The Tree Bank Hispaniola: What Good Did It Do?

If you read the Sangha's blog, you may remember that we have had to close down our participation in the Tree Bank program (earthsangha.org/blog "What's Next for the Tree Bank"). Something we didn't cover in that post was the program's legacy. What good did the Tree Bank do and how durable are its benefits likely to be? Of course it's impossible to say for sure, but in this note I'll explain why I think the prospects are actually quite good.

The Tree Bank Hispaniola was an agroforestry program. We founded it in 2006. Our main project area, the subject of this note, is in the Dominican Republic near the border with Haiti.  It's a hard-scrabble region of sparse pasture and emaciated cattle, rain-fed beans and pigeon peas, stands of pine on steep ridges and fingers of broadleaf forest reaching up from the streams below.

The official name for the region is Los Cerezos ("the cherry trees"). It includes about 30 square miles in the municipality of Loma de Cabrera in the province of Dajabón. And in case you're wondering, there don't seem to be any cherry trees in Los Cerezos.

The purpose of the program was to create an agroforestry system that would conserve and restore native forest and increase local small-holder incomes. In our project area poverty and deforestation are linked so it made sense to try to address both problems together. In most years about 55 families participated.

Major achievements

In my view, the Tree Bank Hispaniola can lay claim to six major achievements. These achievements may be hard to measure, but that doesn't detract from their importance. Here they are.

1: We rehabilitated coffee.

The year 2014 was the height of the "Roya" coffee-leaf rust epidemic. The epidemic had spread throughout Central America and the Caribbean. By the end of that year, there did not seem to be a single living coffee tree in all of Los Cerezos. Coffee had been a mainstay of local agriculture for generations. It requires skill and time to produce a good yield, but pound for pound, coffee was by far the region's most valuable crop. (It's true that coffee prices vary a lot but as an average over, say, 10 years, no other crop in the region could match coffee.) Coffee was important for the forest as well. The coffee cultivars that we plant require shade — and we planted hundreds of thousands of native trees, grown at the Tree Bank nursery —  to supply that shade. (Banana is helpful for quick shade. We didn't plant coffee in high value, well-established forest. See further Item 4 below.) Native shade overhead and a coffee understory: it was a simple formula that worked very well, so we returned to it as soon as a rust-resistant cultivar was available. Pessimists told us that we would never be able to replace the coffee that was lost, but we kept planting anyway and today the coffee groves are just bursting with fruit in good years. Thanks to the Tree Bank Hispaniola, coffee is back. How durable will this success prove to be? Very, I think, since our farmers are expert in handling coffee and no farmer in his right mind would cut back a coffee grove that is making money. 

2: We developed cacao as a major crop. 

Cacao is the little tree whose seed is used to make cocoa and chocolate. From the farmer's point of view, cacao is similar to coffee. Like coffee, cacao is an artisanal, high-priced, shade-tolerant or shade-dependent (varies with the cultivar) non-invasive tree crop. But before the Tree Bank, cacao wasn't really a thing in Los Cerezos. There were a few aficionados, but that was it. We encouraged the planting of cacao and began producing thousands of cacao seedlings at the Tree Bank nursery. Demand for the seedlings has surged and many farmers now plant cacao as a supplement to their coffee. And as with coffee, the likelihood of continued success is high. After some initial planting mistakes, participants have proved adept in managing cacao, and cacao beans sell for a good price.

3: We improved landscape water retention.

Forests are like giant sponges. They hold immense quantities of water in both the soil and the vegetation itself, and they release that water slowly after each rainfall. Los Cerezos is mostly steep, deforested terrain. Centuries of swidden ("slash and burn") cultivation and overbrowsing by cattle have left a thin, fragile topsoil that dries rapidly. To improve the situation, we encouraged farmers to allow the planting of little "pocket parcelas" with native trees. Most of these areas are small (an acre or less) and of little use to agriculture. They're too close to a stream or they're too steep to plant. But if the trees can get a foot-hold — or root-hold! — they will gradually transform the area into another landscape sponge. At participants' request, we also funded the purchase of a 44-acre property — the "Gran Reserva" — that includes the headwaters of a major stream. People were afraid that a planned tree plantation would damage that drainage and cause additional drying in the region. Obviously, the likelihood of continued success with this property is high. We turned the deed over to the local farmers' association. Conservation of this property has essentially unanimous support in the community and much of the area has now been planted with native trees. It's hard to quantify, but Los Cerezos is definitely greener and wetter than it was before the Tree Bank arrived. On that point, everyone seems to agree.

