Tape #306 - Enterprise, Development and Natural Resources

....my office, she's acting as the International Visitor's Coordinator for the summer and with that we'll get started unless there are any questions.

Let's start with the big picture.  Why is it important to integrate small business development with forest management.  Well, the short answer is this woman and millions of people like her, forest-dependent people, especially in the developing world who are critically dependent upon forest resources for their survival and secondly, and no less importantly, the forest resource for everyone for the global commons is equally as important.  The purpose in talking to you today is to share some of the research results that my colleague and I have come up with  and also the main idea for me is advocating for design change for people working in rural poverty alleviation, as well as, people working within the natural resource management fields.  I have six main points.  I promise I'm not going to speak for 90 minutes.  When I hit 20 you can start hemming and hawing.  Okay, six main points, a little bit more detail about why integration between these two fields is important.  Second of all, what forest dependency really means, thirdly, what traditional forest management has been like, fourth, similar issues within rural poverty alleviation, small business development as a tool, and then some major issues and problems with integration.  So, moving onto the first point right away.  It's really important to integrate small business development with forest management because you cannot address rural poverty without addressing natural resource degradation because the two are intertwined.  The victims of the worst natural resource degradation are also victims of terrible poverty.  Secondly, many small business development programs in rural areas target women.  I'm sure most of you are familiar with the gramine? bank model and very often women are targeted in these kinds of programs.  Also, women are targeted in natural resource management programs because of their critical role in natural resource management and thirdly, from a practical point of view administering programs in rural areas to disperse populations is very expensive and very difficult and maybe we can achieve an economy of scale by combining forces.  This is deforestation of Central America.  This is soil erosion in the fall from over-intensive agriculture many many years.  So, moving onto the second point.  What does forest dependency really mean?  Well, two main areas, people who are forest dependent depend directly upon the forest to meet their basic needs.  Bush meat, fuel wood, traditional medicine, materials for building houses, and many many others.  Secondly, they depend upon the forest to provide supplemental and sometimes primary income.  This is a Tibetan woman, obviously she's dependent upon the forest for her fuel wood.  And that brings us to another main point that women are at the very intersection of natural resource management and the economic center of poor households.  This is men and women hauling fuel wood in the fall and the more the resource becomes degraded the farther and farther these people have to walk to gather fuel wood to cook their food.  If they don't fuel wood to cook their foods, the water doesn't get boiled.  If the water doesn't boil properly there's a lot of illnesses that are associated with that, so, it has many many consequences.  You can see women are not spared the heavy loads in the fall.  Some of the products in the forest are mentioned.  Here are some others as well.  Some of the traditional products like timber, some non-traditional products we don't think of honey collection, nut and berry collection, all dependent upon a healthy forest resource.  [someone talking in background - inaudible]  Okay, sorry.  Here's a traditional product that's being gathered in a non-traditional way or antique way you might call it.  These are dried mushrooms in Thailand.  Bringing forest goods to market.  When we talk about forest-based businesses, they mean much much more than timber production.  In many developing countries small scale forest-based businesses provide the largest employment besides agriculture.  In fact, you can see the statistics on the right of all forest-based business including timber production and ecotourism, the whole range from traditional to non-traditional.  You can see that small scale businesses, 35% of all forest-based businesses in Jamaica are provided by small businesses.  In Nepal, the handicrafts industry provides 13% of all forest-based businesses.  Most of these are very small businesses.  In Deli, 10,000 jobs alone are small-scale forest-based businesses.  I know there are many hyphens in that phrase.  A big study done by FAO showed that small-scale forest-based businesses often provide the highest percent of small enterprise employment in the country.  So, either within the realm of a country's entire small business sector, forest-based businesses are often a very significant portion of those.  Is that a little slower?  Okay.  This is weaving.  Ecotourism in Nepal, the white rhino.  What are the benefits of forest-based businesses?  Well, many of them are products that can be either sold in the market, traded with, bartered with their neighbors for other similar commodities.  They can also be stored and eaten during the lean times.  So, it's kind of an insurance for people who don't really have much other insurance.  On average, forest-based businesses provide incomes higher than agricultural work.  Some of the disadvantages we'll talk about in the very last section when I talk about problems with integration.  This is chair-making in Thailand.  So, now we're moving onto the third point.  I'm sorry my slide, it was supposed to have little check marks next to one and two to show you that we're moving onto number three.  So, I got a 50% discount on these slides for that error alone.  We're moving onto number three, traditional forest management.  Okay, much of traditional forest management, the goal has been to protect the resource from the local people.  That means shoving people out of their resource, cutting off their traditional access to these resources, and as you can tell from earlier slides, this means their very survival can be threatened.  This is practiced in the developing countries and developed countries as well.  The first national park in the Unites States, established in 1872 had exactly this policy of kicking the local people, who were the Shoshoni Indians, out of the park.  There were such violent conflicts between the forest managers, the park managers, and the Indian population that the U.S. Army had to intervene.  This approach of cutting the local people away from the resource is called offenses and fines approach.  It's practiced, unfortunately, all over the world.  