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Abstract:
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"Efforts to develop strategies coordinating federal forest policy objectives with local governance institutions in Mexico have met with major obstacles. Federal forestry projects, including Programa de Desarrollo Forestal in the seventies and Proyecto de Conservacion y Manejo Sustentable de Recursos Forestales (PROCYMAF) currently, have focused on improving state, private and community sectors capacity to implement forestry management activities that incorporate environmental, industrial and economic development goals. Repeatedly, program officers found that timber production permit data were inconsistently recorded or difficult to access or did not exist. Pursuant to these efforts, some state delegations of the responsible federal agency, Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT), have revamped their databases, but in extending projects across states, PROCYMAF has continually encountered a serious lack of this basic information. The result is that the level and scope of community timber production and forest use patterns are unknown.
"To fill this gap, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has coordinated the project National Survey of Community Forests of Mexico. The effort is housed at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economica in Mexico City, in collaboration with PROCYMAF (as part of Comision Nacional Forestal (CONAFOR)), the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Florida International University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
"The project involves two phases of field research: 1) construction of a database of ejidos and indigenous communities with logging permits in ten major timber-producing states and 2) survey of a random stratified sample of ejidos and indigenous communities with logging permits in these ten states as well as forest ejidos and communities with no official extraction activities. The states are Chihuahua, Durango, Jalisco, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Michoacan, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Chiapas, and Puebla. The first phase collects key statistics to provide basic information and inform the design of a new SEMARNAT permit database. Phase 1 results lay the groundwork for the second phase of the project, which entails in-depth surveys in communities to answer key questions on industrial organization, community objectives, local governance and impact of community forestry. Overall, the project results will inform forest policies in technical assistance, conservation, payments for environmental services, training and design of other government programs, as well as contribute to the academic literature on land use and common property resource management.
"The paper presents work to date on Phase 1 of the project. The paper begins with issues raised during the collection of data. We will then present a comparative analysis across the ten forest states, including data on number of communities in which logging permits are held, a typology of community integration along the production chain of wood products, total hectares and total forested hectares, number of technical forestry service providers, nontimber forest product permits, type, level and ownership status of capital equipment used in timber production, real and actual processing capacity, degree of local control over extraction and processing activities through community member personnel, and trends in forest cover. The paper is the most comprehensive statement to date of the presence of community forestry activities in Mexico. We conclude by suggesting recommendations for policy and research."
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