Central America’s last rain forest shrinks as it burns

Khaleej Times Online.

FLORES, GUATEMALA – There are only a few paths through the wilderness of the rain forest near Peten, 500 kilometres north of Guatemala City.

To the right and left of those trails, vast tracts of land that used to be part of the central American rain forest are burning. Squatters, ranchers and peasants have burned a several kilometre-wide swath through the forest.

Everywhere, charred roots poke through the ground as herds search the scorched earth for any surviving vegetation. Every time nature attempts to reassert itself and grow back, another fire is started to push it back.

Large areas of forest are burning everywhere. Trunks of mahogany trees lie smouldering in their own ashes. The ranchers are proud of their work. Fewer trees, more livestock, more riches, they argue.

“The forest doesn’t matter at all to them,” says David Dudenhoefer of Forest-Alliance, an international organization. “They would prefer to flatten the rain forest.”

No one fights them…

It’s been a century since the Guatemalans began the second colonization of the rain forest that marks the geographic divide between North and Central America.

The Mayas built their centre in the ancient forest here in the first millennium, stretching across Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. When they left their cities, the forest came back, turning the empire of the Mayas into a forest of overgrown mounds.

But ranchers aren’t the only ones burning down the rain forest. Many people from the south, desperate for a piece of land, are trying to settle here illegally.

Thirty years ago, 30,000 people lived in the region. Today, more than 400,000 people live in more than 200 settlements.

“We have to admit, the most burnings occur where people live,” says Julio Pineda soberly. He is the head of the forest firewatchers in Flores, the regional capital of Peten.

Some 130 firefighters and 400 soldiers stand ready to fight fires. As of mid May, there had already been 48 large fires to fight.

No one counts the agricultural burnings and no one fights them. Those are usually started shortly before the rainy season, so the peasants have time to harvest their crops: corn, wheat and marijuana.

“The forest was just in the way for the Spanish. The English took the wood, chiefly mahogany. And our governments set the woods on fire to smoke out the guerillas,” complain the firefighters, often in unison.

The invaders

Pointing to a map, they show that the white cleared areas are displacing the green forested areas. In the last few decades, the forested area of Guatemala has shrunk by thousands of hectares.

“The biggest problem are the large ranchers,” says Victor Melina, one of the forest rangers responsible for the area.

But there are serious and determined groups that still want to save the rain forests of Guatemala, Mexico and Belize.

International organizations like the Rainforest Alliance and the Forest Stewardship Council, which is based in Bonn, along with multiple other groups have vowed to aid Guatemala in creating a system that reconciles civilization with the rain forest.

Chiefly, the “invaders” need to be convinced that it would be better and more lucrative not to burn down the forests’ treasures, according to these organisations. Instead, it would be better to intelligently and conservatively harvest them. By their plans, only one or two trees should be felled per hectare every 25 years.

Contracts for managing the forest are sometimes issues directly to the communities and cooperatives. Wood harvested from the forests in accordance with conservation guidelines receives a certificate from the Rainforest Alliance.

With the assistance of groups, some of them German, those certified trees are then sold on world markets with the eco-friendly label.

Other products from the rain frest include pimentos, raw rubber and palm leaves, commonly used as decorations in floral bouquets in Europe.

“If we’d continued like we’d done earlier, we’d be a lot poorer today,” explains Venedict Garzia, 54, in the old forest settlement named Uaxactun.

That settlement, amidst the Maya ruins of the same name, was founded a century ago as part of the rubber harvesting industry.

The airstrips built for transporting the rubber in the middle of the settlement were later used for refuelling planes used in drug smuggling. Such runways still exist.