There are some very famous international examples, volcanos in Wanda?, Luangua?, and Zambia, and Chitwan? in Nepal.  Many of these have adopted newer approaches but they were originally established by drawing a line and kicking the local people out away from the resource and restricting their access.  Under the system, forest managers and fields people are trained as guards.  They don't involve themselves in the community, they don't facilitate any premises, they carry rifles.  That's Nepal.  Okay, the problems with offenses and fines approach, well, when it works obviously the local people's survival can be threatened and when it doesn't work is when their survival is threatened.  People will find a way whether it is legal or not, to extract resources from the forest because most parks and forests do not have enough guards to guard the entire perimeter of a forest.  So, you see people going and cutting timber and collecting things illegally because if their survival depends on it, they have to break the law.  This does not encourage sustainable management if everything has to be done in the darkness of night and if it's illegal.  So, this has lead many natural resource management approaches to the conclusion that this approach is not very effective, new approaches are needed and maybe more top-down approaches, I'm sorry, getting away from the top-down approach, people have seen the light that that's important and they've been doing this over the last, I think maybe since around the 70's.  It started with something called social forestry in India and now there are many primutations?, one of them is called community forestry.  I'm trying to remember which is forward.  This is a community meeting in Nepal.  See, you don't slide projectors and or nice meeting rooms to get local input.  Moving onto the fourth point.  Similar issues with rural poverty alleviation.  Okay.  At the same time that natural resource management was realizing that they couldn't ignore the local people, they couldn't ignore those economic needs of local people because it just wasn't going to work to draw a line and say, you can't take the wood from here anymore.  That doesn't work.  Well, at the same time that natural resource managers were making that connection, people in rural poverty alleviation were recognizing the importance of the environment and the ecological consequences of their work to the local whose income and poverty they were trying to attack with their work and they came to very similar conclusions about what methods to use.  Some of those methods include getting the local people to participate, particularly women, leaning away from the top-down approach which I mentioned before.  Broadening of the sectoral focus including issues of public health, environmental sustainability and many many others.  This is a market in Tibet.  They are all small entrepreneurs.  My check mark came out here, but it's not in the right place.  Okay.  Next topic is small business development as a tool.  I'm sure most of you are aware of the gramine bank model, no, okay, the gramine bank model is an alternative banking system that was established, gramine means village, I think it's in Bangladeshi.  It's called the village banking model where instead of, let me say this correctly.  In contrast to a traditional bank that requires a borrower to have collateral to borrow money, like say to start a business, poor people don't have collateral, so instead of having collateral, the gramine bank model establishes like a credit circle of say five women and the group will vouch for the other people in the group.  So, if I borrow money then she guarantees that I will repay and I don't repay, she's going to pay, she like, guarantees me and there's a circle of about, I think, between five and ten people is a traditional model and they guarantee each other.  And in a village setting where everybody knows each other, you know who you're going to bank on and who, you know, who's a scoundrel.  So, it's sort of based on the fact that people know who's a good credit risk, who's responsible, who will repay, who has the alcoholic husband who will steal the money away from her, you know, people know that in a village setting.  So, this model has proven to be extremely successful and has shown the banking community you don't need like, this traditional profile of a good risk somebody with a big house and two nice cars.  You don't have to have that kind of collateral to be a good, you know, payer back of the business loan.  This model is very well designed for poor people and actually, this system that was developed in Bangladesh has spread.  It's all over the world and also, there are over 200 programs in the U.S. based on that model.  So, we have imported that model from overseas development work.  The main premise of the gramine bank model is to provide credit, to provide loans to people starting their own businesses.  There's another model, another track kind of within world poverty alleviation that's very successful called business development services.  This is based more on training.  Sometimes it provides credit to people but it always has an education component, how to be an entrepreneur, basic accounting.  Sometimes basic literacy and numeracy depending on the education level of the participants.  So, these are two tools within world poverty, well, just general economic development that I think would be particularly useful to those involved in natural resource management.  I keep forgetting which is forward.  Bringing goods to market in Bangladesh.  When projects are integrated, when rural economic development people actually have the brains to sit down with the natural resource management people, what do they try to do, you know, what does it mean to integrate these two fields that have evolved very separate paths?  Some of the tools we mentioned before are similar, participation, bottom-up approach, but still they're very distinct fields.  So, when you try to integrate them, what's the main idea of integrating them, well, two main ideas, but the extraction and use of the forest resources must be sustainable.  And the second point is that the small businesses have to be viable businesses.  They can't be projects that require funding from USAID for 20 years, because that's not a viable business.  There are lots of NGO's, lots and lots of NGO's and some government agencies too.  Though speaking of the Federal employee, I have to say, that we are far behind the NGO community.  And there's a lot of will there, I have met with the people in USAID Microenterprise and had lots of meetings about how to mesh these two areas and there's a lot of will but seeing results from the ground is very difficult for answering to different audiences and different goals, different ways to measure a project's success.  So, it's actually, it seems kind of logical to bring these two things together but it doesn't happen on the ground as much as it should.  