The World Bank/WBI’s CBNRM Initiative

Case Received: February 7, 1998

Author: Roland Bunch

Tel/Fax: +504 76 2354

Email: rolando%cosecha@sdnhon.org.hn

Personnel of COSECHA, a small non-governmental organization in Honduras, have been working as consultants for a number of other institutions working on community-based soil conservation and recuperation, water harvesting, and forest conservation for the last six years from central Mexico to southern Brazil. Through this work, it has come to know the efforts of scores of organizations, governmental and non-governmental, that are involved in these efforts, and the results of such efforts. This case study will be a composite view of what has been learned through the successes and failures that these groups have experienced.

Efforts to establish village-based organizations for various purposes within the area of rural development have not, by and large, been particularly successful in Latin America. That is, even when the purpose of local organizations was that of increasing incomes, the vast majority of cooperatives and other local organizations either fell apart, or survived year after year as nothing more than meaningless skeletons. They accomplished little or nothing at all, except to convince villagers that organizations were a waste of their very limited time and resources.

When we try to motivate villagers to form and maintain organizations that have other purposes even less directly connected to their own economic welfare, or related to it only over the very long term (such as natural resource conservation), we should expect to have even lower percentages of success. After all, if villagers do not even maintain local organizations that are designed to increase their own incomes immediately, why should they bother to maintain ones that save someone else's forests, or will only improve the quality of their own soils or crops years in the future?

Experience at the grassroots shows us very clearly that the problem of the vast majority of non-functioning or dysfunctional local organizations is not so much that village people do not know how to organize or manage organizations, but rather that they are not sufficiently motivated to manage and maintain well their local organizations. The problem is not so much information as motivation. Thus, the solution is not more training courses on how to manage cooperatives, but rather the forging of closer ties in people's minds and in their experience between their own basic welfare in the immediate future, and the management and maintenance of the organizations. People must come to see that the organizations’ continued proper functioning is important, or even absolutely essential, to the improvement of their own welfare in the immediate future.

How can this be accomplished? First of all, it must be recognized that traditional forms of training, carried out in classrooms and largely through lecturing, even when heavily supported by audiovisual presentations and lively discussions, do not very effectively change attitudes and motivation, if at all. Experience changes attitudes and motivation. And it is probably only through guided experiences that farmers will become motivated enough to manage and maintain organizations designed to conserve natural resources.

Environmental education, until now, has heavily consisted of teaching villagers, especially children in a classroom setting, the beauty and importance to ecological balance and of various animals and plants. Increasingly, ecological organizations are becoming disappointed with the impact of such a methodology. More and more, people are realizing that a new kind of environmental education must be used--one that is seen as a series of practical experiences, and which relates the conservation (not preservation) of natural resources directly to the people’s own short-term well-being.

The application of these principles can be seen clearly in the more specific cases of soil conservation and recuperation, water harvesting, and forest conservation that are rapidly spreading across Latin America and beyond.

Over the last 30 years, COSECHA has worked on soil conservation throughout much of Latin America. Gradually, as simple, inexpensive technologies were found to retain the soil on hillsides (contour vegetative barriers, strip cropping, and in-row tillage), we also began realizing that many villager farmers had very little fertile soil to retain on their hillsides. We had to try to bring back soil fertility, to rejuvenate what soil there was, and even increase the depth of whatever topsoil was left. Over the last fifteen years, we have found that "recuperating" soils is easier than the scientific literature would have one believe (to the extent that it even broaches the subject), and that small farmers were willing and capable to do so.

Probably the most important principle in achieving significant, sustained adoption of soil recuperation by poorer village farmers is finding technologies that will pay back to the farmer the full value of his or her investment within the first year after application. Thus, even though it has often been said and written that soil conservation requires major investments that are not repaid until years later (thereby justifying extremely expensive and almost always counter-productive artificial incentives), COSECHA has found and disseminated technologies that not only conserve, but improve soils, while at the same time providing increases in income and food, within 12 months, that more than pay for the labor invested in the improvement of soil quality and fertility.

Thus, farmers learn from their own experience (learning by doing), that soil conservation and recuperation will not only profit them and their children in the long term, but can also profit them in the short term. Through the most effective educational methodologies known to pedagogy (learning by doing and personal discovery), farmers are learning that conservation of the soil, and more generally, nature and the environment, are profitable for them. To the extent that this process depends on green manure plants and trees that were used or rescued from nearby forests, the farmers are also coming to appreciate, once again through their own personal, practical, day-to-day experience, that the conservation of the forest is also immediately advantageous to them.

Our experience, and that of most organizations throughout the world, in small farmer water harvesting, is much less extensive. In fact, we have only been working on this technology for three years. Nevertheless. the experience so far has been instructive, and points to similar possibilities. At the same time that farmers will be able to reduce run-off during heavy rains, thereby reducing erosion, flooding, and a series of other downstream problems, they will be able to maintain more crops (and therefore cover) on the land, while also both increasing productivity and reducing their risks. And total payback of the investment should come within the first year, if not within three or four months. Once again, farmers will learn, through their own experience, that improving water quality and decreasing fluctuations in water run-off will, at the same time, help them improve both their own food security and over-all productivity. Once again, conservation, using appropriate small-farm technologies, pays off immediately in more food and higher incomes.

The connection between forest conservation and improved livelihoods is somewhat harder to make, but we are gradually putting together a series of threads that are gradually tilting the balance in favor of forest conservation. First of all, the farmer needs simple technologies that will allow him/her to avoid previously useful but presently destructive slash and burn agricultural systems. These technologies are presently known and are in varying stages of dissemination. Where farmers were not already ahead of the agronomists and ecologists in finding and spreading such technologies, their acceptance of the technologies, when and where they are appropriate, has been good, if not excellent.

These technologies include those of both economically and biologically improved fallows, as well as green manure/cover crops and improved, diversified perennial gardens. In each of these four categories of farming systems (two of which eventually evolve into diversified agroforests, and two of which move toward green manure/cover crops intercropped with annual or semiperennial food crops), income can be produced every year, while at the same time, the quality of the soils can be improved and weed populations progressively reduced. Since a reduction in soil fertility and increase in weed populations are the two principle reasons farmers use slash-and-burn systems, the elimination of these problems makes slash-and-burn systems unnecessary.

Once farmers do not need to cut down and burn forests in order to grow subsistence crops, other motivations for not cutting forests (e.g. for cash cropping) must be found. Farmers who are rescuing green manure/cover crops from the forest will come to appreciate their existence, as will those who use forest leaves for increasing soil fertility, manage forests to regulate insect pest infestations, hunt animals for food, gather plants for medicinal purposes, understand the role of birds and bats in maintaining their soil’s fertility and the forest’s role in regulating rainfall, collect firewood in sustainable ways, use forest fragments for wind breaks, etc., will gradually realize how many ways the conservation of forests is also in their own, short-term personal interest.

Little by little, we are learning how to make the whole economic development process a constant learning experience in the methods, and the value, of managing sustainably the natural rersources that surround us.