Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola is a partnership with a group of small-holder farmers who live along a section of the Dominican Republic – Haiti border. We are working with our farmers to improve their incomes and to conserve and restore the region’s native forest.

The project is based in the mountain community of Los Cerezos, on the Dominican side of the border. (See the aerial photo below.) The remaining forests of Hispaniola’s rugged interior, virtually all of which lie on the Dominican side of the border, are among the most important surviving remnants of the Caribbean global biodiversity hotspot. (A hotspot is a region of very high biological diversity that is also under a very high level of threat.)

The program consists of a community tree nursery and a set of planting incentives. The Tree Bank nursery produces native trees, grown from locally-collected wild seed, as well as certain non-native species. The non-natives are selected for their economic importance—for example, we grow citrus and coffee. None of the non-natives are invasive. The planting incentives focus on the native species and are intended to add economic value to a farm’s native forest. Our incentives include our Rising Forests Coffee program (see the Coffee tab, above), and the region’s first reasonably priced farm credit program; the credit program is linked to a forest easement system, also a regional first.

Eventually, the result will be a system in which small-holder farmers can “sell” native-forest restoration to foreign contributors, through the sale of carbon or biodiversity credits, through the sale of forest-compatible goods, and through direct donations. Such a system, we hope, could one day benefit small-holders in the many parts of the rural tropics.

Our Rising Forests Coffee is featured in the Worldwatch Institute's "Nourishing the Planet" blog! (Posted on October 4.)

Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola's "Rising Forests" coffee is now available for sale! Read Chris’s note of September 27.

We have launched our "Forest Credit" system! See the Tree Bank News for details. (Look for the September 9 and 23 entries.)

Bad weather, bad news: Gaspar, our Tree Bank / Hispaniola Project Director, just sent word today that Hurricane Irene scored a direct hit on our Tree Bank nursery. All of the nursery’s shade cloth has been shredded, and it will all have to be replaced. We don’t yet know how much that will cost, but it is likely to come to a couple of thousand dollars. If you’re interested in the Tree Bank, now would be a great time to make a donation! (Posted on September 5.)

Our first shipment of Tree Bank coffee has finally arrived! See the Tree Bank News for details. (Posted on August 19.)

To see our project area, meet some of the people involved, and take a look at our work, view these three slide shows:
the Tree Bank Land slide show,
the Tree Bank People slide show, and
the Tree Bank Work slide show.

For a bird's-eye view of the region as a whole,
take a look at the Tree Bank Aerials slide show.

To learn more about the support that Tree Bank farmers receive, look at the Bank’s Table of Benefits and the form that we use to enroll farmers in our forest credit program—our Solicitud de Préstamo.

If you are interested in the wildlife value of the region’s native forest, you might like to look through our Tree Bank Bird List, which includes all threatened, endangered, endemic, and US-migrant bird species that may occur in our project area.

For news on the Tree Bank, check the Tree Bank News and recent issues of our newsletter, the Acorn.

For broader context, take a look at our Tree Bank Reading List.

An update: You can read about our coffee in the Worldwatch Institute's "Nourishing the Planet" blog! (Posted on October 4.)

We have been working since 2008 to set up a coffee import program to help our Tree Bank farmers, and to make their remaining forests more valuable economically.

Virtually all of the coffee in the Tree Bank / Hispaniola project area is shade-grown, so supporting local coffee production can help the forests pay for themselves. Instead of cutting down the forests to make money growing other crops, farmers can grow coffee, and leave the forest canopy in place. They can even get the coffee seedlings for free from our own Tree Bank nursery.

But we’re offering our farmers a much better deal than just free seedlings. Here’s what we’re doing:

1. We are paying them a premium. We are only buying their highest-grade coffee—it’s the grade that the Dominican government calls “Gold Selection”—but we are guaranteeing them a price that is at least 10 percent above the market price for Gold Selection, at the time we buy it.

2. We are dedicating all proceeds from coffee sales to the Tree Bank, thereby helping to stabilize not just the coffee program but also the Tree Bank’s Forest Credit program, which offers our farmers reasonably priced credit.

3. We are creating a coffee brand just for our farmers. We call it “Rising Forests Coffee.”

The result will be a huge gain for our farmers. Despite the fact that they have been growing good coffee for many years, our farmers have very little to show for it because their only buyers thus far have been middle-men—people or small companies who are buying for large exporters or domestic distributors. Such buyers are committed to paying farmers as little as possible; that’s just how the system works. Rising Forests Coffee will take our farmers out of that system, and into one designed to work for their benefit.

Starting our coffee program has been quite an effort. Our first step was to incorporate our partner organization, Asociación de Productores de Bosques, Los Cerezos, so that we would have our own exporter of record. (Otherwise, we would be stuck using an intermediary company as official exporter, and money that we could have paid to our farmers would have gone instead to the intermediary.) Incorporating a nonprofit in the Dominican Republic is a very time-consuming, difficult process. In our case, it took more than a year and a half; our papers finally came through in July 2010. Then we had to: find a licensed firm to grade and certify our farmers’ coffee as Gold Selection; work with CODOCAFE, the Dominican federal coffee agency, to get our coffee approved for export; find a Dominican shipping company willing to do business with small-quantity customers like us; learn how to import food into the United States; and find an FDA-certified warehouse in the DC-area to store our coffee. (For the US-side of this effort, we were very lucky to have the advice of Amy Frey, President of ATC International; Amy’s east-coast warehouse is now “our” warehouse!) Anyway, as of August 2011, we have managed to do all of these things, and we are expecting our first shipment of coffee shortly.

You can help support Rising Forests Coffee in two ways:

First, make a donation to the Tree Bank. Your donation will help stabilize our work, not just for Rising Forests Coffee, but also for our Tree Bank nursery and our Forest Credit Reserve System.

And second, when the coffee is available for sale, buy some! Please check the Updates on this page from time to time. We’ll let you know when the coffee is ready.

It costs nearly $30,000 a year to run the Tree Bank, and thus far, virtually all of that money has come from our members—our extremely generous members.

We say “virtually all” because the Tree Bank did benefit from one instance of institutional support: a $500 check from a small foundation, which arrived unsolicited in 2010. We are very grateful for that gift, but of course it does not alter the general funding picture. We are doing our best to secure foundation support for the Tree Bank, and we believe that our case for funding is growing steadily stronger. But thus far, all we have to show for our grant applications is a sheaf of rejection form-letters wishing us “the best of luck with [your] important work,” or words to this effect. That’s foundation-speak for “get lost.”

So that brings us back to you. When you donate to the Tree Bank, you are investing in two things. One of those things is little, the other is big, and both of them are highly innovative. The little thing is our local program along the Dominican Republic – Haiti border, where we are working to reconcile farms and forests. The big thing is the basic structure or model of that program—a model for a kind of rural development that may be applicable to millions of people in many regions of the forested or formerly forested tropics. And the innovation can be found throughout, as we hope you’ll see from the descriptions available below.

A peculiar fact of life: just about everyone endorses innovation in the abstract, but relatively few people are able to return its gaze when it is actually looking them in the face. Maybe that’s because innovation is inherently risky. Or maybe it’s because innovation tends to arrive in unexpected shapes and sizes, which may make it hard to recognize. Whatever the reason, we are very grateful that innovative vision comes so naturally to the Sangha’s supporters.

Please help us stay both big and little. Donate to the Tree Bank.