Paraguayan Forest Reaps Benefit From Farm Project

Life has been hard for Diega Garrido de Jara, whose family survives by subsistence farming in the red soil of eastern Paraguay.

But the 63-year-old now has hopeful visions of a bed of roses--the one growing behind her house, along with a variety of other new crops intended to improve life for her, her 10 children and 15 grandchildren.

The Jaras are among 12,000 white and Indian families taking part in an unusual, grass-roots agribusiness project inside a 20-mile-wide ring around the 154,560-acre Mbaracayu Forest Reserve.

Mbaracayu’s manager, the private Moises Bertoni Foundation, Paraguay’s largest conservation group, wants to improve farmers’ lives and to enlist them as partners in preserving eastern Paraguay’s fast-disappearing semi-tropical forest, savannas and wetlands.

The foundation has set up a private company, CAVYSA, that teaches crop diversification and marketing, buys products at competitive prices, and stores, processes and transports them to market.

In return, the foundation expects farmers, prospering for the first time, to recognize the value of having a pristine forest next door and to guard it against invasion by landless settlers, poachers, loggers and clandestine marijuana growers.

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Stepping into a role usually occupied by government and international aid organizations, the foundation believes its project is unique in Latin America, said Jose Vierci, CAVYSA projects director.

The government, struggling to preserve a still fragile democracy that replaced Gen. Alfredo Stroessner’s nearly 35-year dictatorship in 1989, is far away in Asuncion, 230 miles to the southwest. During the dictatorship, Paraguay was largely overlooked by international aid efforts.

There are some small projects in Latin America, “but I don’t think any nongovernmental organization has gone so far in trying to stimulate an industrial enterprise” involving so many farm families, said Alan Randall, director of major project development for the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy. “In that sense it is unique.”

CAVYSA provides the farmers with a steady customer for their products, Randall noted.

“Suddenly, they have a market they didn’t have before,” he said. In the past, the area’s subsistence farmers were obliged to sell to passing truck drivers and often unscrupulous middlemen.

The underlying goal is to protect the Mbaracayu reserve.

“Paraguay has the highest deforestation rate in Latin America,” Randall said. In the 1970s and ‘80s, huge tracts were cleared for industrial-scale cotton and soybean planting. A growing population of landless peasants increasingly invades, cuts and burns unprotected forest.

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Mbaracayu is the largest remnant of semi-tropical Atlantic forest that once extended down the Brazilian coast and inland to eastern Paraguay.

It is full of rare and endangered species, including jaguar, bush dog, tapir, bell birds, macaws, harpy eagles, tiny terrestrial orchids and giant lavender-flowered Lapacho trees.

Vierci, the agricultural engineer who directs the CAVYSA projects, said the area’s economy “was devastated by single-crop farming, usually cotton or tobacco.” Farmers relied on one crop so long “they forgot how to grow anything else.”

With CAVYSA experts teaching them new crops, the farmers have new opportunities.

Jara’s rose bushes, which she plans to sell, as well as seeds, bee hives and know-how were provided by CAVYSA, which has its headquarters in Villa Ygatimi, the area’s largest town.

“At first we didn’t believe them,” said Jara’s son Mariano, a former cotton grower who now harvests corn and yerba mate leaves, which are used to make a bitter tea popular throughout southern South America.

“Lots of people had come and lied to us before” about farming projects, he said. “But CAVYSA brought ideas and we see that they work.”

CAVYSA buys corn, beans, peanuts, honey and petit grain, an essence extracted from bitter orange leaves, storing them for shipment over dirt roads to Asuncion.

A recently completed plant, based on local technology, is ready to process yerba mate leaves. Another, under construction, will extract starch from manioc root for use as a filler in pharmaceutical and food products, providing a year-round market.

Local workers have acquired new skills, learning to make bee hives and build the processing plants, which will employ 40 people.

“A local entrepreneur is starting an ox cart freight service to bring products to our plants,” Vierci said.

At Arroyo Bandera, 12 miles from the Jara home, the 106 residents of an Indian village plan to sell honey from eight community hives to CAVYSA.

They belong to the 1,000-member Ache tribe, a hunter-gatherer group that left forest isolation only in the 1960s and now lives in small developing farm communities outside the reserve.

Considered an integral part of the forest environment, the Ache have exclusive hunting rights in the forest so long as they use traditional weapons and limit their harvest to daily needs.

Otherwise, the private reserve is off-limits to all but guards and scientists studying its highly diverse fauna and flora.