500 Year-Old Trees Felled For $100

by Nefer Munoz

Experts consulted by IPS pointed out that "sustainable management plans" through which logging is permitted in Costa Rica made it possible to fell 500-year-old trees, which sell for as little as $100 apiece.

"Officially it is said in Costa Rica that wood is extracted in a planned and sustainable manner. But what really exists is legalized deforestation," Quirico Jimenez, a forestry expert with the non-governmental National Institute of Biodiversity (INBIO), told IPS.

This Central American country of 3.5 million currently has 2.09 million hectares of forest, two-thirds of which is in private hands. The current laws stipulate that any logging on privately-owned land must be carried out within the framework of a previously approved sustainable management plan.

But Jimenez has joined in the howls of protest against such management plans. Recognizing that the initiative meant well, he said that in practice, it was playing havoc with the environment.

The forestry expert complained that logging companies regularly exceeded the established ceiling of five trees felled per hectare, due to the lack of adequate mechanisms to enforce the legal limit.

Critics of the sustainable management plans also protest that they are drawn up only by forestry experts, when they should be drafted by multi-disciplinary teams that include biologists, geologists and botanists, in order to best determine what areas of forest should be left untouched.

The government has acknowledged that its "sustainable" system has flaws, and holds that the main obstacle standing in the way of correcting those shortcomings is a lack of funds.

Guido Chaves, director of development at the National System of Conservation Areas, told the local press that the large number of sustainable management plans filed with the government every year made it impossible to oversee each and every one of them, and admitted that there had been anomalies.

"It is true, we must acknowledge that unauthorized as well as authorized trees are felled," Costa Rican Vice-President and Environment Minister Elizabeth Odio told IPS.

But Odio said that although environmental organizations have called for a total ban on logging in Costa Rica, that was not feasible as it would be impossible to enforce, and would spell disaster for the local economy.

She stressed the need for a national educational campaign aimed at preventing indiscriminate logging, and said she would back the idea of preparing an inventory of Costa Rica's trees, as no surveys have been carried out to determine how many specimens there are of each species.

"For me, the saddest thing about the logging is the poverty it leaves in its wake in the communities," Javier Baltodano, a biologist with the local Friends of the Earth group, told IPS.

According to Baltodano, no tangible benefits are left behind in the rural communities where the management plans are implemented, because the logging activity generates neither jobs nor infrastructure.

On the other hand, it leads to a loss of biodiversity and natural resources, and leaves behind trails of destruction caused by the loggers' trucks and heavy machinery.

Although indiscriminate logging like that seen in the 1970s and 1980s no longer occurs today in Costa Rica, the "selective logging" legalized through sustainable management plans is becoming a serious threat for many species of trees, environmentalists warn.

Thanks to heavy lobbying and pressure following the publication of independent studies on the environment, the Environment Ministry ordered a ban on the felling of 18 endangered species of trees, such as mahogany, balsam fir, black laurel and lignum vitae, in 1997.

But demands are getting louder that the ban be extended to additional species, and to regions where logging is heaviest, such as the southwestern Pen’nsula de Osa, and the Huetar Norte and Tortuguero regions in the north.

Critics of the government's forestry management policies say another questionable element is the position taken vis-a-vis development projects.

Any investment project, whether involving tourism or infrastructure development, can be declared a "project of national interest" by the government, thus granting the authorization to fell trees and build whatever is necessary.

"That is a veritable privateering license, because it puts higher priority on economic interests than on environmental protection," Roxana Salazar, a member of the non-governmental Fundacion Ambio, told IPS.

Like the other experts interviewed, Salazar called for a change of course by environmental policy-makers, arguing that Costa Rica's international image as an ecologically-conscious country was not totally merited.

Some 837,000 hectares of land are currently protected in Costa Rica. But environmentalists warn that if the present rate of logging under the supposedly sustainable management plans is not curbed, the country stands to lose all of the forests lying outside its preserves in the not-so-distant future.