Poverty eradication versus conservation

Last week was both the most taxing and the most interesting since I arrived here in Liberia. A pilot project that ActionAid is implementing for Conservation International was to be reviewed together with a representative from the United States Agency for International Development, the project financiers. Operating under the rather American-sounding title ‘Civilian Conservation Corps’, the project aims to engage with communities living around Sapo National Park in the remote southeast of the country. The objective is to provide incentives for communities in return for their contribution to conservation activities and the enforcement of park protection.

Established as Liberia’s first protected area in 1983, Sapo is a biodiversity hotspot and an important part of the Upper Guinea Forest Ecosystem. Some parts of the forest are thought never to have been entered by humans and the park is home to several rare species, some of which are endemic to the area. Sapo made international news headlines last week when the elusive Pygmy Hippo, once thought to be extinct, was captured on camera by a team from the Royal Zoological Society.

I could tell that tensions were running slightly above their normal levels among my colleagues in the office. The pressure was on to prove to the donor that the project was producing tangible results. This was going to be a challenge given the subtle nature of the intervention. What’s more, the communities are more or less cut off from the rest of the country due to the near total lack of infrastructure. The word ‘road’ is far too generous a term to describe what we drove over to get out there! The journey took the best part of two days. To put this into context, Liberia is roughly one third the size of the UK. We passed numerous vehicles that were stuck and some of the passengers had been waiting by the roadside for several days.

Faced with this isolation people living in the area are forced to engage in illicit activities which undermine the conservation of the park. The area is rich in wildlife and hunting for ‘bush meat’ is rife. The problem is that much of what is caught is endangered. At one stop your correspondent was offered some smoked Colobus Monkey. Identification of the species was made possible by the fact that the arms and hands were still attached! Another activity taking place on a significant scale is mining, mostly for diamonds and gold, and several illegal mining settlements have grown up within the park boundaries. Some are apparently better-equipped than the permanent communities outside the park, with generators and even video stores! The most curious thing about them however is their names: Baghdad, Afghanistan and America. Are these supposed to be ironic in some way?

So how do you go about convincing the locals to stop killing the cute, fluffy animals and prevent miners from entering the park to dig up their habitat? Conservation organisations have traditionally lobbied for the establishment of protected areas and official systems to enforce them. However, the Liberian government simply doesn’t have the resources to effectively police Sapo and the incentives for local communities to undermine park protection are huge considering the lack of alternatives they have. Some of the communities even claim that parts of their traditional forest were ‘grabbed’ by the authorities when the park was established without any form of consultation or compensation. This approach is clearly unfair as well as unsustainable. ActionAid’s strategy on the other hand has been to try and rather innovatively marry poverty eradication with conservation.

The first step in the process is to conduct what we in the business call a Participatory Vulnerability Analysis. In layman’s terms this amounts to sitting down with the communities and discussing why it is that they engage in illicit activities. During the process an attempt is also made to raise their awareness of conservation issues and the value of keeping the park intact. The next step is to get communities to come up with a plan for what they need in order to find alternative means of sustaining themselves. Some of the ideas so far include micro-loan schemes, agricultural activities and road rehabilitation projects. Once communities have been given the chance to take up alternative livelihoods the hope is that they will stop poaching the wildlife. Since most of the illegal miners come from outside the area and the only way for them to enter the park is through the villages in which we are working, it is also envisaged that volunteer watch teams will be set up to address this.

As always, the reality is much less simple. It will be difficult to achieve these goals unless there is long-term engagement in the area. One issue that came up during the review meetings was eco-tourism. This has the potential to be an enormously lucrative enterprise for the Sapo region in the future but the area is currently far from ready to receive environmentally-sensitive holidaymakers. With this in mind, it would be interesting to look at Costa Rica’s development strategy to see how this could be applied in the Liberian context. There are many parallels with the situation here – a volatile region prone to civil conflicts, marginalised local communities, a lack of infrastructure especially roads – but despite this Costa Rica has managed to keep a very high proportion of its land mass protected and is now reaping the economic benefits of an influx of tourists.

Encouragingly, the locals we met did seem to be aware of the reasons why the park was protected and one village had already formed its own watch group. The key to success will be to agree on suitable alternative livelihoods. One suggestion the communities made was to provide support for rubber plantations. However, this may also undermine park conservation due to the amount of forest that would need to be cleared, aside from the fact that it takes seven years before rubber tapping can start.

Most importantly for the continuation of the project was the fact that the donor representative seemed to be largely happy with what he saw. For my part, the trip was exciting but exhausting and it’s good to be back. Monrovia almost feels comfortable compared to some of the places I stayed during the visit!

Oh and in case you’re wondering, I didn’t see a Pygmy Hippo, not even on a barbecue.