Tree Bank / Hispaniola: All Topics
The text below includes all the major topics available on the Tree Bank / Hispaniola page, except for news items.
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 Work,” below.)
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.
The Land
The Tree Bank / Hispaniola is based in Los Cerezos, a small mountain community in the northwestern reaches of the Dominican Republic, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the border with Haiti. In every direction, the landscape is a series of steep ridges and valleys, most of which lie within the headwater drainage of the Artibonito River. The Artibonito is Hispaniola’s longest river. Its upper reaches—about the first third of its length—wind through this part of the Dominican Republic; the remainder flows through Haiti.
Small family farms cover most of our project area. These are not the sprawling, corporate sugar and rice plantations that are found in the flat, low-lying regions of the country. In our area, farmers eke out their harvests from steep, hillside plots that have usually been in the same family for generations. Most of the farms in our area range in size from less than two acres to around 15 acres. The farm that is, by far, the area’s largest covers 31 acres.
Beans are the predominant crop, and most parcelas include some rice as well, despite the hilly terrain. Many farms include at least a little coffee, citrus, avocado, or mango. And while rice, beans, and fruit are the biggest income generators, most families keep separate “kitchen gardens,” where they raise food just for themselves. On these conucos, you can usually find a rich variety of produce: bananas, plantains, squash, gandules (sometimes called pigeon peas), corn, and several kinds of starchy tubers.
Amidst these farms lie small forest fragments that offer glimpses of how the landscape must have looked hundreds of years ago. Hispaniolan pine (Pinus occidentalis) is the dominant tree along the ridges, which in our area, rise to an average elevation of almost 3,000 feet above sea level. Several palm species are also well represented, including the magnificent Hispaniolan royal palm (Roystonea hispaniolana), choice nesting spot for the cigua palmera, or palmchat (Dulus dominicus), the Dominican Republic’s national bird. (The Hispaniolan pine, the Hispaniolan royal palm, and the palmchat are all endemic to the island—they occur naturally nowhere else.)
Even though our project area has been farmed for generations, there is still much in it that is worthy of conservation. All or nearly all of its forest fragments have been cut, to one degree or another, probably many times. But the fragments still contain a substantial number of native tree and other plant species, including some rare and endangered ones. There are many bird species as well, including many endemics. (If you are interested in birds, you might like to look over our Tree Bank Bird List, which includes all threatened, endangered, endemic, and US-migrant bird species that may occur in the project area.) Even so, the frequency and scale of forest cutting is almost certainly increasing in our region, as a result of both farming and demand for timber, primarily Hispaniolan pine.
Beyond our project area, to the southeast and across the main branch of the Artibonito, the terrain becomes even more rugged and the ridges reach higher and higher, culminating in the region’s highest peak, Nalga de Maco, which rises to 6,532 feet. That mountain lies within a national park of the same name. The park is home to such natural treasures as orchids and stands of what likely qualify as old-growth forest. It’s also recognized by Birdlife International as an Important Bird Area.
Nalga de Maco is one of several parks within the Dominican Cordillera Central, the mountainous region in the center of the country. These parks are essential to maintaining the island’s biodiversity and hydrology. But small-scale farming is unraveling them, here and there, especially along their edges.
To the west of our project area lie the barren ridges of Haiti. Once cloaked in forest, these ridges have been reduced to a kind of artificial Caribbean desert. Haiti is the most deforested country in the world. Less than 2 percent of Haiti’s original forest cover remains.
In terms of its ecology, our project area is strategically located. It lies within the “deforestation front,” between Haiti and the still largely intact Dominican parks to the east. (You can see the location of our project in the aerial photo on the Tree Bank / Hispaniola page.) Successful forest restoration in our area could confer major economic and ecological benefits on both of Hispaniola’s countries.
The People
The Dominican Republic is home to nearly 10 million people, but fewer than 500 of them live in Los Cerezos, the little mountain community where the Tree Bank / Hispaniola is based. Just about every Los Cerezos resident is a farmer. Of course there are a few teachers and shopkeepers, and even among the farmers, there is some diversification. Several families own small herds of cattle, for example, and some grow specialty crops like citrus, avocados, and peanuts. But most people here are farmers in the most basic sense. They grow a range of staple crops, but mostly beans and rice. Some of their harvest is sold, but most is kept to feed their own families.
