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Peru Journal - Part 4: The Peruvian Amazon

November 14, 2009

Going to Hell

We’ve flown from Cusco, the ancient Incan capital situated at 11,000 feet surrounded by the Andes and dry, thin air to Puerto Maldonado, the low-lying tropical capital of Madre de Dios (“Mother of God”) province in Peru’s southern Amazon.

Although the Peruvian Amazon is the size of California and covers two-thirds of the country, few Peruvians, who mostly live in cities along the coast, know or visit this region. A little over a million people live here, a quarter of those from the Peruvian Amazon’s 59 indigenous tribes. There are few roads, so travel is mostly by motorized canoes along the Amazon’s vast network of rivers.

Madre de Dios has come to be known as Peru’s “biodiversity capital.” It contains some of the last pristine tropical rainforests in the entire Amazon. There are 15,000 plant species here, more tree and bird species in a 100 square mile radius than in all of North America, and more varieties of orchids, butterflies, and beetles than anywhere else on the planet.

Protected areas constitute about half the province. Several of Peru’s most significant Amazonian national parks, such as the Manu Biosphere Reserve and the Tambopata National Reserve, adjacent to the Switzerland-sized Bahuaja Sonene National Park are in Madre de Dios.

Our narrow canoe travels up the Tambopata river to a lodge in the jungle called Posadas Amazonas. It is a unique joint venture between the local Ese Eja native community of Infierno (“Hell”) and a company called Rainforest Expeditions owned by two enterprising and idealistic Peruvians from Lima. Forest engineer Kurt Holle and architect Eduardo Nycander, both RE founders, have made conservation enterprises their specialty.

The Ese Eja have lived for centuries along the Tambopata river from the foothills of the Andes to Bolivia. Infierno, a community of 120 families about 30 kilometers outside of Puerto Maldonado has communal title to more than 25,000 acres of primary forest along the river.

Gilbert Arrospide, a community member who will be our guide, tells us the area got its name from the traders navigating up the Tambopata during the 19th century rubber boom. The mosquitoes on this part of the river were particularly vicious, and the steep clay riverbanks made it difficult to camp there for the night. The Ese Eja now take perverse pleasure in their community’s name. When the Catholic Church asked them to change it several years ago, they refused. Other Amazon native communities have acquired also acquired odd European or American place names, depending upon where shipments of rubber sap were destined. Further up the Tambopata is a settlement called Baltimore. There is a Philadelphia and Mississippi somewhere.

Gilbert’s family fled the northern Amazon and came south early in the 20th century to escape the rubber barons who enslaved local indigenous communities, forcing them to harvest rubber sap for export. The Ese Eja hid in the forests when they came.

Today Infierno is a mix of Ese Eja families and “rivereños,” river people who migrated to the region early in the 20th century and were grandfathered in to Infierno’s communal territories.

Gilbert, a rivereño, was raised in the jungle and is expert at spotting its hidden life, which in the Amazon is almost everything. He can point out a saddleback tamarind monkey sitting in a tree 300 feet away, a green snake camouflaged in the branches, or the lethal and solitary bullet ants whose sting can cause intense pain for hours.

When Kurt and Eduardo first approached Infierno in 1994 to propose building an eco-lodge in the jungle, their offer divided the community. The regional indigenous organization of Madre de Dios, FENAMAD, warned that the Limeños were out to trick them. But after two years of talks Infierno agreed to move forward, setting aside about 9000 acres of primary rainforest on their land for the lodge and conservation purposes.

Since then, Posadas Amazonas has turned out to be one of the most profitable ventures of its kind in the Amazon. Over the years it has generated $3 million in income for Infierno. Stanford University’s School of Business, Harvard Business School and Cornell University’s Hotel School, along with Colombia’s Ministry of Tourism, have all studied Posadas Amazonas for clues on how to replicate its success for other indigenous communities living in ecologically sensitive areas.

