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Expropriation to preserve at- risk rain forest

The Nature Conservancy is now actively working with Mexican government environmentalists to "expropriate" thousands of acres of land to "preserve" it. See the story below.

MEXICO: Expropriation to preserve at- risk rain forest
The federal government and a nonprofit group are buying the land from local farmers to ensure its biodiversity is preserved.
http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=36385

The Mexican government and a U.S.-based non-governmental organization have agreed to expropriate thousands of acres of tropical forest on the Yucatan Peninsula in what officials are calling the largest conservation land deal in the country's history.

The US3 million accord, published Friday in the federal registry and paid for partly by private funds, will ensure the protection of 370,000 acres (150,000 hectares) half the size of Rhode Island in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve.

The government plans later this month to formally announce the expropriation, which is not entirely without precedent in Mexico.

In February 2003, the government bought the Manhattan-size Espiritu Santo islands in the Sea of Cortes using US3.3 million raised by several nonprofit groups.

LARGEST MEXICAN JUNGLE

The biosphere reserve, spread out over 1.8 million acres (730,000 hectares,) is the "largest intact tropical forest in Mexico and the largest contiguous tropical forest outside of the Amazon," according to The Nature Conservancy, a Virginiabased, international conservation group that helped negotiate the expropriation and is contributing the largest share of the funding: US1.7 million.

The reserve is a UNESCO World Heritage site that is home to significant Maya ruins and hundreds of plant and animal species, including the largest jaguar population outside of the Amazon.

The expropriation will annex the land into the biosphere's "core" conservation zone. Previously, the 370,000 acres were located in a buffer area not subject to the strictest land-usage rules, say experts at the Nature Conservancy and the private Mexican conservation group Pronatura, which mediated negotiations with the landowners.

"We're talking about the second-largest lungs of the Americas after the Amazon, with a great richness of species and very well conserved," says Pronatura board president José Elias Selem, referring to the Calakmul reserve.

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

Since it has lacked money to expropriate conservation lands on its own, Mexico's government has begun forming partnerships with private organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, which also participated in the Espiritu Santo project.

The expropriation deal comes after more than a decade of frustrated attempts by about 300 Maya communal farmers, known as "ejiditarios," to unload the land, divided into four parcels and located about 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of the communities where they actually live.

"They have been trying for a long time since the (biosphere) reserve was established to get cash from the land so they can invest it in the properties where they actually live and work," says Andrea Erickson, the Nature Conservancy's lead scientist on the project.

Because the ejiditarios were so far away from their land, it was nearly impossible for them to either extract any productive use from it or to monitor any illegal activity there. That meant the land's virgin forests and varied species of flora and fauna were vulnerable to exploitation and destruction, the conservation experts say.

Local leaders in the state of Campeche, where the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve is located, have been eager for some time to settle the land expropriation matter and the political unrest that accompanied it, including angry ejiditarios taking over city offices, blocking highways and staging large public protests.

In the spring of 2002, the Nature Conservancy approached Campeche's governor with the idea of acquiring the land for conservation, using a mixture of government and private funds.

Pronatura, which had worked with ejiditarios in the past and understood their concerns, paved the way for talks, and two years later, the deal was sealed.

Officials from the Environment Secretariat who worked on the deal declined to discuss the project until it is formally announced later this month.

MAYA RUINS

The conservation land also envelops the ancient Maya ruins of Calakmul, which means "City of the Two Adjacent Pyramids." Two years ago, scientists discovered hieroglyphs that showed Calakmul was a rival Maya superpower to the Tikal in Guatemala.

The Calakmul biosphere hosts more than 350 bird species, 90 mammal species, including pumas and howler monkeys, and is a habitat for 3 billion migratory birds each winter, The Nature Conservancy says. About 1,600 plant species more than half of all the species in the Yucatan live in Calakmul.