This is a pit sawmill.  So, the last point that I want to talk a little bit about, the major issues or problems with integration.  This is paper-making in Nepal, it's a very successful small business project focused on women.  And if you go to Nepal, you'll see in all the tourist shops, they have beautiful hand-made cards with like block print and this beautiful hand-made paper and this is the paper, this is the starting point that makes some kind of gooey, gloppy thing that they press onto a screen, you probably have seen paper being made.  This lady in the background is my favorite of the whole slide show, the big ring in her nose, she's great.  So, then the paper is dried.  Okay.  What are the major problems with integrating?  These two fields.  Time frames are very different.  Lack of depth of analysis.  I'm going to expand a little bit so you know what I mean.  The business environment is critical, and linking incomes directly to conservation, very difficult.  Okay.  What do we mean by time frame?  Okay.  The turnaround time for business is very different than for trees, obviously.  Ecological time is measured in decades or centuries a lot of times.  Now, I don't think most of these projects would have the pressure of quarterly income statements and stockholder meetings.  But if people's survival is dependent upon small businesses like this, they can't sit around for three years waiting the capital to accrue.  So they probably need a turnaround within six to 18 months of some profit.  That's very very different, obviously, than ecological time or any kind of time frame within forest management.  A good example is a bark that was harvested in central Africa.  It turned out that it could be a viable business but in the long run it was hurting the resource because they were over-extracting.  In the short-run it looked like it was sustainable to extract the resource to make, they were making a medicine to treat cancer.  But in the long-run it really was going to destroy the resource.  So, the time frames are very different between business and forest management.  The second point is, having good intentions is not enough.  If a forest manager has the idea that he wants, oh, I'm going to, you know, be really smart and integrate and really think about the incomes for local people.  Just having the willpower or having the idea or the good intention is not enough.  A good example is an ecotourism project in Indonesia.  The natural resource management people, the forest management people, they focus on building up this nice ecotourism site.  They built beautiful trails, they put together beautiful signs, you know, all these interpretive things for visitors and they were talking about this project like, we built the resource and now the local people can build the small guest houses and the restaurants and this is a very good, you know, sustainable income for them and its, you know, it's not like the Hilton, I mean it's more sustainable than that, it's just simple trails and it's protecting the resource and teaching people about the value of the resource so now the local people can build up their small businesses.  But that's really missing the point because it's very possible that the business environment is not ripe at all for small entrepreneurs to start their own businesses.  There are lots and lots of things at the policy level that the forest managers in Indonesia may have no clue about.  Credit problems.  Maybe people can't borrow money unless they have huge amounts of collateral.  Maybe they can't borrow a small amount of money, maybe there's a loan minimum of, you know, $50,000 or upward.  Perhaps the business licensing laws are really tedious and complicated.  You need a high price lawyer to help you figure that out.  Obviously, a rural person trying to open a popsicle stand is not going to be able to get through that maze.  Another example, maybe women cannot own property in that setting, in that country.  Maybe she can't own businesses.  So, there are lots of things that go beyond the common sense, I mean the good intentions of the forest managers, like hey, we're going to build up this nice park and then the local people can build the, you know, the popsicle stands and the postcard vendors and you know, the waffle stands or whatever and they can have sustainable incomes.  You need a little bit more than a superficial analysis for it really to work.  This is ecotourism in Nepal.  And the final point is, how difficult it is to actually link the income generation to conservation.  If you give people and alternative, it doesn't mean they won't pursue both at the same time.  An example is, in South Pacific in Vanawatu? which is, you know, 80 islands comprise this country, there was a wild yam project.   People realized that there was a big market for wild yams in the central city where people had regular jobs and they were pining for the foods of their childhood like we all do.  But on the main island people were not growing the wild yams because the wild yams grow on or near the forest.  So, this very clever person figured out, hey, there's a market for wild yams in the central city and there are people out in the outer islands who need income opportunities.  Fantastic.  So, now, we're going to give them this wonderful alternative to clear-cutting their forest, right?  They're going to give up clear-cutting the forest, the million dollars that the loggers wave in front of their nose, they're going to give that up for $20 a year from the wild yam exports.  You see my point that they were going to pursue both at the same time.  They thought the yams were fantastic, in addition, to getting the million dollars from the loggers.  This is a forest in Vanawatu, it's a eucalyptus tree.  So, we've been through all six points, talking about why integration is important, what forest dependency means, how traditional forest management evolved, similar issues within rural poverty alleviation, how small business development can be a tool, some of the major problems and issues with integration.  I think the trend of integration is likely to continue.  Lots of big organizations like, the World Bank's GEF, you know, Global Environmental Facility which is funding environmental projects.  They are getting involved with small business development, Microenterprise programs, USAID, and I think will continue trying to integrate, at least, my friends who work at AID Microenterprise have indicated that.  Of course, we need more lessons learned, we need more models to draw from to figure out how to actually do it.  I guess if I could leave you with one final thought it would be that we need to integrate these fields because our economic and environmental sustainability depends on it.  And it's people like this guy, keep in mind when you think about how to develop sustainable incomes without hurting this person's environment.  That's it.  You want to hit the lights for me? 