November 15, 2009

Fishing for Piranhas

We’ve spent our first night at the lodge. It’s a lovely open structure in the middle of the rainforest, built on platforms of tropical woods and reeds. The rooms have no electricity and are lit at night by candles and kerosene lamps. The beds are covered with mosquito netting and one side of the room opens to the jungle. In short, we live the way most inhabitants of the Amazon live.

The open architecture leads to nights full of adventure. One editor finds that a family of bats has taken up residence in the rafters of his room. Another surprises a lizard in the shower. I discover a live frog frolicking in the toilet. Among my other night visitors is a golden cicada and a giant moth a good eight inches across. The nights teem with the sounds of insects and amphibians anxiously searching for mates – tooting, hooting, croaking, gulping, blooping, buzzing, crackling, humming – competing to be heard over the din of hundreds of other species.

We wake to a troop of titi monkeys chattering in the trees around the lodge. On our first full day in the Amazon, we are going to learn about rainforest ecology and the Amazon’s role in fighting climate change. Peruvian biologist Enrique Ortiz, also vice-president of the Amazon Conservation Association, accompanies us. His organization works on conservation projects in the cloud forests near the headwaters of the Madre de Dios river, in the los Amigos river watershed (CHK) and in Tambopata.

He has studied the Amazon rainforest for over 20 years. An avid paraglider, Enrique loves heights. In his student days, while doing his doctoral research on the forest’s giant Brazil nut trees, he tells us he would spend the night in the forest canopy’s upper stories tied to the branches, listening to the night monkeys and waiting to be greeted by hundreds of parrots and macaws that would perch there at dawn.

Besides its beauty and wealth of animal and plant biodiversity, says Enrique, rainforests protect watersheds, prevent soil erosion and help regulate rainfall and climate patterns. Forests disappearing in South America mights precipitate drought in North America.

Preserving rainforests is also the cheapest way to combat climate change. The trees soak up carbon dioxide and pump oxygen into the atmosphere. Each year almost one fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – more than the entire transportation sector -- result from cutting down forests.

At dawn we hike through the forest to an “Oxbow” lake, one of many crescent-shaped lakes in the Amazon that form when meandering rivers change course and cut new channels. Navigating on the lake in a primitive catamaran with a rough-hewn log for a rudder, we see prehistoric looking hoatzin birds that eat leaves and have two stomachs like cows, and a small water bird called a sun grebe that can carry its chicks in pouches under its wings, even in flight. Four species of piranha live in the lake, as do electric eels, giant catfish, and stingrays. A family of highly endangered giant river otters also reside here, protected and studied with the help of a German conservation organization. After observing the six-foot long otters happily feeding on piranhas we fish for them too, using red meat as bait.

At the Oxbow lake and elsewhere, Infierno has run up against the Peruvian state’s convoluted land policies. Though the community has traditionally considered the lake as part of its territory (it has title to half the lake shore), has made it a conservation area, and has had a request pending before the Peruvian government for some time to include the lake in their communal land title, the state granted a third party a concession to develop fish farms on the lake without the Ese Eja’s knowledge or consent. Infierno is fighting the fishing concession in court.

Battles like these are being fought across the Peruvian Amazon on a daily basis. Unlike in the US, under Peruvian law a landowner may own the land, but everything above the soil (timber), under the soil (minerals, oil, gas), and in the water (fish, alluvial gold), belongs to the state. Different ministries handle different concessions and often don’t communicate with each other. Native communities have no veto power over the decisions.

Thus Infierno, having designated 9000 acres of its land as a conservation area, and having established a profitable eco-lodge whose tourists generate considerable fees for the Peruvian state, discovers after the fact that the state has granted a gold-mining concession on the river just in front of its lodge, and a fishing concession in their protected lake.

In recent years the Garcia government has greatly increased the amount of territory in the Amazon auctioned off for oil and gas exploration, from 15 percent to 70 percent. It has often done so with little or no consultation at the regional or local level, impinging on and sometimes overlapping with communal tribal lands, exacerbating conflict with local indigenous communities.

