Working with another graduate of our training program, Peruvian biologist Carmela Landeo, CSF is helping examine the real economic impact of roads and logging on Amazonian indigenous communities. Landeo, who works with the Peru office of World Wildlife Fund, is studying changes wrought in the forest and in household incomes as industrial timber extraction draws indigenous villages toward the cash economy. Landeo is studying the communities of Shintuya and Shipeteari, both on the fringes of the Manu National Park.

The purpose of the study is to inform Peruvian policy makers, who have often assumed that building more roads and giving indigenous people the chance to sell timber and other resources would unequivocally raise their standard of living.

Our work with Carmela is showing that the opposite can be true. She gathered data on subsistence and cash income from hunting, fishing, farming, logging and wage labor, and found that the isolated people of Shipeteari enjoy household incomes five times those experienced in more accessible Shintuya. The forest explains much of the difference. Shipeteari’s forests are ecologically intact, still producing fish, game and soils that can sustain swidden agriculture. Logging has fragmented Shintuya’s forests and eroded the skills its people need to prosper in a forested environment. To be fair, logging has gone bust - it did generate income in the past - but people’s incapacity for savings and investment makes the inevitable bust cycle into an economic tragedy, as these numbers convey.

Subsistence and cash income in Shintuya and Shipeteari, Madre de Dios (in Nuevos Soles)

Drafts of the paper have already been shared with official in the National Natural Resources Institute (INRENA) in charge of planning and zoning the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve. The findings are immediately relevant to issues of infrastructure and forestry policy, as well as to government and community decisions on the activities that will promoted within the new reserve, which is a vital link in the so-called Vilcabamba-Amboró biological corridor. Our study shows, with numbers, how roads and logging can undo communities at the same time they wreck the forest.