I'm sure you have questions and I'd love to hear comments and I'd love to hear research or programs that you are all involved in that are somehow related to this.  If people have something longer than a short question I'd ask you to take the mike, otherwise, I can para, they asked me to paraphrase all the questions so that the taped version of this represents everyone's collective thoughts.  Yeah?

 

Participant:  [beginning is inaudible]  I was telling her earlier about a German government project ___________ forestry? project in Nepal covering about 1.2 million people.  One of the suggestions or one of the things that they are trying to do, I believe that a lot of international government organizations should try to do is, to keep away from that superficial analysis that she's talking about, I think it's important to involve local people in the initial stages of planning.  I mean, ultimately, I believe they should be the one's making the decisions regarding what's best for their community, particularly, in terms of environment and conservation.  But development agencies often may have a design plan then come in somewhere in the middle try to involve local people in participation and of course they make a lot of mistakes because they don't have any idea of, you know, how the local people live their lives, they don't tap into indigenous knowledge that's already there.  I think a lot of people are trying to use what they call participatory research and participatory technique that it becomes a mutual learning process for the local people and for the people who are trying to assist them in developing some kind of environmental sustainability within their community and I really think agencies need to pursue this more.  What's really sad about this project that's been going on now in Nepal, they've been doing, I think, an excellent idea because it's forest management, but they then involving like she was saying Microenterprise opportunities for women and men, but specifically for women.  Literacy programs, training for traditional birth attendance.  I mean taking the idea that it's a holistic undertaking when you go into a community, yes, you're focusing on environmental conservation but that doesn't exist on it's own, people have lives and livelihoods that they have to support.  But I found out recently that while this project is going on for a few more years, you have evaluators who sit in their offices back in Germany, they come over for a few weeks they see what's going on, they want to phase out the rural and credit savings schemes.  [Why is that?]  And I'm not sure why.  I've been e-mailing and I'll be over there soon again to see what's going on, but why they are doing it, I'm thinking, it's coming down to the bottom line which is money, but it doesn't make any kind of sense because what I've seen over there is that women being able to suddenly buy cow, being able to buy small __________ like chickens and goats, being able to start businesses of selling bread.  I mean they can suddenly have all the ways of making income because often they sell the wood that's in the forest, that's one of the problems that they're having besides the fact that they have to use it every day for cooking and other household needs, but they want to phase a lot of these things out because they feel that you should be focusing on planting trees.  They see it very singularly, not as a holistic part of the community, and it's really hard to change some people's mind to see it in a different way as you were saying.

 

Participant:  It's just a quick question regarding the participatory stuff you were talking about then.  Is when they go into a community over there on that project you're talking about with the German support of whatever, are they doing something like a swot analysis which allows the community to develop a swot analysis' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so it actually allows the community to develop their own, to see their own strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and what it is that's strengthening them.  If you take a community through that which has been done a lot in __________ in Australia.  For ________ to look at what's, you know, threatening their environment but through that also they get to see their strengths and if they can see their strengths, what are, you know, it's a lot of different things, you know, huge different strengths, then they can see what the strengths are and that way it's their realization that and then people instead of saying, look, this is your strength.  Because if you sell a strength, then you run with it.  If someone tells you you're really good at something you'll run with it.  But it might not be actually good for you and the same with their communities.  Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, it's just called a swot analysis.  It comes from the business paradigm and it's very useful.

