if they are green products like carbon offsets or natural resin). And nothing done to improve the situation of millions of landless Colombians who look longingly to the eastern plains as a possible new home.

I don't want to be one of these progressives that finds fault with everything, but the prospect of a government-mandated plantation project for an entire department does scare me some. Of course I should make it down to Gaviotas someday to check out the project and to learn more about it. In the meanwhile, I've been working for months now on a different project for the plains, this one more agrarian. I hope to post that plan in the next few days.