THE “GREENING” OF COSTA RICA

Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples,

and the Remaking of Nature

Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept of sustainable
development has become the basis for a vast number of “green indus-
tries” such as ecotourism and carbon sequestration. In The “Greening”
of Costa Rica, Ana Isla examines the effects of economists’ rejection of
physical limits to growth, biologists’ obsession with environmental con-
trols such as debt-for-nature exchanges, and the indebtedness of Latin
American countries.
Isla’s work is based on a case study of the 250,000 hectare Arenal-
Tilaran Conservation Area, created in the late 1990s in connection with
the Canada–Costa Rica debt-for-nature swap programs. Rather than
reducing poverty and promoting equality, development in and around
the conservation area has in fact resulted in the disenfranchisement of
local subsistence farmers and their communities, and the expropriation
of their land, water, knowledge, and labour.
Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes
the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted
into commercial assets such as carbon credits, intellectual property, cash
crops, open-pit mines, and ecotourism, the consequences of which are
often more detrimental than beneficial to the local populations.

ANA ISLA is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and

the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock University.
This page intentionally left blank
ANA ISLA

The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples,
and the Remaking of Nature

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
©  University of Toronto Press 2015
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN 978-1-4426-4936-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4426-2671-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-

based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Isla, Ana, 1948–, author

The “greening” of Costa Rica : women, peasants, indigenous peoples,
and the remaking of nature / Ana Isla.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4426-4936-1 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-2671-3 (pbk.)

1.  Debt-for-nature swaps – Costa Rica.  2.  Debt-for-nature swaps – Social

aspects – Costa Rica.  3.  Debt-for-nature swaps – Canada.  4.  Ecology –
Economic aspects – Costa Rica.  5.  Costa Rica – Social conditions –
21st century.  6.  Human ecology – Costa Rica.  7.  Debts, External –
Costa Rica.  8.  Debt relief – Costa Rica.  9.  Costa Rica – Economic
policy.  10.  Sustainable development – Costa Rica.  I.  Title.

HJ8525.I85 2015  336.3’435097286  C2014-906877-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the

Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing
activities.
To Felipe, Xochitl, and Nelson
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures and Tables  ix

Preface and Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction: The “Greening” of Costa Rica  3

Part I: Foreign Debt, Debt-for-Nature, and the National

System of Conservation Areas

1 The Political Economy of Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State  35

2 Political Ecology, Debt-for-Nature, and National
Conservation Areas  48

Part II Embodied Indebtedness: The Remaking of People

and Nature

3 Nature and People in the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area   69

4 Biological Diversity and the Dispossession of Peasants’
Knowledge   86
5 Forests and Peasants’ Loss of Access  100
6 Ecotourism and Social Development  114
7 Women’s Microenterprises and Social Development  132
8 Mining and the Dispossession of Resources and Livelihoods  147
9 The “Greening” of Capitalism  158
viii Contents

Abbreviations 175
Notes 179
Bibliography 183
Index 197
Figures and Tables

Figures

0.1 The “iceberg” model of capitalist patriarchal economics:

A subsistence perspective, with some modifications 9
0.2 Main Contradictions figure, incorporating Ariel Salleh’s
discourse 10
2.1 Costa Rica’s National System of Conservation Areas
(SINAC) 52
2.2 NGOs in the Canada/Costa Rica debt-for-nature
investment 58
3.1 Communities of the Arenal Conservation Area 70
4.1 Cerro Chato Genetic Reserve in Z-Trece 87
5.1 Teak monoculture plantations as a carbon sink 101
6.1 Arenal Volcano National Park in the La Fortuna area 115
7.1 Odilie at her tilo medicinal plant organic farm
in Abanico 134
8.1 Bellavista Mining processing plant collapsed over the
lixiviation lagoon in Miramar 155

Tables

1.1 Costa Rica’s Total External Debt and Debt Service 37

1.2 Average Productivity of Coffee and Banana Plantings
per Hectare, in Metric Tons 41
1.3 Sex Ratios for the Rural Population, 1970–2005 44
1.4 Evolution of the Economically Active Rural Population,
by Sex, 1980–2000 45
1.5 Distribution of the Rural Economically Active Population,
by Sex and Sector, 1999 46
x Figures and Tables