 

Participant:  I would just like to make a comment on the differences in the backgrounds of the people that you are dealing with.  I come from Zambia, that's one of the countries that was mentioned there __________ integrated management.  That project has done well after many years of educating the local people.  I think I would like to mention here that they local people that she's referring to in Australia maybe can do a swot analysis.  But when you come to Zambia you have to start by first educating them to get them to understand why they must conserve their forest.  All along they've traditionally lived with their forest, they did make business out of the forest, they simply existed naturally in the forest and the forest didn't? die.  Then some ________ person with money comes and dangles that money in front of them suddenly, they see money out of their forest.  So, to convince them to preserve their forest as well as make money takes a lot of educating.

 

We need a lot of education in this country, as well, you know.

 

Participant:  So, that's the first point and I would also like to mention that apart from, in Wangua? for example, they are now making money not because of logging but it's a place, it's a tourist place and now you have hunters because there's plenty of animals, so you have these hunters paying for licenses.  Their advantage is that the money that is being made by the conservation people is being reinvested now suddenly they have a school and the community decided on how to use that money that is coming in.  They'll tell you they need their road done and the money that is used for licenses for that year builds the road for them.  It builds a clinic for them.  When you get to that stage you can get the people to understand and choose what they want to do.  But I would like to talk on a different area that I'm operating from, it's an agricultural area.  There was a shortage of land that had been state land which had been preserved as forest.  Now, they've settled people into that forest land or part of it, and these are agricultural people, they want to grow crops.  We have a problem in that we need to educate those people to use conservation farming methods.  It is very good to sit here and talk about conservation farming methods but you need money to go and educate people about that conservation farming method and very often, that money is not available.  I'm one of those people that I'm married to an Ecologist, he's a lecturer, we have all the information that we need but we can't teach those people how to do conservation farming because we haven't got the means.  So, we are slowly watching this beautiful forest being destroyed, not deliberately, but the people don't know any better.  They know that they have to cut down trees to grow food.  We are helping them to grow food, but we can't, we don't have the resources to manage the forest as well.  So, I don't know how institutions or finances can come in and assist in such situations.  So, very often it's the question of existence really rather than greed for money that has destroyed forests.  It's simply survival.  And this forest that I'm talking about is like a ______ land fall, a beautiful river for the water resource.  So, if it is cut down, that river would probably die.  There's plenty of fish at the moment and there's plenty of water but we are slowly seeing it getting degraded and there's nothing much we can do about it.  So, I would like people to look at it from that point of view as well, rather than simply the making of money out of the forest but as a survival for the local people.

 

Participant:  What we see in our area of the country and we're at, the area I'm addressing is at 10,000 feet.  We're the highest valley, I believe in the world that's still agricultural producing.  We have BLM land that we graze our cattle on and without this government land, we wouldn't be able to survive.  We are the true environmentalists of the land.  What we see is that our land and our water is being taken more and more for recreational purposes and we don't know how we will survive.  We send our cattle up, they eat the natural grasses, they eat the natural shrubbery or the vegetation that's on that land and the churning and the natural manure, they replenish the land as it is used.  However, we have hunters and we have commercial interests that drive through our grazing lands, they run over our cattle, they dump their beer bottles and their cans in our water tanks, they cut our fences because it's inconvenient for them to walk 15 feet to the next gate.  However, we have the guards, the government guards of this land that patrol up and down should our cows encroach on the BLM land or forest we're fined unless we fortunate enough to have someone with common sense.  Common sense that says hey, I just looked at your fences, they were in admirable condition, where we graze our animals we have to maintain 30 miles of fence and that means we can't take notarized vehicles, we use horses, we cart the fence posts and the wire.  I like what you're saying about getting the local people involved.  We know that land.  Our very survival is dependent upon it.  But, we bring people in to manage a program that have absolutely no idea of what they're doing and they may have gotten their PhD in this and that.  Common sense and common knowledge goes a long way.  But I applaud you for your sense of values in that.  We had treaties a long time ago that said that land belonged to us a long with the grazing rights and we still have those treaties and I believe, our integrity of the land should stand and thank you.

