Chavín Forestry Incentives

The lead forestry engineer in Chavín made strong assertions that the only proper way to deal with the problem of deforestation in Peru is a top-down approach in which the central government requires landowners to reforest all vacant land at their own expense. This struck me as more than a little implausible, and politically unfeasible. Frankly, I was pretty impressed with the program that the municipality had already thought up, and the scale of their ongoing program.

The municipality has created a very well thought-out series of incentives that both encourages reforestation, and also incentivizes the care of existing forests. They pay individuals to (a) plant and care for trees in tree nurseries, both in the urban and rural parts of the municipality, and (b) take part in the planting of saplings out in the countryside.

That's the easy part--that's pretty much also what you see from most other reforestation projects.

The other portion of the project that is more unusual is the generation of incentives to care for trees which have already been planted. This may be (arguably) the most important part of the project, and the most interesting.

What Chavín does is pay 30 centimos (about ten US cents) per tree, per month for maintenance of trees planted in the past, for a period of several years (I want to say three years, but I'm not 100% sure about that--it's in my notes somewhere).

The brilliant part of the project is that this payment is made to the local government committee of the "Centro Poblado," the smallest unit of organization of these rural villages. Then, although the forest engineers help to mediate any problems and also provide technical support, they pretty much leave the situation alone and let the locals regulate their own affairs.

Evidentally, the typical problem in these rural places is farm animals getting into a recently reforested area and trampling all the newly-planted trees. The typical community solution to this is (a) locals round up the offending animals and corral them. They then (b) inform the owner that he is to charge a fine, to compensate for the loss the community would have received. If the owner doesn't pay, they (c) butcher the animals and distribute the meat to the community.

In this way, every individual in the community has an incentive to enforce local rules about the protection of reforested areas, and an incentive to obey the rules, because they know everybody is looking out for them.

The endshot is that the program is well-funded, and quite extensive. It also has very few problems in terms of sustainability over the term of the project.

In the end, I'm rooting for the current mayor in the next election. He's no saint, from the sound of it (and I'm a little annoyed that I could never get to meet with him), but his does seem to be doing a good job. And if he's reelected, there may be a fair chance that he'll continue the reforestation project.