Those families are usually large. The average local farm supports, at least in part, about 10 people, some of whom are likely to be off the farm a good deal of the time, for school, work, or some other reason.
The complexity of local family life can baffle non-Dominican visitors. The family of Gaspar Pérez Aquino, the Tree Bank’s Project Director, is a good example. Gaspar lives, not in Los Cerezos, but in the nearby town of Loma de Cabrera. Each morning he rides his motorcycle 14 kilometers into the hills, to the house of his sister Catana, in Los Cerezos. He changes clothes there, then heads out to the family fields to tend his beans, rice, corn, and mangos. At harvest, he sells some beans and mangos to pay farm loans and help support his wife and three children—along with a daughter-in-law and two granddaughters—back home in Loma. Surplus produce stays at Catana’s house, where it helps feed Catana and three of Catana’s grandchildren. Gaspar’s brother and three of his nephews usually eat at Catana’s as well, although they have their own farm.
That’s 15 people at least partly dependent on one farm. Additional family income is provided by Gaspar’s son, who teaches school (not in Los Cerezos but nearby), and from Gaspar’s niece, who lives in Dajabón, the provincial capital, and sends part of her paycheck to her mother in Los Cerezos. Even so, the farm is the heart of this family—and so it is with just about every other family in Los Cerezos. Nearly everyone is tied to the land. The health of the land is by far the most important local social resource.
No matter how small their farms are, or how meager the last harvest, local people are quick to share with visitors. Rare is the passerby who isn’t hailed from the doorway of a roadside house and invited in for a visit. “Perfect timing,” he’ll be told as he’s handed a plate of rice by the smiling matriarch-turned-hostess. “We were just about to make some coffee….”
The Work
The hub of the Tree Bank / Hispaniola is its community nursery, located behind the primary school in a tucked-away section of Los Cerezos called “la berenjena” (the eggplant). All of the program’s trees get their start here, and teams of volunteers, intermingled with school kids, can be found working here most mornings.
The nursery grows trees for four types of plantings:
1. Orchards of citrus, avocado, coffee, and cacao (the little tree whose seeds yield cocoa and chocolate).
2. Woodlots of fast-growing but low-value timber, primarily Honduran pine (Pinus caribaea var. hondurensis).
3. Woodlots of slower-growing, high-value native timber, such as Hispaniolan pine (Pinus occidentalis), the native mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni), and the tree that Dominicans call “roble,” or oak (Catalpa longissima).
4. Conservation reserves, which, like the high-value timber lots, contain only native species—hardwoods, pine, palms, the works—but are not to be logged at all.
All nursery stock is available for free to members of our Dominican partner organization, the Asociación de Productores de Bosques, Los Cerezos (Los Cerezos Forest Producers Association). In exchange for the trees and the benefits associated with them (see below), Association members help maintain the nursery.
As of August 2011, 21 tree species were in propagation at the nursery. Eleven of them are native to the island. Of the natives, four are endemic (that is, they occur naturally only on Hispaniola). One of those endemics, Hispaniolan pine, is listed by the IUCN as “near threatened.” Of the native non-endemics, one, the mahogany, is listed as endangered. Another, the Spanish cedar or false cedar (Cedrela odorata), is listed as vulnerable. (The main IUCN threat levels, in order of increasing severity: vulnerable, threatened, endangered.)
All of the native species are grown from seed collected from local ecotypes (local, wild native-tree populations). The seed is collected by our member farmers and by representatives of the Dominican Federal Natural Resources Department. The planting of local ecotypes is an important “best practice” in ecological restoration because that helps maintain the genetic diversity and local adaptation in the species planted. That’s why we focus on local-ecotype production at both our Tree Bank nursery and our Wild Plant Nursery in the Washington, DC, area.
The seeds are sprouted in sand-filled germination beds, then transplanted into plastic “grow bags” and set out in our 4,300-square-foot terraced container yard. Currently, only about half of our container yard is under shade cloth and, therefore, in production. (Shade cloth is expensive.) In its current configuration, the nursery typically houses some 7,000 seedlings but it can accommodate more than twice that number.