Last year, Amazon tribes feared that several legislative land decrees would undermine their rights, and allow companies and private investors to bypass indigenous communities and facilitate exploitation of the forest. In June 2009, during bloody confrontations between Amazon indigenous peoples and government forces at Bagua in the northern Amazon, at least 30 people (mostly policemen) died and more than 200 were wounded. The government cancelled the decrees, and the Prime Minister and much of the cabinet resigned.

Environmental activists complain that while Peru is wide open for business, there are still no strategic plans or procedures that would rationalize the haphazard process of granting oil and gas concessions and address the lack of prior consultation with local inhabitants.

The lack of coordination not only creates conflict, but results in the Peruvian government working against its own investments. Peru plans to build up to nine dams in the Amazon, mostly to supply Brazil with electricity. One of the dams in Madre de Dios will inundate portions of the southern Interoceanic Highway, a signature road project Peru is spending over a billion dollars to build. Peru’s plans to export natural gas to Mexico may cause Peru to lose money by obliging it to import more expensive petroleum to meet its domestic energy needs.

Gold Miners

It’s only 8:30 am but we’ve been up for hours. We hike back to the canoes to visit two of the eight park guards who patrol almost 3 million acres of protected forest. Just outside the park guard station at the confluence of the Tambopata and Torre rivers is a gold-mining dredge, one of thousands throughout the region.

Illegal gold mining currently poses the greatest immediate environmental threat in Madre de Dios, destroying almost half a million acres of forest and polluting rivers with tons of mercury used to extract the gold from silt. In their reports, Peru gatekeepers Tom Barton, Matthew Clark, Lauren Keane and Francine Uenuma have described the devastating impact of illegal gold mining on Madre de Dios and detailed new government efforts to combat it.

November 16, 2009

A Visionary Farmer

Our third day in the Amazon, we wake up at the luxuriously late hour of 7 am. The forest is strangely quiet. Sheets of rain are coming down, and will continue for the next 10 hours. A rhino beetle sheltering from the downpour joins us at breakfast.

The humidity pervades everything, dampening our clothing and curling the pages of our notebooks. In the brief five to ten minute respites between torrents of rain, swarms of winged ants and termites take flight frantically on temporary wings grown expressly during the rainy season to find new nesting sites before birds and insect predators rouse themselves. A swarm of termites flies through our morning meeting with Infierno’s leaders.

Our afternoon program is on the outskirts of Puerto Maldonado. Since some of the roads we would have traveled have been washed out by the rains, we will now go by boat for a two-and-a-half-hour canoe ride in the rain on the swollen river. The lodge has provided us with rubber boots to walk through the waterlogged jungle and descend the steep staircase to the river now covered by mudslides.

The Amazon’s rivers seem sluggish but they are treacherous and unpredictable. The river’s height can vary by as much as 20 feet in a single day. The water is filled with debris, especially after rains. Tie your canoe too tightly to its mooring, and the sinking or rising river will swamp it. Tie it too loosely and a tree floating down river may crash into it. The current tugs stairs and docks loose. It has even eaten away the concrete landing of one of Puerto Maldonado’s major ports and we must clamber up through the mud.

We are going to meet Victor Zambrano, a farmer who has become one of Madre de Dios’ most visionary grassroots leaders. The eighth child of a couple from the Andes who migrated to Madre de Dios in the early 1900’s, he grew up near what was then the isolated frontier town of Puerto Maldonado on his father’s small subsistence farm, then at a remote customs post on the Bolivian border. He and his family lived among the Ese Eja, and he credits them with teaching him how to live in and with the forest, how to recognize which plants have medicinal properties or other uses, how to gather forest fruits and hunt game.

He joined the Peruvian marines for 24 years, and then returned to Madre de Dios in 1987. By then his father’s land had become a treeless cattle ranch overrun by squatters. After wresting his land back he used the knowledge he gained from the Ese Eja and agroforestry experts to build an agroforestry farm that has become a model for the region.

