Selva del Marinero: Ecoturismo Campesino

If you're looking for a fun thing to do during your holidays in Mexico, visit the ejido Lopez Mateos and stay at the Selva Del Marinero community forestry ecotourism initiative!

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This will be a LONG post about my experience there and my thoughts. Tourism can bring many benefits
to an area, but at the same time the costs can be quite high if a scheme is not
managed appropriately and fails to be economically viable, environmentally sensitive
and culturally appropriate. Implementing sustainable tourism practices is what
many tourist destinations aim for, albeit the many difficulties associated with
it, such as the amount of  time
needed for the scheme to be economically profitable and the trend towards
unsustainability  as
locations become more popular. Three years ago I went to Los Tuxtlas Biosphere
Reserve in Veracruz, Mexico, and participated in a number of projects related
to conservation and biology. With a group of students from Stanford University
(mostly Biology and Latin American Studies majors) I visited a small community
initiative, “Selva del Marinero: ecoturismo campesino”.



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 ‘Ecotourism’ is a relatively new concept whose main feature
is sustainability. Despite the many definitions for this concept, I will use ecotourism
as the “responsible travel to fragile and usually protected areas that strives
to be low impact and small scale. It helps educate the traveler; provides funds
for conservation; directly benefits the economic development and political
empowerment of local communities; and fosters respect for different cultures
and for human rights.” I’ve come across the idea that not all ecotourism can
be sustainable, but since the above definition encompasses the present and
future well being of local people through conservation, I believe that all
ecotourism has to be sustainable in order to be called ecotourism. 



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As I said before, ‘Selva del
Marinero: ecoturismo campesino’ is an ecotourism scheme located in the Biosphere Reserve of Los Tuxtlas
in the ejido Lopez Mateos in Veracruz, Mexico. This region is the
northernmost tropical rainforest in North America and one of Mexico’s most
biologically rich forests, with a high percentage of endemic flora and fauna.
75-80% of Mexico’s forested land is found in ejidos, rural systems of
cooperative land tenure resulting from a land reform that extended from the end
of the 1910 Revolution until the constitutional reform of 1994. Ejidos are composed of two different
kinds of property rights over land: individual parcels, used for agricultural
activities, and common lands, mainly dedicated to pasture and forest.

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The forests provide a number of
vital ecological functions and a wide range of ecosystem services for the
inhabitants of the area. However, despite their high ecological values,
Mexico’s forests are being lost at an alarming pace: the country may have
already lost as much as 95% of its original tropical forest cover. The overall
deforestation rate in the ejidos, which is equal to 1.4% per year, is
higher than the 1.2% national average. The ejido Lopez Mateos was no
exception: slash-and-burn agriculture was practiced, land was turned into
cattle ranches and the streams were over-fished because of the lack of economic
programs for the new settlers when land was distributed to communal farms in
1972. Legal possession and land rights were recognized only 10 years later, and
during those years the lands was exploited.



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The idea of ecotourism was born
in the community in 1993 after stakeholders’ workshops organized and
facilitated by an external convener (a researcher of the National University),
which allowed the identification of hopes and ideas for the future. The
community started working right away, willing to try out this new alternative
that wouldn’t compromise the conservation of their land. We can see in this
example that even in communities that are very interested in sustainable
management of their forests, they often face a number of challenges that
eventually lead to excessive deforestation: non-conducive policy environments,
inadequate business skills, and limited access to financial services. 



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Local management committees were
created as needs appeared (e.g. Food Committee made up of the women of the
village), which was a great step in promoting the empowerment of local
communities in the management of natural resources. This allowed for specific
committees to liaise with local authorities on matters affecting them, such as
local ecological legislation. The stakeholders’ participation meant they were
completely in charge of the decision making process, and every member of the
community developed a sense of pride for the job they carried out. 



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High amounts of time, effort and
preparation are needed for a community like the ejido Lopez Mateos to reach profitable
sustainability. The village received its first ecotourists in the summer of
1997 and since then has gone through a lot of positive changes to improve the services
they offer to visitors, such as training (first aid, confidence workshops for
women, etc).Governmental organizations have
invested millions of pesos in the village to make ecotourism more viable and
reduce deforestation of the forest. Thanks to this, the community has been able
to build the infrastructure needed to receive the visitors. The ejido
also linked with other communities that had a shared vision into the Network of
Community Ecotourism of Los Tuxtlas (Red de Ecoturismo Comunitario,
RECT).  This step was taken
because, although managing tourist destinations at a large spatial scale (i.e.
state or country level) is problematic, managing them with too narrow
boundaries does not allow for the maintenance of adequate learning and
networking infrastructures. They claim that they practice the “most authentic
form of ecotourism” (RECT 2005) and the union has increased the quality and
quantity of services offered to visitors: bird watching, community projects,
hiking through established trails and camping. The most attractive part, however,
is the authentic interaction with the culture and locals.