Just uphill from the container yard is a covered pavilion—you might call it a shed without walls—where thousands of grow bags are filled each season. We mix our potting medium from local soil, leftover hulls from the last rice harvest, and composted cow manure.
The nursery is a modest facility at this point, but we are gradually expanding and improving it, as our finances allow. In March 2010 we bought a used pickup truck and put it into service for the nursery. The pickup has greatly extended our planting range; in the pre-pickup era, we sometimes resorted to packing seedlings onto donkeys to get them out of the nursery. The pickup has also made it much easier to keep materials flowing into the nursery; before we bought our own pickup, we sometimes had to wait for weeks to rent or borrow one. We managed another major improvement in July 2011, when we installed a cistern at the nursery. The nursery’s water arrives by pipe, from a big cistern farther up the mountain, but the pipe is occasionally crushed by errant logging trucks, and an extended drought during the first half of 2011 made it obvious that the nursery needed its own water reserve.
We also have plenty of additional unused growing space. Our site covers more than an acre of gently sloping terrain, bordered by the school on one side, and farmland and a stream valley on the other three. We are using only about half of the site so far.
Procedures for planting the nursery stock vary from one planting type to another. (See the list of planting types above.) Gaspar Pérez Aquino, the President of our partner organization and the Tree Bank’s Project Director, controls the movement of the stock overall. Gaspar has to keep the distribution rational and fair—and that’s not always easy because demand for stock ebbs and flows.
Fortunately, plants destined for orchard use—citrus, coffee, and so on—don’t present many distribution problems. For the most part, these are easy to grow, and our farmers just collect whatever they want when they are ready to plant.
The second planting type, the Honduran pine woodlot, is not such a simple matter. Honduran pine is easy to grow and many farmers are interested in planting it. This species offers important economic benefits—it supplies the equivalent of “home-grown two-by-fours”—so we believe that it has a legitimate role to play on our members’ farms. But its benefits come with significant environmental risks: large-scale exotic pine plantations can damage soils, drop water tables, and displace wildlife. To avoid the possibility of damage, we keep these plantings small, by limiting production of this species and by using an incentive package that favors the other planting types at the expense of this one. (See our Table of Benefits.)
The other two planting types, the high-value native timber woodlot and the conservation reserve, are new to our region, and are guided by a more complicated set of procedures. These plantings must be composed entirely of native species. They must be designed and certified in advance. Farmers must demonstrate that no extant native forest has been removed to make way for them. There are rules about the number of species, acceptable densities, minimum planting size, enrichment plantings, and so on. Once the plantings are in the ground, they are subject to a yearly census that tracks seedling growth.
The native forest plantings are generally installed on land of marginal value to agriculture—usually steep, unstable riparian (stream-side) slopes, or on the low-fertility soils of the mountain ridges. Of course, our farmers must always reserve their best soils for cash crops. (Cash crops are crops that can be reliably sold at a reasonably good price. The most important cash crop in our region is beans.) But there is generally room for at least a little grove of native trees on all but the very smallest farms. And on larger farms, restoration of substantial areas to forest can help reduce erosion and improve soil fertility while increasing and diversifying farm income.
As you might imagine, those income benefits are crucial to our program. We are constantly trying to improve our program benefits, and devise new ones. To understand the rationale behind our benefits, it’s helpful to have a general sense for how farming is practiced in our region.
Our farmers practice a modified form of swidden agriculture—the kind of agriculture known, pejoratively, as “slash-and-burn.” In swidden systems, a farm plot is created by cutting a patch of forest and burning the downed vegetation. (The fire releases the nutrients locked in the vegetation and makes it easier to work the soil.) After several years of cultivation, the fertility of the plot declines, so it is abandoned. The farmer cuts another patch of forest for planting, and forest is allowed to recolonize the original plot. The regrowing forest restores some of the fertility to the original plot, and eventually, the plot is cut and used again.