2.1 Costa Rica’s External Debt and Debt Service (US$ million),
1980–1996 49
2.2 INBio’s Funding Sources 64
3.1 FUNDACA Loans, July 1996–July 1998 72
4.1 ACA-Tilaran Nucleus Areas 90
4.2 ACA-Tilaran’s Flora and Fauna Species, as a Percentage
of Total Costa Rican Species 90
5.1 Unemployment among Young Females (% of female
labour force ages 15–24) 112
6.1 Production Structure in La Fortuna City, December 1999 126
9.1 US Bilateral Debt-for-Nature Transactions under the
Enterprise for the Americas Initiative 165
Preface and Acknowledgments

While a member of Toronto Women for a Just and Healthy Planet

(T-WJHP), I took part in the Social Forum at the Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro in 1992. It was at the Social Forum that Alternative Treaties
were signed by nongovernmental organizations. The Debt Treaty (1992)
was signed by those aware of the contradictions of the dominant model
that built on the myth of unlimited growth, and began the International
Debt Treaty Movement (IDTM). As a member of IDTM, my role was to
discuss debt-for-nature exchanges. With this responsibility, I decided to
enrol in the PhD program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Educa-
tion (OISE) at the University of Toronto. There, I decided to study the
most recent debt-for-nature agreement signed by Canada. It happened
to be with Costa Rica, which received an international prize as a green
state at the Rio Summit in 1992.
To introduce this book I will illustrate the problem of promoting sus-
tainable development, defined as the management of the complete life
cycle of people and nature for economic growth, with an encounter I
had during my field research. In 1999, in Zona Fluca, Costa Rica, I was
invited to visit a small chili-pepper farm, of less than five hectares, by a
Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock engineer who was responding to
a reported pest infestation.1
What I noticed immediately was that the peasant’s house was fall-
ing apart. We then walked directly to the infested area, and there we
saw the chili-pepper plants covered with white spots, symptoms of the
infestation. The farmer mentioned two or three chemicals he had used,
and the engineer advised him to add even more chemicals to resolve
the problem. However, the peasant needed more money to buy the new
chemicals to cure the pest, and to receive a bank loan the engineer had
to write a letter explaining the peasant’s need for money.
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

While they were discussing the chemical problem, I saw a small dog
chained to a pole, on a day when the temperature had reached thirty
degrees Celsius. Next to the dog was an empty plastic container that I
supposed was for water. As he struggled to stand up, I could count his
ribs. He seemed to be dying. The farmer’s grandson was playing close
by. While I was talking to the boy, who told me that he was not going to
school because he couldn’t learn anything, the engineer and the peasant
finished their conversation and asked me to join them inside the house.
There I met the peasant’s daughter, the child’s mother. In her face I could
see poverty, defined not by lack of money but by fatigue. She was using
four eggs to make gallos (tortillas with eggs), for the engineer and me.
When I saw the meal she had prepared, I thought of the dog and how
anemic and hungry the family looked; I declined the invitation so that the
child could eat. All the while, I reflected on the payments the peasant had
to make in order to use the new agrochemicals and to repay bank loans.
As the engineer and I returned to the truck, I asked why this family
was living in such terrible conditions. I also questioned why a five-
hectare farm was unable to provide a livelihood for three persons and
a dog. Then I understood: The farm had been in debt because of a bank
loan to buy chemical fertilizers. Five years previously the farmer’s wife
had died, which meant a huge loss in terms of unpaid work. Conse-
quently, the farmer started to introduce more chemicals to increase
productivity, but these chemicals burned the soil and the land became
unproductive.
This experience also reminded me of an interview I conducted in
1998 with engineer Miguel Alfaro, the head of the Ministry of Agricul-
ture and Cattle Ranching, in La Fortuna. He told me how certain chemi-
cals spread from the unwashed hands of farm workers to their children,
and seep into the drinking water, when rain washes the chemicals from
the fields into local streams, and how these substances have caused
learning disabilities in children.
In the farmer’s family I had visited, I saw this process brought to life.
By the time the grandchild was seven years of age, he had already left
school because it had no facilities to accommodate his disability. High-
yield agriculture seemed to have destroyed not only this land but also
its people.2

This book is dedicated to several women in my professional and per-

sonal lives: Xochitl, my daughter, who suffered from my absences
during research trips; Juana, my sister, who enjoys the green Amazon
 Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

rainforest; and colleagues who helped make possible its publication.

