About the Tree Bank / Hispaniola
The Earth Sangha’s Tree Bank, founded in 2006, is a little, local program—but one with big ambitions. If we can run the program smoothly in our current project area, along a stretch of the Dominican Republic – Haiti border (see below), we hope to transplant it elsewhere, to other parts of the rural tropics.
The Tree Bank is based on an idea that is not hard to explain, but that is very hard to put into practice: in many parts of the tropics, arresting and eventually reversing deforestation will require the cooperation of large numbers of small-holder farmers—a class of people who are currently powerful agents of deforestation.
The Background
Tropical deforestation is 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 (swidden or “slash and burn” 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, increasingly, they 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. Most small-holder farmers are not managing soils in ways that could maintain fertility without artificial fertilizer, and most small-holders are too poor to buy fertilizer. Even where fertilizer is available, the economics of fertilizer use rarely works to the advantage of the small-holder, and continual use of fertilizer has its own environmental deficits. (For more on fertilizer use, see the Tree Bank Work page.)
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—or At Least Not So Bad—News
But 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. Nor is the return of secondary forest an irreversible trend; indeed, renewed agricultural pressure is likely, at least in some regions, given projected losses of agricultural productivity to climate change, and continued growth of the human population (now at 7 billion).
But the resurgence of secondary forest does create major opportunities—for conservation and perhaps even for the farmers themselves.
The Tree Bank’s mission is to help 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 to buffer surviving patches of old growth. Restoration can also 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. And since the people concerned are farmers, restoration must become an integral part of the agricultural economy. The aim of the Tree Bank is to help make that happen. The Tree Bank’s basic objective is to help 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.
That market may include direct purchases of restoration services, as carbon or biodiversity offsets, for example. It should also include direct donations, from an international public concerned about the fate of tropical forests and willing to help pay for the restoration of degraded land. And it should include goods, such as our shade-grown coffee, that are forest-compatible and that can help make standing forest more valuable economically.
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. We also want to support 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.
In this way, we hope, the Tree Bank will benefit both forests and farmers. And perhaps eventually, participating farmers in one region will help “transplant” the Tree Bank system to other regions.
Tree Bank / Hispaniola: What We Have Done Thus Far
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. Hispaniola is home to nearly 20 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 project is based in the border community of Los Cerezos, in the northwestern Dominican province of Dajabón. (See the aerial photo on the Tree Bank / Hispaniola page.) We chose the district of Los Cerezos as our base because it is an ecologically strategic area to fight deforestation. That’s because it is on the “deforestation front” that is moving into the DR from Haiti; in this region, the forests on the Haitian side of the border are long gone, and although our area has also been extensively deforested, it still contains many valuable forest fragments. Our area is also adjacent to BirdLife International’s Nalga de Maco – Río Limpio “Important Bird Area.” And our area lies within the headwaters drainage of the Río Artibonito, which is Hispaniola’s longest river. The Artibonite, as it’s called after it crosses the border into Haiti, is that country’s most important river by far. More generally, Hispaniola’s remaining forests are among the most important surviving components of the Caribbean global biodiversity hotspot. (A biodiversity hotspot is a region that contains a very high native-species diversity, and that is also highly threatened by human activities.)
The Tree Bank / Hispaniola is a collaboration between the Earth Sangha and the Asociación de Productores de Bosques, Los Cerezos (Los Cerezos Forest Producers Association), a local cooperative of farmers interested in agroforestry. Our project goals are to:
Extend native forest cover in our project area and eventually 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 establishing the region’s first forest easement system and its first low-cost farm credit system. Eventually, we hope, it will create a sustainable-production native-timber program, and an environmental education program for the region’s children.
Where to Find More Information
For more information on how the Tree Bank / Hispaniola works, read the Work page. To see the landscape, the nursery, some of the planting sites, and some of the people involved in the program, look at the slide shows in Links panel of the Tree Bank / Hispaniola page. For recent activities, check the Tree Bank / Hispaniola News.