The Hazards of a Walk in the Park
The conservation of one of the largest national parks in the world is being threatened by loggers and landless peasants says environmental group Fundacion Gaia Pacha.The Madidi National Park faced one of its gravest threats in May this year when the ‘organizaciones campesinas,’ landless peasants from the neighboring territory of Apolo invaded the Anmi sector of the park in a protest for the creation of a more direct road between Apolo and Ixiamis. This would ultimately cut across the protected region of Anmi, enabling the locals to settle in the protected areas, as well as utilize the region for illegal logging and coca growing. It is believed that the protestors were also financially supported by wood exporting factories with key interests in using the park for logging. Roughly 600 protestors illegally occupied the park and cut down the highly expensive and endangered Mara wood, as well as threatening the lives of park guards and announcing that they would burn down the reserve if their needs were not met. According to Rodrigo the protest occured because, “the government has not solved the problems of roads, schools and health for the communities in Apolo.”
The groups also demanded the cancellation of the protection of the Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (TCO) groups within the park, despite the fact that it is their land and the external groups have no actual entitlement to it. The protestors called for a dialogue with the ministries in Apollo, and instead on May 28th they were met with police that forcibly removed them from the Anini area. In June, another protest occurred in which around 4,000 locals from Apollo waved Peruvian flags and demanded that the park and surrounding areas be annexed to neighboring Peru, as the Bolivian government was not responding to their needs. The locals desire to utilize the lands of Madidi would ultimately lead to the destruction of this area, though it is a difficult situation as logging is one of the few practices that can allow poor communities to eck out a substinance living.
Coordinator of the Fundacion Gaia Pacha, Rodrigo Meruvia, explained that these needs were addressed by the government through the Movimiento Sin Terra, through a strategy designed to give land to communities without enough space. While overtly this plan appears to be beneficial for these groups, the movement does not allow the communities themselves to choose the land they are given. These external communities are not content to share land of poor farming quality between at least 200 individuals, when the small communities in the Madidi National Park are given vast acres of fertile land.
The predicament presented by entrepreneuring locals is not the only threat either. It is a well known fact that the areas under conservation present lucrative money-making enterprises if put in the hands of big businesses and governmental projects. While the current Bolivian government has enforced the protection of Madidi National Park from the creation of a hydro-electric dam along the Beni River, this is not the case for conservation sites in many other areas. For example, the Pando region is facing pressure from Brazil to build a hydro-electric dam, which Rodrigo has said “is not a need of Bolivia, but only the need of border countries.” Within Bolivia there is “a pyramid of importance” Rodrigo explains, in which the lowest tier presents the credence of the government, the second is article 1333 of the Bolivian environmental laws, and the highest tier is occupied by the hydro-carbon laws. Hence it is not unheard of for environmental laws to fall by the wayside as oil exploitation agreements between Bolivia and neighboring countries take precedence. While the hydro-carbon laws are given higher importance than Article 1333 the risk of petroleum exploration in the Madidi National Park is a looming possibility.
Moreover, the efficiency of SERNAP in protecting the park is lacking in many respects as a result of poor organizational skills, communication, and the absence of leadership. This is at least partially attributable to the designs of transnational companies with an interest in sabotaging the park in order to exploit its natural resources. Many big businesses prevent SERNAP from doing its job through underhanded pay-offs to indigenous communities in return for causing problems for the organization.
In March 2000, National Geographic described Madidi National Park as one of the 20 most interesting tourist destinations on the planet. Over 500,000 tourists visit the park annually, supporting the greater part of Madidi´s internal economy. The business provided by the tourists encourages the communities within the park to maintain its upkeep, while it simultaneously provides them with improved living conditions. Though as Rodrigo is apt to point out, tourism in the park can be considered a double-edged sword if tourists are not properly supervised by park guards and SERNAP, as they are liable to damage the biodiversity of the region. The best option to avoid these dangers is the method advanced by the Fundacion Gaia Pancha: education.
Today Gaia Pancha is relentlessly working to expand the awareness of the importance of the Madidi National Park, as well as improving environmental accountability across Bolivia through seminaries, presentations, and projects in schools. The Fundacion Gaia Pancha has also worked with such groups as AGRECOL, FOBOMADE, ZOOPRAMA, and PROMIC to promote the benefits of biodiversity to the public. While the problems of maintaining the conservation of places like Madidi National Park can appear daunting when pitted against such behemoths as the ‘logic of the market,’ it is useful to remember another ideology presented by such organizations as Fundacion Gaia Pancha: the logic of sustainability.
