By Brent Sohngen (sohngen.1@osu.edu)
Watching the current turmoil at USAID is more than sad. Not only is it devastating to hard working people and their families in all corners of the earth, but it will also have long-term implications for the welfare of people in other countries where economic development sorely lags. Yes, we can ignore the plight of others and focus only on ourselves. But the America I know has never been like that. I hope it doesn’t change. I fear it has.
Let me give one example of the type of work of USAID does. You can read more about it and other examples in the book I co-authored with Douglas Southgate Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership are Saving Forests in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2024).
For years, USAID has supported community forestry in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of northern Guatemala. I wrote a bit about this project in an earlier blog post: Is timber harvesting in the tropics sustainable?
Back in the 1990s as Guatemala’s long-running civil war came to a close, there was discussion about what to do with land in the north of the country. The area contained an enormous wealth of Maya history locked up in buildings covered by half a millennium or more of rainforest growth. Lots of people had moved to the area to escape violence and more people were coming in search of a better life. An agricultural frontier was moving north towards the region along the recently paved road, shifting forests to farmland with significant losses of cultural Maya relics to the private black market.
Some people argued the entire northern part of the country should be turned into a giant set-aside, or national park. Fortunately, their arguments didn’t prevail and a more pragmatic approach emerged. This approach included setting some parks aside, while at the same time creating community forestry operations – where forests would be managed for timber and non-timber forest products by local groups.
USAID supported this institutional approach of providing limited ownership of forestland for forest management. The limited ownership occurred in the form of 20-year contracts with local groups. USAID supported efforts to manage these forests scientifically, using forms of selective harvesting in 30- to 40- year rotations which would help maximize value and regeneration of the most important species, Mahogany.
USAID supported entrepreneurship at timber mills that would receive the logs and turn them into boards, sometimes drying them before shipping them to other parts of Guatemala or the world. Famous rock bands have used the wood for their guitars because it’s sustainable. With support from USAID, local business groups would meet periodically to develop marketing strategies.
I haven’t spent an enormous amount of time in northern Guatemala. But the time I have spent has taught me that entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well there. With limited ownership of the land and forest resources through community forestry, full ownership of timber mill capital, and an eager willingness to work, members of the community forestry operations were well off.
As part of my research, we have shown that these efforts slowed deforestation (Fortmann et al., 2017) and increased incomes (Bocci et al., 2018).
Maybe it would have happened without USAID. I don’t know? What I do know is that USAID helped it happen by adapting the time-honored U.S. model of fee simple ownership and encouraging local community ownership because they are philosophically consistent. Back in the 1990s, people in that organization sensed an opportunity to encourage local ownership and help local organizations become better business people.
Who knows what the “new philosophy” at USAID, or whatever some new agency like it is called, will bring? It’s got a tall bar to get over to beat what USAID accomplished in the past.