Throughout the 1990’s Victor was president of the Farmers Federation of Madre de Dios (FADEMAD) and helped introduce sustainable farming practices as a way to improve the incomes of local farmers. With no local agricultural extension services in Peru to speak of, the Catholic Church sponsored an agroforestry expert to teach Victor and other Madre de Dios farmers how to use mixed cropping techniques, which plants will fix nitrogen in the soil to improve soil fertility, which fast-growing trees can be harvested for timber, and how to create densely cultivated "enrichment belts."

Today Victor’s farm is a small garden of Eden. His house is surrounded by tropical flowers, ferns, herbs, medicinal plants, and 120 species of trees. In the 21 years since he began digging up the tough grasses in his cow pastures with a shovel, he has planted 19,000 trees. The wildlife has returned to his land.

Victor is now in his sixties. He currently heads the Tambopata National Reserve Management Committee, a citizens’ advisory board to the reserve’s public administration. He helps develop land policies and other measures to defend and protect the reserve’s boundaries.

He sees illegal gold mining and the squatters, crime and lawlessness it brings as the greatest immediate threat to Madre de Dios and its forests. The miners are a powerful force in the province with lots of money to spend. In addition to moving into protected areas, they frequently squat on land belonging to local farmers.

This afternoon after our meeting, Victor is going to see the regional governor to ask him to resurrect the region’s defunct environmental department and to request that the national tax authority and an environmental prosecutor go after illegal miners.

Longer term, he worries about oil exploration in the region, the dam the government proposes on the Inambari river that may inundate some communities, and the southern Interoceanic Highway now being built to connect Brazil with Peru’s pacific ports. (more on this later). There is a real possibility the highway may spur deforestation and the establishment of large industrial biofuel farms as road building did in neighboring Brazil.

Most of all, Victor, like so many people we meet here, is frustrated that Lima never informs Madre de Dios of its plans until after the decisions have been made. “For the government,” he exclaims in exasperation, "there doesn’t exist a need to inform and discuss."

We begin the long boat journey back to Posadas Amazonas towards dusk. The rain has finally stopped. We see large rodents called capybaras feeding on the river bank and several macaws flying to their roosts, and then we are in total darkness.

Our boat captain Jesús navigates the river by the silhouettes of trees he recognizes. Gilbert and our other guide Luis sit in the bow as spotters and signal with flashlights when Jesús should veer right or left. At one point, we feel a large bump and the boat stops. We’ve hit a branch but the boat can continue. Occasionally we hear the outboard motors of other canoes traveling in the night. Finally, we are back at the Posadas dock, surrounded again by the rainforest’s night sounds.

Buying Carbon to Save the Forests

Ultimately, giving rainforests a market value that makes preserving them profitable may be the only way to save them. Until recently, Lima considered the Amazon’s rainforests to be “empty,” with no economic value save for timber and Brazil nut extraction. Longstanding land use policies encouraged squatters to establish title to land by clear cutting and burning trees in order to plant crops and establish farms.

The recent Copenhagen climate conference may represent a breakthrough for the Amazon by supporting a new payment mechanism called REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) to promote conservation. REDD projects would pay countries or landowners like Infierno to preserve their forests and gain revenues by enabling them to sell carbon “credits” to industrialized countries for the “ecosystem services” their forests perform by sequestering and storing greenhouse gases.

Carbon trading markets are still in their infancy. About $700 million is currently traded on these “voluntary” markets, according to Bruce Cabarle, a World Wildlife Fund forests and trade expert who, with his colleague Daniel Arancibia, WWF’s forest coordinator for Latin America, stop by Posadas to speak with us. They are at a neighboring lodge upriver giving REDD workshops to representatives of Amazon communities throughout South America.

The carbon markets are still sorting out certification standards and monitoring methods. Europe has its own trading system and Chicago has begun its own climate exchange, but the markets are fragmented and don’t communicate with each other. Depending on the market, a ton of carbon can sell for as little as $1 or as much as $15.

Nevertheless, these proto-markets have encouraged entrepreneurs like Roberto Persivale, a former Peruvian mining executive now with a financial services firm, to seek out the remote Amazonian indigenous community of Bélgica (“Belgium”) on the Peru-Brazil border. Persivale and his Lima-based colleagues at his firm Asesorandes want to position forest communities like Bélgica so that if and when global carbon trading markets take off, both can profit and protect Belgica’s 128,000 acres of communal lands from deforestation in the process. “This is like the early dot.coms,” says Persivale. ”You invest money for high stakes.”