4: We extended native-tree canopy.

The trees that we planted in the Reserva and those parcelas all came from the Tree Bank Hispaniola nursery, about an acre of shade cloth and irrigation in a section of Los Cerezos known as "the eggplant" (after a common weed, not the vegetable). Over the life of the project, we worked with about 15 species, collecting their seed, germinating it, and growing out the seedlings which the farmers then planted. I don't know how many trees we planted, but the total would be in the hundreds-of-thousands order of magnitude. Of course, many of those trees died, so a series of plantings was often necessary to stabilize a parcela. We occasionally lost parcelas to other uses, but we also gained parcelas when farmers decided that they wanted a woodlot on their property. During our time in Los Cerezos, ours was the only native-tree planting operation in the region. Wild stands are very important for local wildlife. Birds, reptiles, bats, and insects are among the island's woodland species.

I would rate the chances of continued success on this front as good, but not as a sure thing. ("Success" here means the planting of more native trees and the conservation of native trees already planted.) I think that there is now a greater awareness of native trees as a part of local heritage, but sometimes people have to make hard decisions about what they want to do with their land and the trees don't always win.

 5: We created a small-holder farm credit program.

The Tree Bank's "Forest Credit" lending program is by far our most popular activity. It's also the most fragile. (I'm writing in the present tense because the program is still on-going. This program will conclude at the end of 2025.) By local standards the program involves an enormous amount of money and is therefore tainted by suspicion, even when there isn't any reason to think that anything has gone wrong. To give you a sense for how the program works, here is some background on it, as well as are some numbers from the last bout of lending back in April of this year. 

Forest Credit is designed to address a kind of credit gap. It's very difficult to farm, even on a small scale, without access to credit. But very few banks in our project area have programs designed to meet the needs of small-holders. That's where we fit in. We offer modest annual loans, mostly on the order of $1,000, for the purchase of seed, fertilizer, and the occasional heifer in exchange for pledges not to cut well-defined tracts of reasonably high-quality forest on small-holder lands. Loan size is based on the quality and size of these "credit reserves." A small charge of non-compounding interest is added to the repayment obligation, to help keep the program stable. Additional incentives for repayment are available in the form of community pressure. You can imagine. 

Now for some numbers. In April, the program boosted its loan value by an eye-popping  47 percent. We lent about $50,900 to 53 families, in exchange for the conservation of about 354 acres of native and mostly riparian forest. The lending included $6,665 in  "new money" — that is, donations to the credit fund from the Sangha —  and it overtopped last year's total of $34,700 by $16,200. The number of participants didn't change much from recent years, nor did the amount of forest protected.

There is no question that Forest Credit is complicated but it has two simple factors going for it. First, all of its funds are already in the system; the money is either out on loan or it's sitting in a bank account in the Dominican Republic, awaiting its next use. And second, there is a high-level of transparency; when someone is late repaying, everyone knows about it. In effect, there is a kind of built-in audit function. Chances of continued success I think are good.

6: We assembled a tough, clever, and compassionate team, and we gave that team our full support.

Cosme, Manolo, and Yinabel — our in-country leaders —  brought a deep understanding of their community to bear on local issues of vital importance, and to very good effect. Our support took the form of monthly stipends for the leaders and for the nursery crew, and a lot of hardware, including an association building, two pickup trucks (in sequence, not together), a tri-motor for back-country delivery of seedlings, nursery supplies including shade cloth, steel pipe, and water storage tanks, and personal gear such as phones and GPS units. All the hardware belongs to the project, not to the Sangha. We don't want anything back!

Those monthly stipends are going to go away as we withdraw, and tree seedling production will likely decline substantially. I think that the nursery crew isn't yet sure about whether to adjust the nursery priorities or not. At present, the crew continues to produce and plant seedlings, even though they aren't being paid. But even if things change in one way or another, we believe that the Tree Bank will continue to function as an important community resource.

Chris Bright, Earth Sangha Co-Founder