Forest Pays Dividends for Farmers
Adalberto “Tito” Vargas Guillen recalls his first meeting with some 30 coffee growers in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. A project coordinator with the AMBIO Cooperative, Vargas was pitching a swap: conservation coffee for carbon offset payments.
Using balloons of carbon dioxide as models, Vargas briefed his audience on the carbon cycle, photosynthesis and global warming. One community elder weighed in. “We already knew that trees clean the air and supply us with oxygen,” said the man, Vargas recounts. “What we didn’t know was that we are the ones who are polluting the air.”
That insight and the chance for income led growers in eight villages to join Scolel Te (“The tree that grows” in the Mayan dialect of Tzeltal), an AMBIO-operated forestry program supported by CEPF.
Participating growers are interplanting their coffee with Inga, a tree that provides edible legumes and nitrogen-fixing bacteria that help fertilize the soil—plus partial shade for the coffee and habitat for birds and other species. Farmers are also planting other species of trees on their plantations and as living fences to control livestock movement. The additional trees absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and companies and other entities looking to offset their emissions purchase carbon credits generated by the project, which in turn results in payments to the growers.
“There’s a great enthusiasm for this program among the people,” Vargas says.
Scolel Te has a strategic role to play in establishing green buffer zones between three protected natural reserves. The program will link the reserves of El Triunfo, La Sepultura and La Frailescana, strengthening biodiversity in the mountains of Chiapas.
Twelve other villages have joined the original eight and Vargas now counts upwards of 300 participants, thanks to additional support from Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas.