To Save the Rainforests, Provide Healthcare, Education and Services for Those Who Protect Them

While world leaders met in Glasgow to announce a new pledge of $20 billion to protect tropical forests as a centerpiece of international climate mitigation policy in November of 2021, I was visiting with Indigenous Machiguenga communities in the Peruvian Amazon district of Echarate. Given that tropical deforestation produces more emissions than almost any country, stopping it must indeed be a top priority for global climate policy. The good news is that we have strong evidence about which policy instruments are effective in maintaining standing forests. There is a growing global consensus that titling Indigenous and other forest-dwelling communities while providing them with the resources to continue to protect their forests and enjoy a high quality of life is one of the best things the international community can do for rainforests.

When I spoke with local Machiguenga cocoa and subsistence farmers, they overwhelmingly reported that they were content to continue farming small plots of one or two hectares each, sustainably shifting their plots through their territory in the cycles of cultivation, fallows, and regeneration that their ancestors practiced. So long as their basic needs were covered—healthcare, education, infrastructure, electricity, funds for emergencies, and, increasingly, internet access—they felt no strong need to deforest. But here is one glaring problem: right now, a chunk of the funding for meeting these basic needs is covered by the fossil fuel industry.

In 2000, over sustained objections from local people, the Peruvian government struck a deal with the Camisea Gas consortium, a group of half a dozen firms with interests in fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and export, to tap 11 trillion cubic feet of gas beneath the stunningly biodiverse and carbon-rich rainforests that the Machiguenga have protected for generations. The municipal district of Echarate, Peru, where the Machiguenga reside, has received levies over the past 15 years from the gas consortium to the tune of 3.4 billion soles, or about $845 million US dollars. In 2021, the district of just 40,000 people secured a levy of 131 million soles (about $32 million USD). This “canon” fund, which the Peruvian state negotiated alongside support for various national development projects and a steady domestic gas supply, gives Echarate a titanic budget compared to similar districts.

Apart from these official payments to the government, companies have also cut deals independently with communities in exchange for allowing pipelines and extractive activities on their lands. These deals have been highly exploitative. The current leader of one community told me that in the mid-2000s, one of the Camisea gas transporters offered a low cash payment of just 200,000 soles to build a pipeline through their lands. The community accepted this amount as individual payouts. The money was gone within a couple of years, with no lasting improvements in quality of life to show for it. In other cases, companies have provided short-term funding for fish farms, but without long-term support for feed or technical support to maintain healthy stocks.

Image: Natural gas pipeline materials at a company encampment near Kiteni, Echarate, Cusco Region, Peru (GPS: -12.4752 S | -73.0064 W) Photo courtesy of the author.

Despite these unfavorable conditions, communities have managed to channel some of these funds into local healthcare, education, and infrastructure projects that the government could not or would not help them to implement. For example, the same community that received just 200,000 soles in cash payments in the mid-2000s managed to negotiate with another consortium member for 1.2 million soles in 2016. They used this money for communal infrastructure projects and, notably, as a collective rainy day fund that would prove critical for buying emergency supplies and securing emergency health services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But these concessions from the fossil fuel industry were hard-won, and came only after the Machiguenga had shown that they were willing to use militant tactics, including disruptive marches to the provincial capital and directly sabotaging pipeline operations. Yet in comparison to the tremendous harm that the fossil fuel industry does to people and the planet, these payments amount to crumbs. After all, oil and gas extraction is dangerous for workers, acutely toxic for human and non-human communities, and fundamentally incompatible with a livable future.

By contrast, the nearby central jungle of Peru, which has a similar ecology but where municipal funds for basic services is far more limited, is one of the country’s most troubling deforestation hotspots. The district of Puerto Bermúdez, for example, is experiencing far higher deforestation rates even though it has a similar population to Echarate and a similar ecology. The main difference is that it had less than one tenth of Echarate’s municipal budget in 2021.

This is precisely why the Glasgow agreement on tropical forests—a commitment of just $20 billion dollars—and the media’s subsequent celebration was so frustrating to behold. This amount might cover a few key services for Indigenous people in a few tropical forest districts. But there are thousands of forest districts like Echarate in the world, and protecting the world's forests means guaranteeing that the basic needs of the people who steward them are met.

Joel Pereyra Cavero, vice-president of the Chakopishiato community in the Alto Urubamba, addresses an audience. Photo courtesy of the author.