 

Participant:  I want to relay an example of a project that I work with.  I work with USAID, the Agency of International Development, and one of the projects that I work on is called SANRM is the acronym, it stands for sustainable agriculture and natural resource management.  They have a project in the Philippines that started out with very much a participatory approach by working with local people to identify with the locals that lived in this watershed.  What they saw is the constraints of the problems and one of the things that the particular community I work with identified was water.  They said well, you know, we see the water, we don't have the same water flow, the water quality has degraded and this is a big issue for us.  So, they set up a water monitoring project and at that time, it was basically men who were involved with the project and who did the monitoring.  But with the project which brought in tools like GIS and mapping, they were able to go across a major watershed with major tributaries and see differences in water quality from river tributaries that ran through pristine forests, agricultural land to urban land and really get a sense themselves of where the water had deteriorated.  Through this mapping they saw the correlation between maintaining upland forests, agricultural and urban lands and so they organized their own NGO and went to the local mayor and they've become very, these are local people, become very active in changing policies on natural resource management.  But one of the other things that happened is throughout all this the women became interested because they said well, we also see that the water quality is affecting our health and our children's health and once came into it they wanted to monitor things like ecoli bacteria and other things and so the women are now involved in the whole project and it's kind of become a very interesting, starting from the local, you know, people's participation and now people are carrying it forward.  It's a neat project.  [And it's called SANRM?]  SANRM.  Sustainable agriculture and natural resource management.  It's actually run through the University of Georgia but we fund it as USAID.

 

Participant:  I want to address points that you made in between the lines.  I'm from __________ agricultural university.  I think we have a lot to do with developmental organizations, NGO's, and university policies because I'm not _________ research program of natural resource management in __________ and of course, people come to us for consultation of whatever and I think there's a problem here.  Most of the time, programs are not that well developed, not that, [cannot understand] analyzed and they just ________________ for a day and talk with people and you can learn something about _________ and after three months you come again and you get so much money for it.  It's very tempting for a university and NGO's who really need money to function and do that, good jobs to say, okay, we always try to tell well that's not a good developed project, you could do this and this and this to improve it and otherwise we can't come in.  But I know from many other people and departments that they are not that ________ and perhaps it part of discretion, how do you deal with these kinds of things and it's important that we do as much projects as possible or are we going for quality and also turn down projects if we can't manage to improve it.  This question I want to raise.

 

Participant: I am working for USAID in Madagascar who happen to have one of the most successful environmental programs in Africa.  Yeah, we have seven, but also ________ and a whole range of activities.  I would like to go back to women's participation.  Our program in Madagascar has showed that given an economic basis to environment and education is a very successful approach and that's women participation in natural resources management is a ________ point to strengthen their empowerment of women because we have experienced ________ women who are participating in local committees for natural resources management become kind of women leaders in their community and that they were able to participate even in the, what we may call [side 1 ended]  ______ terms but ________ in terms of participation as a global goal and that is an experience that I would like to share with you all.  Strengthening women's participation in natural resources management and land use or whatever we want to call it is a critical basis for women's empowerment.

 

Lecturer:  If your goal is to empower women, I agree with you and I'm happy you shared your experience with us.  It's really important to involve women.  Even if that's not your goal, even if your goal is just to have a very successful project, you still need to involve women from the outset.  The person who started the gramine bank in Bangladesh named Mohammed Unice? when asked why his programs target 99% women, he said, well, we target women for these micro-credit programs because women have plans, plans about dinner and plans about their children's education and their whole families health.  That's why I focus on women.  And also, women don't drink or gamble the money away the same way that men do, unfortunately.  So, they actually are a better credit risk in that setting than the men.  So, I agree with you.  Others?

 

Participant:  Thank you very much.  When you talked about the __________, you talked about participation of the local people and you insisted more on basic literacy and numeracy while I think that may be in all the countries, but in the African countries and especially in the _______ region where really we have a problem of the management of natural resources because of all those issues that you raised.  You may have numerous illiteracy in the training of the people but if you don't have credit you can go nowhere.  That's the first thing.  And also, I think that the participation of the local community needs some kind of government.  So, if we succeed in integrating agriculture and natural resources, I think also, we need to go to governments, you know, have training programs in governments, make people feel that they have the right to do things and then, you know, that they have also to respect some kinds of rules.  Thank you. 

 

Participant:  I've thought about this for a long time and I've kind of come to the conclusion that we still haven't got to the root of the problem which is that none of the natural resources are economically valued until they have some sort of harvest attachment to them and until we basically raise the price of and include the price of air and water and soil and trees that grow for a hundred or more years, I don't think there's going to be an economic, good economic base on the land in any country developed or developing.  In the developed countries people call them subsidies when they try to go back and, I call it, reparations, rather than subsidies, but basically, what happens is all the money that is paid for natural resources goes just to the value- added parts, nothing goes to the parts that will sustain and the only way it seems to me that you're ever going to get something economically sustainable is to recognize that conservation costs money and you know, I know in our own area, the Tongus? National Forest, we have much the same problems that the lady from the midwest or the west was talking about with grazing, it's publicly-owned and many of the people in the rest of the United States think that it should be locked up and it probably should be locked up from pulp mills but the alternative suggested are similar to what you're talking about, mushroom gathering and you know, bark and all that and I've got to tell you there's no money in it.  I mean, at least a pulp mill will pay you a wage and so, somebody has to come to grips with the fact that if you want conservation, no matter where you want it, whether it's in the Amazon forest or anywhere, you're going to, the urban people are living off of it and they will have to pay for it.  Thanks.