Angela Miles was my doctoral thesis supervisor at the University of
Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), and Sheila
Molloy was my editor. Both were members of T-WJHP, an ecofeminist
organization.
I also dedicate this book to these friends and colleagues: Terisa Turner
and Leigh Brownhill, who housed me several times in Cahuita, Costa
Rica; Terry Baker, who edited the first draft; Luciana Ricciutelli, who
has played an important part in the editing of this book; and Liz Bayley,
who edited the final version of this book.
In Costa Rica, I would like to thank Josefa, Julia, Odilie, Irma, Maria
Rosa, Lorena, Jorlene, and Soledad from the Grupo Ecológico de
Mujeres de Abanico (GEMA) (the Abanico Ecological Women’s Group),
who allowed me to research their work and their lives; also, the Z-Trece,
La Fortuna, Abanico, and Miramar communities for their contributions
to my research; and lawyer Magda Rojas, for her objective perspective
and friendship.
Most of all, I thank Don Felipe Matos, director of the Natural Resource
Program of Universidad Para la Paz, in Ciudad Colon, who helped me
to connect with key people crucial to the completion of this work.
Their support has been invaluable to me, and I am indebted to all of
them.

Data for this book were collected over ten years in a number of sites
in the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area (now the Arenal-Tempisque
Conservation Area) located in northwest Costa Rica. In Canada, I
am indebted to two institutions for their support: the International
Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
IDRC granted me an award to write my doctoral thesis during the
summers of 1998 and 1999. With IDRC support, I spent forty-five
days in 1998 and another forty-five days in 1999 in the Albergue Eco-
turístico La Catarata, at the base of the Arenal Volcano, to learn about
the La Fortuna, Z-Trece, and Abanico communities. There I inter-
viewed seventy community members. I also spent a month in Tila-
ran, where I collected information on the structure and functioning of
the Arenal Project from the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area library
and also carried out interviews with World Wildlife Fund–Canada
(WWF–C) and officials from the Ministry of Environment and Energy
(MINAE).
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

awarded me a postdoctoral research fellowship for the year 2001. I spent
forty-five days in Miramar in Montes de Oca and in Abangares, where
I interviewed thirty community members, attended several town hall
meetings, and took part in hundreds of informal conversations with
community members.
In the United States, I am indebted to the University of Kentucky
for granting me a postdoctoral Rockefeller fellowship during the last
semester of 2002. During this tenure, I wrote a chapter and participated
in the ninth Latin American Feminist Encounter, held in Costa Rica,
where I had the opportunity to present my research to a wider audi-
ence. Also in the United States, I am grateful to the Rachael and Ben
Vaughan Foundation for its economic support, which allowed me to
complete my research.
I would like to thank Brock University for granting me a sabbatical
year in 2009–10, which enabled me to complete my field observations
in Costa Rica.
Several chapters in this book have been published in works from
Inanna Publications and Education, in the journal Canadian Woman
Studies, and in Routledge’s Capitalism Nature Socialism. I thank the
publishers for permission to credit them. An earlier version of Chap-
ter 4 was published in Capitalism Nature Socialism , 16(3), 2005,
pp. 49–61. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in Women and
Gift Giving: A Radically Different World View Is Possible, edited by Gen-
evieve Vaughan (Toronto, ON: Inanna Publications, 2007), pp. 157–170.
An earlier version of Chapter 8 was published in Canadian Woman
Studies/Les cahiers de la femme 21/22(4) (2002), pp. 148–154. An earlier
version of Chapter 9 was published in Women in a Globalizing World:
Transforming Equality, Development, Diversity and Peace, edited by
Angela Miles (Toronto, ON: Inanna Publications, 2013), pp. 169–187.
In Costa Rica, I would like to thank to Sonia Torres for granting
permission to reproduce two photographs: one of a teak monoculture
plantation, and the other showing a Bellavista Mining processing plant
collapsed over a lixiviation lagoon in Miramar. I also would like to give
map credit to Loris Gasparotto, from the Geography Department at
Brock University.
Lastly, I am indebted to the University of Toronto Press, whose
reviewers’ comments have made such a great impact on the final ver-
sion of this book, and to Douglas Hildebrand, editor at the University
of Toronto Press, who encouraged me to finish it.
THE “GREENING” OF COSTA RICA

Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples,

and the Remaking of Nature
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction: The “Greening”
of Costa Rica

Every conservation area in Costa Rica has a godfather. Canada is the godfather
of the Arenal Conservation Area–Tileran.
– Rogelio Jimenez, Director of the Arenal Volcano
National Park (personal interview, July 1998)