Optimistic proponents of the Glasgow pledges might counter that the $20 billion dollar commitment was never intended as a direct statement of value for the world’s forests, nor anything like a ceiling on how much should be spent to support communities. Rather, they might claim, it is meant as a kind of seed funding to support new global policy frameworks—including the latest additions to the ever-growing alphabet soup of global conservation acronyms, ART-TREES and LEAF—to channel far more funding into forest conservation through carbon markets. While this is true in a narrow sense, it feels like a particularly frustrating episode of deja vu to those of us who have followed forest climate policy for some time. Similar commitments have been made time and time again while yielding minimal results.

Over the past 15 years, billions were spent on pilot projects and international activities at the United Nations and World Bank to develop REDD+, a market-based approach to tropical forest conservation that has largely failed to deliver serious change. These programs never aimed to help governments provide universal health, education, and vital infrastructure services in rural areas, which would drastically reduce forest dwellers’ need to seek incomes through deforestation. Rich countries have also unilaterally committed billions of dollars to support conservation through market-based approaches with little to show for it. Meanwhile, the global North effectively appropriates over 10 billion tons of raw materials, 379 billion hours of human labor, 22.7 exajoules of energy, and 800 million hectares of land from the global South, with devastating environmental consequences.

The fact is that across the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Southeast Asia, and other tropical forests, smallholder farmers deforest because they need money to meet their basic needs, while large firms are often given unfettered access to ‘unclaimed’ lands to produce commodities like soy, beef, cocoa, and palm oil for global markets.

In the Alto Urubamba, where I was collaborating with the Indigenous organization ECA Maeni, which co-manages the Machiguenga Communal Reserve with the Peruvian Park Service, we spoke with a number of community members about how conservation had benefited them. In particular, we were curious about how Peru’s National Forest Conservation Program, which offers communities 10 PEN (about $3 USD) for each hectare of forest that they commit to conserving over a five year period, was affecting people’s lives. In a focus group discussion with cocoa farmers, one resident told us that they were highly supportive of conservation and protecting their forest, but that the “amount of money we receive from conservation is very small, and what’s more, the government requires us to do a ton of paperwork to receive this small amount of money.” Compared to what they can make from planting cocoa, conservation money hardly seemed worth the trouble to him.

At the same time, these farmers were clear that they had no interest in expanding their plots into the forest so long as they could count on support for meeting their basic needs, including health care, education costs for their children, and infrastructure.

Susanna Binari Piñarreal describes her medicinal plant garden in Koribeni community in the Alto Urubamba close to natural gas pipelines. Photo courtesy of the author.

While sitting outside the home of the head of Machiguenga Indigenous community of Poyentimari along the Urubamba river in Peru in November, he made a striking remark to me: “The most beneficial action that our communities have taken by communities here was to shut off the valves to Camisea’s natural gas pipeline twelve years ago.”

He had a point. Conservation programs and conventional rural development schemes have continued to deliver limited and inconsistent funding to communities. Meanwhile, communities have had virtually no reliable means to assert themselves politically or to demand more funding and better services. By contrast, the natural gas industry was required by the Peruvian state to fund at least some services through the municipal canon levy, and industry had no choice but to negotiate with communities after Indigenous organizers forcibly shut off a pipeline in 2009.

If we in the global North are serious about confronting tropical deforestation, we must demand that our governments spend unprecedented resources to meet the needs of Indigenous and forest-dwelling communities. We should be talking about tens of trillions of dollars—not $20 billion—in an international effort to repair the historical harm that colonization has caused while also securing the well-being of the people who protect forests. We ought to be offering a far better deal than the fossil fuel industry.

So long as international climate leaders can expect to be celebrated for recycling old failed market-based approaches with middling commitments in the low billions, we can expect tropical deforestation rates to keep rising catastrophically. We in the global North must see the Glasgow pledges clearly for what they are: feeble gestures that fossil fuel companies and others who seek to profit from deforestation can easily outmaneuver. Like other Indigenous communities, the Machiguenga who I spoke to were clear that they do not want to see their forests destroyed, nor do they want to surrender their traditional ways of life to extractive interests. The global North must make refusing fossil fuels viable for communities.

The Machiguenga, like so many other Indigenous groups, are providing a vital service for the world: protecting forests that are essential for maintaining a livable planet. These same groups suffered enslavement, mutilation, and social dislocation under European-backed rubber plantation barons, and now face a precarious existence under modern global capitalism. Everyone deserves healthcare, education, food sovereignty, and basic infrastructure. Repairing historic harms and building a just climate future requires delivering these things to Indigenous Amazonians. To honor the work of Indigenous caretakers of tropical forests and rectify the harmful legacies of colonialism, we must demand that the governments of the global North invest far more in the well-being of these communities, and quickly.

Ashwin Ravikumar is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Amherst College.

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