 

Participant:  One of the concerns that I've had for a long time, I am hearing pieces and parts of that here too is the lesser developed countries which do have enormous wealth yet in the natural resource base continue to be preyed upon, if you will, by the more developed countries who have learned that a small sum of money in our realm is a significant sum of money in theirs and I was at a meeting yesterday which they were talking about biotechnology and intellectual property rights and all those other things and the exploitation of indigenous people's with respect to their resource base upon which they depend and I'm thinking particularly, I'm from Michigan and I live near the Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company and the pharmaceutical companies are well known for going into such as the rainforest areas and claiming, if you will, and even now patenting as theirs, certain products for which they are paying the local people what seems like an enormous sum of money and yet ultimately, by their controlling something which they all gain even further in the world economy, they, in a sense, destitute these people, or even prostitute these people and make them dependent on them for their own resources and that concerns me from the societal standpoint, from a biological standpoint, from an economic standpoint and perhaps this is something that the women seem a little more concerned about because we take a longer view of ourselves in society versus, you know, the quick fix and I would like to just offer that up as a possible discussion piece someplace later on today. 

 

Participant:  My office actually sponsored a publication on that very topic called Biodiversity Prospecting which lays out some of the horror scenes and also a guideline for companies or conservation groups trying to figure out a fair way for pharmaceutical companies to do this prospecting, looking for, you know, useful structures or critters or whatever without really exploiting the local people.  Yeah, you can e-mail me if you'd like a copy of it.

 

Participant:  I would like to address the ag issues that were brought up.  I'm the Assistant Director of Agriculture for the State of Nebraska and I agree with what you're saying and I find it interesting that we have a lot of talk about conservatism and conservation and managing resources but we don't have value attached and the economic base is lacking.  I was, my brother won the National Environmental Stewardship Award from a national organization and he was handed a piece of paper, not even in a frame, the next person across the stage won a new product award and they were given a quarter of a million dollar check.  [Wow.]  So, I think that the value attachment we've got to come to grips with that.  But I also have to say, I believe that the agricultural folks, environmental folks are similar to what we call the blind menoniliphant?.  We've got the environmentalist on the ear and the ag on the left knee, they think they've got a different animal but they don't.  There is more common ground.  And I think that research and consistent work on that is coming to that and the Montana Mediation Council has really been a leader and they have worked consistently to find that common ground and grow that ground rather than find the negative.  And I'd like to wrap-up by saying I think carrots and sticks are two ways of regulating.  We have a ton of sticks out there, you know, if you don't do this we're going to slap you, we're going to fine you, we don't have a lot of carrots.  And my understanding of human nature is if you put some carrots out there that changes behavior.  If you really raise the level of the debate about how field mapping an appropriate clinical usage cannot only maximize yield, conserve the land and return more money to your pocket that changes behavior.  Laws, regulations, and slaps do not.  If people understand that conserving this, this, this, and this, and doing it appropriately, could give them say, a 20% reduction in their property tax.  That changes behavior.  We have enough sticks, we need some carrots.

 

Participant:  What I just wanted to add to that and everybody's talking about putting value on conservation which I think is really important but I think for a lot of people it's also a poverty alleviation.  You cannot talk to someone who cannot put food on their table daily.  You can talk to them about conservation but their going to have their priorities.  I think at the same time they also have to be given means or support in which to be able to support themselves.  The other things that hasn't been mentioned is consumerism and right here in this country we're talking about, your talking about how companies go over and get what we need and exploit those resources but we're using those resources, we're using those resources more than anyone else in the world and that's something, I think, is really hard for individuals to sit down and to look at and really be honest about and say, how much are we using and do I really need to be using this day-to-day and it doesn't seem so much for one person to think well, what am I going to do if I stop doing this as much or using this as much but if all of us start to really look at that, I mean, that's something we all control over as individuals and I think we just need to start looking at that as well.