When and how the Costa Rican neoliberal state became a “green” state
is the subject of this book. Using a debt-for-nature exchange between
Canada and Costa Rica, delivered from 1995 to 1999, I analyse the
work of three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in
the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area (ACA-Tilaran), now named the
Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area. I also examine their impact, on
the lives of women and men – peasants and Indigenous peoples – as
well as on nature itself. The context in which these NGOs operate is a
combination of the economist’s assumptions of unlimited growth, the
biologist’s concern with the natural limits of the Earth, and a country’s
indebtedness. Jimenez’s assertion comprises an appropriate point of
departure for this book insofar as he establishes the new tendency to
recolonize the land in conservation areas. Furthermore, it establishes the
link of the United Nations Conferences on Environment and Develop-
ment that opened the way for the direct management of nature and
people by giving responsibility to the World Bank and to environmental
non-governmental organizations (ENGOs).
The Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature exchange is a bilateral initia-
tive for implementing so-called sustainable development programs in
Costa Rica. The Canadian and Costa Rican governments are not allowed
to receive debt titles directly; the titles must be donated to NGOs, which
4 Introduction

become the government’s creditors. Debt titles were donated to the

World Wild Life Fund-Canada (WWF-C), an NGO of the International
Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCNR), and
to the Costa Rican National Biodiversity Institute (Instituto Nacional de
Biodiversidad), INBio. In addition, I analyse the work of the ANDAR
Association, a Costa Rican NGO that benefited from a debt-for-nature
exchange between Costa Rica and the Netherlands but worked in asso-
ciation with ACA-Tilaran in a gender and development program in the
town of Abanico.
The term greening is used here to indicate how, under the conditions
of neoliberal political ecology (so-called sustainable development),
the ecosystems of an indebted Costa Rica are increasingly becoming
destabilized, especially through an ever-growing pressure for resource
extraction. In a green economy, goods and services provided by nature
depend on the stock exchange. This process was made possible due to
the loans given to Costa Rica’s governmental agencies, businesses, and
individual residents by industrialized countries, commercial banks,
agencies, and multilateral institutions, such as the International Mon-
etary Fund and the World Bank, during the 1970s and 1980s.
During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Agenda 21,
a negotiated plan of action, linked together development and the envi-
ronment as sustainable development (Pearce & Warford, 1993). The
argument is that sustainable development is good and desirable for the
entire world, including and most particularly for the so-called under-
developed world. This redefinition of conservation within a develop-
ment paradigm translates nature into something with monetary value
(Hamilton, 2001).
The greening of Costa Rica entails the use of new instruments, new
experts, new types of nature, and new labourers. New instruments, such
as debt-for-nature exchanges, are financial mechanisms for times of envi-
ronmental crisis. The debtor country’s obligation is to allocate domestic
resources for financing ecological projects in exchange for extinguishing
a limited portion of the country’s foreign debt. Debt-for-nature invest-
ments are based on a negative assessment of the debtor country, mean-
ing that the debt must be considered beyond the country’s ability to pay.
In practical terms, this means the debt titles can be sold at a fraction of
their value in the secondary market where one investor purchases a debt
title from another investor rather than from the issuer country.
The new experts are environmental non-governmental organizations
(ENGOs) that claim debt-for-nature exchanges can reduce the burden of
 Introduction 5