Swidden agriculture can be fairly benign ecologically, and sustainable for centuries or even longer, in areas where the human population is low. Unfortunately, this is not the scenario in our project area or, indeed, in most parts of the rural tropics today. In our project area, the swidden cycle (the frequency at which a particular patch of forest is cut) has declined precipitously over the past half century or so. It used to be around 20 years; today it is typically seven years, which is too short a time to restore enough fertility for a decent harvest.
To compensate for this, our farmers have modified their approach through the use of large amounts of artificial fertilizer. (Fertilizer is applied only to cash crops.) The fertilizer works, but it’s expensive. To pay for it, the farmers have to take out loans, but the little credit that is available to them is also very expensive: the interest charged usually translates into an annual percentage rate that is well above 40 percent. (Our farmers usually borrow for only three or four months.) When the harvest is sold, a substantial share of the proceeds goes to repay all that debt. If the harvest is poor, the debt may force the sale of an important family asset—for example, a cow.
Our farmers are locked in a downward spiral of declining soil fertility, heavy dependence on artificial fertilizer, and debt. This, essentially, is the situation that we are trying to help remedy. As of August 2011, the “benefit menu” for our native forest plantings included the following items.
Future proceeds from timber sales. Farmers who set up native woodlots (but not conservation reserves) can expect a return on their investments when their trees grow large enough to cut—after, say, 20 years or so. (Of course, we will encourage light, selective logging of woodlots, rather than clear-cutting. Once a woodlot has grown, some big trees should always be retained.)
Direct support. The first benefit that we offered was a direct, annual payment to farmers who agreed to establish a native-forest planting. The amount of the payment was determined by the number of trees planted (up to a maximum density) and the diameter of the tree stems. In addition to these “stem fees,” we offered some support for installing the plantings and maintaining them during their initial years. This direct support arrangement is still in force for our initial plantings, but we no longer offer it to new participants. Instead, we enroll new participants in our credit program. (See the next item.)
Credit. We have established the first low-cost farm credit program in our region. The program has just begun—the first loans date from 2011. In exchange for setting up “forest credit reserves,” our farmers receive a long-term line of credit to help manage their cash crops or to undertake farm improvements. A forest credit reserve is a kind of forest easement: the land does not change ownership, but the farmer loses the right to cut the native trees growing on it. The farmer also has an obligation to plant native trees on open ground if there are deforested areas within the reserve when it is designated. The amount of credit is determined by three factors: the size of the reserve, whether the reserve is established forest or recently planted (established forest commands a higher initial credit limit), and how well the farmer has managed previous loans. The cost of the loans is determined, not by a compound interest rate, but by a simple arithmetic rate: 5 pesos per month for every 1,000 pesos borrowed. For more details, see our Solicitud de Préstamo form.
The credit option offers several big advantages over our direct payment approach. It allows us to use our resources much more efficiently, since we can lend far more money than we could ever afford to pay out directly. And in addition to covering new plantings, it gives us a chance to cover established forest—an essential goal that we were not able to meet with our direct support approach. (The stem fees for established forest would have been far too expensive.) And, of course, the credit system helps address a basic social need in our project area: the need for reasonably priced farm credit.
Coffee purchases. Also in 2011, we launched a coffee import program. We are bringing our farmers’ best coffee into the US, to sell under its own brand. This could be an important benefit to both our farmers and their forests; coffee is a common tree-crop in our project region and it is grown almost exclusively in shade, under forest canopy. (Our farmers do not grow “sun coffee.”) And since all our coffee revenue is returned to the Tree Bank, we can afford to pay a premium for our farmers’ best beans. Our current arrangement is to pay at least 10 percent above whatever the going price is for “Gold Selection” (export grade) coffee.
Inga alley cropping—a benefit in progress. Over the next several years, we hope to adapt a model, developed in Central America, for growing beans in “alleys” bordered by Inga trees. (Inga vera is a tree native to Hispaniola, and to much of the tropical Americas.) Inga is itself a member of the bean family, and like many plants in that family, it’s a nitrogen-fixer: it can restore nitrogen compounds to soil, thereby increasing the soil’s fertility. Some field studies have shown that bean and Inga agroforestry systems can produce acceptable yields without burning or artificial fertilizer. If we can make this system work in our project area, we might be able to achieve a huge reduction in the cost of farming, while increasing native-tree cover.
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