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Uniting Trees with Trees |
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The Meso-American Biological Corridor is an attempt to restore the chain of forests that until relatively recently connected South and North America.
SAN JOSE – Promoted by the governments of Central America and Mexico, the Meso-American Biological Corridor, or CBM according to its Spanish initials, aims to reconnect fragments of what was the Meso-American strip of forest and jungle, one of the world’s most biologically diverse areas, but which has been deforested at a rate of 400,000 hectares a year.
However, environmental organizations say that the CBM does not go beyond mere good intentions because, in spite of advances in environmental legislation, the region’s governments lack the resources and the political will to halt the destruction of the forests.
If this trend continues, by 2015 there will be no more forested areas in the 770,000-square-km strip extending through Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, and five states of southeastern Mexico: Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Yucatan and Tabasco.
“The CBM is a strategy to recuperate the continuum of trees with trees, humans with humans and water with water,” Mauricio Castro, executive secretary of the inter-governmental Central American Environment and Development Commission (CCAD), told Tierramérica.
Approved by the eight governments in 1997, the CBM faces alarming environmental problems that affect the lives of 34 million people. The challenges include deforestation, uncontrolled extraction of natural resources and the fragmentation of natural areas in a region that holds seven percent of the known living species on earth.
The concept of the biological corridor itself is in question. The basic concept is to create a broad strip that connects protected areas in order to counteract the number-one cause of plant and animal extinction: the fragmentation of habitats caused by human activities.
The phenomenon reduces the total area of the ecosystems and separates them into isolated patches. Reconnecting these areas would allow the fauna to move among the different sites and the flora to spread beyond the limited zones.
This project is essential for improving the lives of the human population and the economic development of the region, say its proponents.
According to biologist Eduardo Carrillo, “the extinction of the jaguar (Panthera onca) could set off a chain reaction that would affect many species and even the day-to-day lives of people.”
If the jaguars were to disappear, it would alter the food chain because there would be more herbivores and therefore greater degradation of the forest, which would lead to less water, fewer plants, and less timber for people to use, he explained to Tierramérica.
The broad protected swath of land would provide the jaguar – which requires a minimum area of 25 square km to survive – with greater extensions of forest in which to move about, reproduce and feed.
“If we work together to protect the forest, we protect all of its species. It is the only way to preserve the environment, because nature knows no borders,” said Carrillo, an expert from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Participating in the Meso-American Biological Corridor initiative are international agencies, non-governmental organizations, businesses and communities, promoting research, environmental education and sustainable development strategies.
“The idea is to foment sustainable human development in the region. That way we ensure the availability of water and seeds, and less vulnerability to poverty,” explained Castro.
The CCAD heads the CBM Consolidation Program, begun in 2000 with a six-year mandate to ensure the creation of the corridor in each country involved. Its 16.6-million dollar budget was provided by the World Environment Fund, Germany’s GTZ and the region’s governments.
Although many consider it “a necessary idea”, few details about the corridor has been provided to environmental organizations in the area.
In El Salvador, “except for some posters found in some elegant offices,” the CBM is almost unknown, Mauricio Sermeno, of the Salvadoran Ecological Union, told Tierramérica.
Ricardo Navarro, head of the Appropriate Technology Center in El Salvador, went even further. According to the activist, the corridor idea is a “green paint job” that seeks to win over environmental groups to support neo-liberal economic projects like the Puebla-Panama Plan, a regional initiative the Meso-American governments launched in 2001.
However, Honduran ecologist Jorge Varela believes that uniting eight countries behind the idea of preserving biodiversity is in itself a major achievement.
The problem is the lack of political will, said Varela, director of the independent Committee to Protect the Flora and Fauna of the Gulf of Fonseca, an area shared by El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua on the Pacific coast.
“In 1999, a law was enacted to protect the natural areas of the Gulf of Fonseca. It is good legislation, but the destruction of the mangroves continues,” he said.
Other environmentalists in the region told Tierramérica that greater emphasis is needed on consolidating the protected areas that already exist, as well as mechanisms to ensure that the CBM generates its own economic resources.
The corridor’s proponents underscore its achievements, such as progress in connecting forested areas, creating local biological corridors, greater community awareness and the data provided by scientific research.
They believe it will also contribute to the region’s social and environmental stability. It could also save the jaguar, which has roamed the jungles of Meso-America since long before the era of the Mayans.
* Néfer Munoz is an IPS correspondent. Blanca Abarca (El Salvador) and Thelma Mejía (Honduras) contributed to this report.
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