Already investment bankers are calling offering to buy Bélgica’s carbon credits, says Persivale. He estimates they could be worth as much as $80 million over 30 years. Another Peruvian company called Sustainable Forestry Management whose shareholders include New York hedge funds, is reforesting 44,000 acres of degraded land in Peru’s central Amazon with high-value timber. Once it completes the certification process, SFM plans to sell 160,000 tons of carbon on the global market.

The Peruvian government is also trying to position itself for a global carbon market by offering to preserve 136 million acres of Amazon rainforest in exchange for support for investment and social needs in the region. Germany and Japan are already paying tens of millions to support such projects. Peru also contemplates collecting a tax on carbon credits sold in international markets.

Along with the timber and gold mining concessions, now Peru also grants “conservation concessions” which may include REDD projects in the future.

November 17, 2009

Interoceánica Sur

On our final day in Madre de Dios a troop of howler monkeys awakens us with their almost indescribable cries. In his blog, Peru gatekeeper Tom Barton has compared the sound to a cross between a tornado and the whine of a jet engine. Before we fly back to Lima, we are going to see one of Peru’s “megaprojects” the Interoceánica Sur (Interoceanic Highway) which will link Brazil with Peru’s Pacific ports and open up much of Madre de Dios’ interior. It is scheduled to be completed in 2011. Similar road projects in Brazil attracted migrants and lead to deforestation to a depth of 30 miles on either side of the road. Already an estimated 300 families arrive each week from the Andes to settle along the Interoceánica.

In jumpsuits and hard hats, road crews for this massive undertaking work are positioned along the road. There are billboards everywhere. The forest that was once here has become savannah and cattle ranches. Brazil nut trees stand as lonely sentinels in the fields. By law they cannot be cut down, but their trunks are scorched where farmers burned the surrounding forest. Despite the government’s effort to save them, the Brazil nut trees are dying. The orchid bees that pollinate them cannot cross the grasslands. In 15 years the trees will be gone. There are few birds and no monkeys. A dead anteater lies at the side of the road. It’s a sobering final image to take with us back to Lima.

Several days later we meet with Peru’s environment minister Antonio Brack Egg at his office in the Lima neighborhood of San Isidro. A flamboyant former forestry official, author and television talk show host, he heads a ministry that did not exist in Peru two years ago.

He seems to have good political survival instincts (many government ministers here don’t last a year in office) and an even better feel for the media.

In a shrewd move, his first act as minister was to tackle the issues most urban dwelling Peruvians care about – air pollution in the car choked cities, sewage and solid waste. He says 75 percent of Peru’s sewage water and 83 percent of its solid waste is untreated and launched into the environment. He helped establish the first water authority in the country and is drafting water use legislation.

He seems to have acquiesced to government policy on oil and gas drilling in the Amazon, saying the impact is extremely limited. “Some people say Peru should not extract the oil and gas. I’d like to know if they would say the same thing if their country of origin had to import $2.5 billion of oil each year.”

Now, during our visit to Peru, he has fired salvos at the powerful gold mining interests in Madre de Dios. His public statements are accompanied by front-page photo spreads in major Peruvian dailies showing the destruction they have caused in the Amazon. He emphasizes that the illegal gold miners pay no taxes on their ill-gotten gains. “There are three mafias in the Peruvian rainforest,” he declares. “Drug traffickers, illegal loggers, and illegal gold miners.” He vows to go after them.

Whether Brack Egg will succeed depends in part on whether President Garcia gives him the necessary resources. So far the ministry seems heavily dependent on foreign aid. The park guards we met in Tambopata are underpaid and poorly equipped.

But if he can bring the determination he shows regarding illegal gold mining to bear on the other issues threatening the rainforest, then perhaps there is hope, after all, for Madre de Dios.

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