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Extraoficially, between 800 and
1200 visitors go each year, the majority being national. Visitors pay around
$550 MXN per day (minimum wage is $54 MXN per day, or $4.4 CAD), and buy the local
crafts and products produced by the community throughout the year. The project
is becoming profitable just now, after more than 12 years of it being
implemented in the community, and still follows the environmental guidelines
set at the beginning. 

Overdevelopment and overcrowding
of tourism destinations, accompanied by environmental and social impacts,
destroy the very basis of the original tourist attraction. Although the ejido
is a commons, the possible ‘tragedy of the commons’, as described by Hardin, does
not offer a possible model of economic unsustainability in Lopez Mateos. This
is because there is no inequity in benefit sharing. There is a communal
incentive to protect the environment and maximize the benefits in the long run,
and there are no individual stakeholders that would want to utilize the
ecotourism site beyond sustainable level: all the revenues stay within the community
and there is no outside company that externalizes income. 



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Furthermore, even if the whole
community’s economy depends directly or indirectly on ecotourism (this is the
main source of revenue even if some land is still used for subsistence agriculture),
the inhabitants consider that the economic aspect is not the most important
reason for having undertaken this project. Wildlife and environmental
conservation and education to create awareness on the importance of ecosystem
services are the main socio-economic benefits derived from ecotourism: there is
the notion between community members that if this is achieved successfully,
their children will get to experience the forest just as they had the
opportunity to do. 

In late 1998, when the Tuxtlas
Biosphere Reserve was created, the ejido was left out of the nucleolus
zone and wasn’t expropriated because of the conservation efforts that had been made
by inhabitants, including the other projects interrelated to ecotourism:
production of organic manure, firewood-saving stoves and non-timber products,
planting of native tree species for firewood, and using solely ecotechnologies
to power the village and provide it with piped and hot water, sewage, and
electricity. The visitors also have to follow an environmental code of conduct.




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It’s a prevalent idea that
widespread poverty always correlates with a widespread lack of awareness of the
ecological values and their contributions to productive activities, and that
this has always hampered effective policy integration. It is also believed that
a failure to effectively administer and enforce forestry and conservation laws
means that most people see little risk in law-breaking. However, this is not
the case in the community Lopez Mateos: here the tourism is self-regulating.
There is no sanction if guidelines are not followed, but members of the
community have a strong land ethic because their livelihoods depend on nature.
The members of the community developed the governance on the use of their
natural resources to begin with, and the environmental perspective of their
land-use ethic changed in approach as the disastrous effects of a previous
model (governed solely by economic self-interest) were witnessed. I believe
this ethical relation with the land is possible because, as best said by Aldo
Leopold, “of the love, respect, and admiration for the land, and a high regard
for its value”. 



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Something that deeply impressed
me is the way in which these communities prove wrong the idea that people
living in marginal areas are ignorant. Despite extreme poverty levels of the
region, the knowledge that members of the community have on the land they live
in is impressive. The inhabitants have a clear understanding and assessment of
the environmental services they make use of (water, trees, biodiversity, etc.),
and the tour guides are more than willing to share this knowledge and explain processes
such as nitrogen fixation or germination, knowledge that comes from having deep
ties to the land.  Despite the high
levels of investment from within and outside the community, there are still many
difficulties because of the remoteness of the location and difficult
communication with tourists: the only telephone line was installed in 2001 and
Internet access remains limited to the nearest town of Catemaco 20km away.
Despite the continuous struggles, the initiative and hard work of the members
of the community is outstanding. Ecotourism requires full time work, even out
of the peak season, demonstrating the members’ commitment to and trust in the
ecotourism co-operative they’ve created.



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I found this new concept of “Learning
Tourism Destination” which I think applies to this community. This basically
means that the destination is adaptive to change and capable of learning how to
improve sustainability continuously, using throughout this process appropriate technologies
adequate for the level of development of the communities. The success of this community
in achieving sustainability can be mainly attributed to the relatively small
scale and slow growth of the project, the outside investment and initial help,
and the enhanced opportunities community members received for strengthening
their goals as environmental decision makers. 





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I recently also read an article about
a business approach to promote community forestry enterprises using REDD
(Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation – this uses
carbon credits and financial incentives to reduce deforestation and forest
degradation, and is usually accompanied by co-benefits, such as biodiversity
conservation, poverty alleviation and enhancement of carbon stocks). The
proposed mechanisms for promoting small and medium forest enterprises included:

1.Building a business environment
(this is mostly the legal framework to have things such as clear property
rights)

2. Provision of business
development services (these are the non-financial services: marketing, skills
development, legal services, product design, technology access)

3. Access to financial services
(like provision of credit, insurance, money transfers, etc.)

These would ideally create a
sustainable system based on carbon credits and REDD payments would benefit the
community, but the purpose of the business approach would also be to broaden
the enterprises and include things like timber and services so that the
community is not entirely dependant on the carbon market.