Illegal loggers in Peru’s Alto Purus Reserved Zone will find their activities much harder with the arrival of three new control posts.
Asociación para la Conservacion del Patrimonio de Cutivireni (ACPC), a Peruvian nongovernmental organization, is establishing the control posts alongside the Reserved Zone as part of a debt-for-nature swap between the U.S. and the Peruvian governments to guarantee long-term funding for forested protected areas in Peru.
"The forest control posts represent an important step towards achieving the protection of the forest resources and biodiversity richness of the zone,” ACPC Director Ivan Brehaut says. “The pursuit of sustainable forest management together with the control of illegal activities is indispensable for the development of the Amazon region.”
As part of the debt-for-nature swap, CEPF is supporting a two-year WWF project to improve protection of Manu National Park, Amarakaeri Communal Reserve and Alto Purus Reserved Zone. All three areas are inside the Vilcabamba-Amboró biodiversity conservation corridor—CEPF’s geographic focus in the Tropical Andes hotspot.
In total, the funding is expected to leverage $3.5 million in local currency over the next 12 years for Peruvian organizations such as ACPC to carry out activities related to effective management of these protected areas, providing the long-term support needed to ensure sustainability.
The ACPC project—one of the first to be supported by WWF with the new funds—includes establishing two control posts along the Inuya and Sepahua rivers and a mobile control post that will patrol the rivers and serve as a rapid response unit. Trained guards and police will staff each of the posts.
“The largest threat to the Alto Purus Reserved Zone stems from the search for the highly valuable broad or big leaf mahogany, Swietenia macrophylla, an activity that drives illegal loggers deeper and deeper into the area,” says Linda Norgrove of WWF Peru. “The advance of the cutting frontier of illegal logging goes hand in hand with environmental degradation and negative social impacts.
“While mahogany populations are threatened with commercial extinction, local communities are being exploited and the health implications for indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation are often severe. The Reserved Zone is presently poorly equipped with only one office, located in the town of Puerto Esperanza, a one to two day boat trip from the boundary of the area.”
The locations of these new control posts on the key river junctions outside the Reserved Zone means that post staff will be able to control two of the primary access routes for illegal loggers as well as the transport routes for their illegally harvested timber. Additionally, they will enable monitoring of the logging activities of forest concessions and the impact on indigenous communities located within the zone.
The Alto Purus Reserved Zone is an area of high biodiversity in the Peruvian Amazon covering some 2.7 million hectares. Peru is home to more species of bird and butterflies than any other country. Scientists are continually finding plant species with significant medicinal properties.
However, it has been estimated that approximately 12.5 percent of the original Amazonian forest cover found in southeastern Peru, or 500,000 square km, has been deforested or burned.
Logging companies along with miners in search of gold and other valuable metals and agricultural occupation are the main culprits. Although the destruction rates have decreased lately, it still continues at a worrying pace.
The wood the loggers send down the river goes into the hands of a broker who in turn sells it to industrial timber companies who are able to sell the logs on the international market.
Conservationists estimate that for a single foot of mahogany extracted from the Amazon, a logger may get paid just $1.2. That same timber on the international market can reap nearly 1,000 times that amount. With such a lucrative market place, it’s not hard to see why illegal logging is posing such a huge threat.
The impact of the ACPC control posts on illegal logging will be at their highest over the next six months as the river waters rise and illegal loggers attempt to transport mahogany timber downriver.