Community Forestry in the NY Times

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Planting Empowerment employee Liriano Opua demonstrates the growth of a 1-yr. cocobolo tree.Planting Empowerment employee Liriano Opua demonstrates the growth of a 1-yr. cocobolo tree. Click for a larger view.A couple of months ago we did a post on a Mexican indigenous community, the model of well-managed community forestry and business in Latin America.

The New York Times did a profile on the same community the other day. The long term vision of Planting Empowerment is to replicate this model not only in Panama, but throughout the rest of Latin America.

We are making progress towards this goal, as we have seen our indigenous community partner of Arimae take increasing ownership of the UNDP-GEF SGP funded project.

Update on the Small Grants Program Project

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Liriano clears around one of the baby rosewood saplings that the community planted through the SGP program. One of the most exciting things I saw during my recent trip to Panama was the results of the United Nations Development Program's Small Grant Program (SGP) project that we helped Arimae receive and execute. With the financial support from the SGP, the community built a small nursery to produce rosewood, and then planted five hectares of those rosewood saplings with their own initiative. Another interesting part of the project is that the seeds for the rosewood came from their own reserve, so the saplings should be well suited to the local climate and soil conditions.
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Update from Panama

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Operations Director Damion Croston visited Panama in early May. Here he presents a couple of the more important items from the trip.

Small Fire in Plantation

In April we experienced a small fire in one of our plantations in Nuevo Paraiso. A local partner from whom we lease land was clearing an adjacent parcel to plant crops when the fire made its way past the fire break onto our plantation. Thanks to the vigilance and quick actions of worker Jose Rodriguez damage was kept to a minimum. An investigation is currently being conducted to assess total loss and to find ways to prevent another such incident. Sponsors can rest assured that the fire will not affect the value of their holdings, and PE assumes ownership of total losses associated with the incident.

UNDP Project

Last Fall we helped our local partners in Arimae obtain funding from the UNDP-GEF Small Grants Programme to conduct an economically and environmentally beneficial forestry project. We have continued to facilitate the project by providing technical assistance. The community has made significant progress since last year and will plant some of the products from the nursery they built as part of the project next month. In the future the nursery will be used to plant native species saplings which will be sold to Planting Empowerment for use in our own plantations. We will continue to provide our local community partners with assistance and economic opportunities whenever possible.