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		Nature Conservancy Magazine: Summer 2006 Nature Conservancy Magazine Waiting for the Sky Poverty, Conservation   Audio chat Full Circle Nature Stories Podcast Nature Landmarks Nature Books Nature Travel Nature Preserves Subscribe Previous Issues

The Poverty / Conservation Equation

Page 4

The Conservancy is working with fishermen from Boca de Yuma (TOP) to create “no-catch” seasons that will help restore fisheries near Parque Nacional del Este (MIDDLE). A decade ago, fishermen could cast their lines from the shore of Samaná Bay, but today even reaching the water requires work (BOTTOM). Deforestation has washed sediments down rivers and choked parts of the bay. Photos © Carolyn Drake   Framing the Debate Does Conservation Matter to the Poor? by Jeffrey Sachs Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation? by M.A. Sanjayan Can We Conserve Ecosystems by Fighting Poverty? by Gregory Mock

“I was a destroyer in this country; I don’t deny it,” says Moronta, a wiry old farmer whose grandparents were early settlers in what was then virgin forest. They were among the first to practice there the age-old method of slash-and-burn agriculture, a practice continued by their children and grandchildren.

“I thought the forest would last forever, like the water,” Moronta says, flashing a sheepish, toothless grin. But one day, in the early 1990s, he was shocked when he walked down to the creek where he had bathed as a child and found it had shrunk to a muddy trickle.

Today, a decade of ecofriendly development projects has transformed Los Dajaos. The community is a model for how poverty alleviation can reap benefits for both local residents and biodiversity.

Once its farmers coaxed beans from parched slopes, children died of dysentery and few residents studied past third grade. Now, a thriving agricultural community, complete with a middle school and a health clinic, nestles in dense pine forest.

Change came in 1996 with the construction of an aqueduct. Starting in the early 1990s, several residents began organizing their neighbors behind a plan to bring running water for irrigation and indoor plumbing to Los Dajaos’ roughly 250 houses. But the outside donors they turned to for funding requested broader development plans. In 1994, after developing alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture, the residents secured an initial $25,000 grant from the Falconbridge Foundation, the environmental development arm of Canadian mining company Falconbridge Limited.

A year later, activists from Los Dajaos and 24 nearby communities formed Junta Yaque, a grass-roots umbrella organization that works with the Conservancy and others to protect vital forests in the mountain range, which is the highest in the Caribbean. The Conservancy provides technical support and funding for projects such as reforestation on private lands and mixed-use irrigation farming, which involves planting fruit trees above crops on terraced hillsides. It is also working with Junta Yaque to implement a watershed analysis to determine the link between the forested highlands and the coastal ecosystems below.

Christopher Columbus avoided these formidable peaks—three of which rise more than 10,000 feet—when he explored Hispaniola in 1492. The island spans an area the size of Vermont and New Hampshire, and is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern two-thirds.

The communities of Junta Yaque lie in the buffer zone of Armando Bermúdez National Park, one of five protected areas spanning 800,000 acres of highland forest. Together, the preserves form a conservation tract called Madre de las Aguas (Mother of the Waters). The tract is the birthplace of the country’s 17 major rivers and accounts for nearly 70 percent of the freshwater needs of the Dominican Republic. It also supplies much of the freshwater in Haiti, which has denuded most of its own forests.

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