 

Participant:  I think I'm going along the same lines as you are, poverty, poverty doesn't mean a thing that's good and poverty makes us very vulnerable to suggestions, very vulnerable to anyone who offers a solution to my being poor.  If my children are hungry and someone offers me food for them then get out of my way.  I will absolutely forget about ecological issues.  I will forget about anything else except that I can feed my children that they may survive.  Poverty makes us too vulnerable.  I am touting my product in that it's what I know best.  We raise fat-free beef on an organically-certified ranch.  We devoted 33 years to doing this.  Folks that we know have said, Olive, it should be headlines in the New York Times, it should be headlines.  Well, why isn't it?  We're talking about taking care of a land, producing good, clean products, and quite frankly, it doesn't seem like it's getting any attention.  Now, we're not the only ones.  Other folks are doing just as much as we have done.  Why don't we get the attention?  And why don't we get paid parity for it?  Thank you.

 

Participant:  Well, I'm going to change the subject just a little bit.  We're talking about the poor people who have to go into the forest and get what they need to survive.  Now, let's talk about the rich people who go in and just take it anyway and do with it what they please.  We have a situation in our area where we have this man with more money than he knows what to do with who goes in and takes down the forest.  He doesn't care about the watershed.  He doesn't care about the land.  He doesn't care about the people, but since he's got the money and he's got the political connections, he's hard to stop.  We know how to take care of our forest and we're still fighting with the environmentalists over the spotted owl deal and everything else just so we could survive but this man comes in he can take down the whole section of forest and he's got no problem.  He can get the permit, he can get anything he needs.  I mean, there's the  political right there and it goes from one extreme to another where you need to take it out because you need it for survival and you need to leave it in because you need if for survival.  So, which issue, I mean, they're both the same issue.  What's left. 

 

Participant:  Yeah, catch 22.  We're from the same area.

 

Participant:  I'm with the Farm Service Agency and I have to say that I think the, one of our programs which is ostensibly a conservation program, is really a poverty alleviation program and that's the Conservation Reserve and I think that's a model for assigning some sort of value to the land, to the water and even to the air and basically, what it does is it, the government agrees to pay a rent on the land that is not producing an annual crop and you can only do up to a certain percentage of your property and a certain percentage of the land in it given county and so on and so forth but I've often thought that I know that in Alaska, some farmers would have gone under without that program.  They wouldn't still be able to farm at all and the land would be really degraded and I just think it would work around the world in situations like this for people who own little bits of forest and or even villages who own bits of forest and they're given a rental based on them not doing destructive things and that answers your question about you know, how do you get people to conserve without paying them and I think you have to pay them and I think anything else is foolish and you know, the developing countries always say well, you guys are bad, you know, or the other way around, excuse me, developed countries say, you know, look at what's happening in the Amazon and so on, and I think, you know, if there was some sort of thing like the Conservation Reserve that was internationally funded that would go a long way.  Thanks.

 

Participant:  What's the name of your program again?

 

Participant:  It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, it basically idles about 36 million acres of land and it has single-handedly improved the water fowl in the United States by about 75% over what it was when it began in 1985 and you know, the fact is in the United States at least 75% of the wildlife is located on farms and if you're going to attack the problems of wildlife and conservation and watersheds you're going to have to deal with private owners in the United States at any rate and that's the way to do it.

 

Participant:  And that program enables the owner to hold it when he's ready to get rid of it, when he wants to sell it, so often _____ farmers who don't have any capital in force, they can go and then buy the land and it's in much improved condition.  So, if it's been a real plus.

 

Participant:  I just had an observation, since we are all women and we are here because we are women and connected to agriculture which ultimately is also connected to natural resources, one of the things that I was just talking to Joe Long about that struck me is we've not really talked about one of the problems that we are facing and that is that we don't occupy those decision-making positions within our organizations or agencies or whatever you represent, most of us, exception.  One of the things I am seeing here is until we can access those somewhat political powerful decision-making positions, these kinds of things are going to continue to go on and so, I met a young lady who is going to run for the Senate in Colorado as a Senator from her rural area because she said somebody has to do this.  My people are not being well-served and I think I can do this.  Clergy and anybody who has an opportunity to take a leadership position in your village, your township, your city, wherever you are from, to do so, because one of the problems as I said from last night is our politicians never have to make decisions on empty stomachs.

 

Lecturer:  Well, I'd like to thank you all for coming.  There are extra copies of the Executive Summary up here that has contact information if you want a final copy of the article that's based on this research.  There's a sign-up for an article on ecotourism if you'd like.  I didn't bring enough copies.  Yeah, the Executive Summary has my e-mail and phone number so you can get in touch with me if you like.  I'd love to hear from any of you.  Thanks a lot for coming, the discussion was really good, really different than what I expected.  But, good job.  Thanks.