Five more farmers in our project area have signed contracts with us to create native forest plantings on their land, and our current plantings are mostly doing very well. See Chris's blog and the news item for June 23.
We are trying to incorporate our Dominican partner, the Los Cerezos Agroforestry Association—but this is not easy. (See the Tree Bank news item for March 28.) We need to incorporate the Association as part of our coffee import project. We're hoping to sell coffee from our Tree Bank farmers to help raise money for the Tree Bank.
We hope this year to buy a pickup truck for the Tree Bank nursery. A pickup would save us money over the long run, allow us to expand our planting program, and help our farmers market their tree fruit. For more on the pickup issue, see page 4 of our April newsletter. You can help us raise money for the pickup by becoming a Tree Bank Partner.
Updates are current as of June 25.
Tree Bank / Hispaniola:
The Mission
The Earth Sangha’s Tree Bank, founded in 2006, is intended to help small-holder, developing-country farmers improve their incomes by conserving and restoring native tropical forest.
Tropical deforestation has been one of the greatest ecological disasters of our era because tropical forests are the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth. Tropical deforestation is also a major contributor to climate change. Since the mid-1980s, the extent of the world’s “old-growth” tropical forest has declined by more than 15 percent.
Many activities are destroying tropical forest, but by far the most important of these is agriculture. Agricultural practices vary from one region to another, but from a global perspective, all major tropical farming systems are heavily implicated in deforestation. This is true of permanent cropping (for instance, the huge soybean farms in the Brazilian Amazon), periodic cropping (“slash and burn” or swidden farming, which is practiced in most tropical forest areas), and cattle ranching (although deforestation through ranching is primarily a New World phenomenon). Of course, there are sustainable practices within each of these systems, but such practices are not the norm.
In terms of the numbers of people involved, small-holder farming is by far the largest sector of tropical agriculture. Such farmers work small plots of land usually devoted to growing food for their own families, although many of them also grow some crops for sale. There are hundreds of millions of small-holder farmers throughout the tropics, and many of them are farming near forest or in formerly forested areas.
Unfortunately, farming in these areas is often a losing proposition for people who are working with conventional cropping systems and who cannot afford large supplies of chemical fertilizer. (Most small-holder farmers are poor, at least by North American standards, and must work their fields with little or no fertilizer; and most are not managing soils in ways that could maintain fertility without such chemical inputs.) The source of the difficulty is the fragility of most tropical forest soils. In most tropical forest areas, it is very difficult to produce reasonable yields of conventional crops, year after year, on the same plot of land because the soils, once deprived of their forest cover, tend to weather and lose nutrients fairly quickly. By the fifth year of conventional cropping, cumulative yield declines of 50 percent or so are common in many areas. Such declines have tended to force the clearing of more forest in a continual quest for fresh and fertile soil.
This scenario continues to unfold in many parts of the world, to the great detriment of both the forests and the people. Haiti, the most deforested country on Earth, is the extreme example.
Now for the Good News
There are some encouraging trends for the forests as well. Many formerly forested areas are no longer being farmed as intensively as they once were, largely because the world’s cities are drawing more and more people out of the countryside. Especially in South and Central America, many farm plots have been abandoned, or are being used less frequently, and many of these are regenerating as forest.
The growth of “secondary forest” on abandoned farmland is not an antidote to the continued loss of old growth tropical forest, because old growth forest is home to a far greater number of species than secondary forest. But the resurgence of secondary forest does create major opportunities—for conservation and perhaps even for the farmers themselves.
The Tree Bank is designed to spread those opportunities, by engaging small-holder farmers in the conservation of extant forest and in forest restoration. Where secondary forest is returning to a landscape, active restoration can help guide and amplify the process. Where it is not returning, restoration can begin the process.
Forest restoration can help protect the land in several ways. Restoration can establish patches of secondary forest in “strategic areas,” to protect soils and streams, and as buffers to surviving patches of old growth. Restoration can increase the ecological value of already-established secondary forest, by creating a more diverse forest plant community. And restoration can help override factors that often interfere with forest regrowth—factors such as unnatural fire regimes, the spread of invasive alien plants, and heavy grazing.
But to make restoration work for the forests, it must also work for the people. It must become an integral part of the agricultural economy. The aim of the Tree Bank is to make that happen.
The Tree Bank’s basic objective is to create an international market for a new kind of farming service—community-level tropical forest restoration—and to help farmers develop the resources necessary for selling into that market.
The Tree Bank is not intended to displace conventional crops, but to supplement them by giving farmers a chance to dedicate some of their most vulnerable lands to native forest—and to forest-compatible crops. The Bank also supports the conservation of remnant forest fragments on small-holder plots. This system will help stabilize soils and waters, preserve biodiversity, and provide additional farm income.
The system is designed to connect farmers to an international public that cares about the fate of tropical forests and that would be willing to “buy” the restoration of degraded land. We also plan to market selected products from participating farms, as another way of supporting forest restoration and improving farm incomes.
The Tree Bank will strengthen both resurgent tropical forests, and the social role of the small-holder farmer. Eventually, we hope that participant farmers in one region will help “transplant” the Tree Bank system to other regions.
Tree Bank / Hispaniola
We opened the Tree Bank in June 2006 by establishing a program on the island of Hispaniola, in the Dominican Republic, along the border with Haiti. (See the maps on this page.) Hispaniola is home to 18 million people, many of them poor farmers whose livelihoods are increasingly threatened by ecological degradation, low farm-gate prices (the payments farmers actually receive for their crops), and rising farm debt.
The Tree Bank / Hispaniola is a collaboration between the Earth Sangha and the Los Cerezos Agroforestry Association, a group of about 45 farms. Our project goals are to:
Extend native forest cover on both sides of the DR-Haiti border,
Re-establish populations of native tree species that are in decline,
Expand the enterprise of farming to include conservation services, and
Help young people develop a broader vision of how their lives relate to the environment.
The Tree Bank / Hispaniola is unusual among agroforestry programs for its high level of “ecological literacy.” It respects native biodiversity, avoids the use of invasive species, promotes the use of appropriate native species, and propagates native planting stock from locally collected wild seed (local ecotypes) whenever possible. The use of local ecotypes helps to maintain the genetic identity and genetic diversity of wild tree populations.
The Tree Bank / Hispaniola is the region’s first native-forest restoration program. It is also creating the region’s first sustainable-production native-timber program, the first community-level tree-fruit marketing program, the first environmental education program for children, and it is the first effort of its kind to be intended for implementation on both sides of the DR – Haiti border.
For more information on how the program works, read the Work page.