indebted countries’ external debt, as well as confront the environmental

crisis. By the end of the 1980s, under the neoliberal agenda, ENGOs
emerged as new models of modernization and environmental protec-
tion by using the discourse of protecting land, air, and water. Conserva-
tion International (CI) initiated the first debt-for-nature transaction in
Bolivia, in 1987 (Conservation International, 1991). During the 1980s,
the Costa Rican economy was so strangled by debt repayments that
the government accepted assistance from the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), allowing it to become virtually a
parallel state power.
As a result, USAID and the US chapter of the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF-US) were able to reshape Costa Rica’s nature (as defined below)
into conservation areas. At the same time, women in development
NGOs came forward to empower women. Since the Rio Summit, the
Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which is under World Bank man-
agement, and the industrial countries, have funded numerous NGOs
involved in debt-for-nature programs. The new experts in this Costa
Rican case study are three NGOs: the World Wildlife Fund-Canada
chapter (WWF-C); the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio), (the
National Biodiversity Institute), both of which use the Canada-Costa
Rica debt-for-nature exchange; and the Asociación ANDAR de Costa
Rica (the ANDAR Association of Costa Rica), using the Netherlands-
Costa Rica debt-for-nature exchange.
The new types of nature are located in conservation areas. A conserva-
tion area is a designated domain where private and public activities are
interrelated in order to manage and conserve the area’s nature for capi-
tal accumulation. In 1989, the Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conserva-
ción) (SINAC) (National System of Conservation Areas) was organized in
Costa Rica. SINAC divided the country into eleven conservation areas
comprising wildlife, private lands, and human settlements, under the
supervision of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy (Ministe-
rio de Ambiente y Energía) (MINAE). The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation
Area (ACA-Tilaran), the case study examined in this book, is one of
these eleven nationally designated conservation areas. At the heart
of the ACA-Tilaran is a large hydroelectric dam on Arenal Lake. Two of
the towns studied in this book are located near this dam.
The new labourers are rural women working to produce medicinal
plants in micro-credit schemes, as well as peasants and Indigenous people
who acquired new roles as service providers in the new industries: bio-
technology, forests as carbon credits, ecotourism, and open-pit mining.
6 Introduction

Ecofeminists are critical of sustainable development within the

framework of capital accumulation because programs associated with
sustainable development result in enclosure and housewifization. Enclo-
sure is the fencing of common land, water, and air resources (the com-
mons) and appropriating the common wealth of workers through the
elimination of customary right. According to Eric Hobsbawm, enclo-
sure was initiated in England circa 1500 (Hobsbawm, 1996, p. 31). This
antique practice continues today, however, revitalized by the sustain-
able development policies of international institutions, particularly
the World Bank. At the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED), or Earth Summit, held in 1992 in Rio de
Janeiro, responsibility for organizing sustainable development was
seen as shared by governments, states, and the World Bank (World
Bank, 2003). Agenda 21, the outcome of the Earth Summit, describes
sustainable development as a combination of economic growth and
environmental management. Sustainable development theory claims
that the environmental crisis is a crisis of control. It therefore encour-
ages conservation and proposes the commodification of nature to
include water and air as the means to achieve this conservation (Fenech
et al., 1999). To control and manage nature, the World Bank created
the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which would establish the
founding of numerous NGOs. The aim was to expand market relations
and assign property rights to free resources by finding an adequate
price to protect the global commons. The global commons (air, forests,
mountains, genes, biodiversity, water, oceans and seas, atmosphere)
includes areas not commodified, where natural and social capital
should be expanded. Conservation within sustainable development
was expected to increase economic growth and capital accumulation
by converting nature into natural capital, through an expansion of the
price system.
In this process, according to Maria Mies (1986), unwaged or poorly
paid rural women, peasants, and Indigenous peoples dependent on
the commons for their subsistence, autonomy, and sociality are house-
wifized, that is, their unpaid or poorly paid labour is the outcome of
a “Eurocentric” economic policy that assumes unpaid work has no
value. When women, peasants, and Indigenous people are described
as “closer to nature,” Mies argues, they are considered “housewives”
(1986, p. 106). This concept is applied to such socially marginal and
externalized economic sectors and actors as Indigenous people and
peasants, when their land and products are taken from them with little
 Introduction 7

or no compensation through structural violence. It reflects an ideology

that defines some human beings and nature as a resource, to be appro-
priated, exploited, raped, extracted, and destroyed. That is, what were
stable biological, cultural, and communitarian patterns – both human
and nature – are transformed into colonies of “extracted commons”
(Salleh, 1997). In direct opposition to sustainable development poli-
cies, ecofeminists have proposed a subsistence perspective to confront
the resulting environmental and economic crises. This book presents
grounded theory on the politics of sustainable development, which is at
the heart of debates in every discipline since the recognition of the eco-
logical crisis. It is a contribution to ecofeminist subsistence perspective
theory, insofar as it argues for approaches to sustain life.

Global Capitalism

In this book the ecofeminist analysis of neoliberal political ecology and

sustainable development departs from Marx’s notion of primitive accu-
mulation. The separation of the workers from their means of produc-
tion is what really produces so-called primitive accumulation. The great
merit of this concept is, precisely, identifying primitive accumulation
as the social event that placed the producer as an autonomous entity in
the market to rent its labour force. The body and the mind, or labour
capacity, become the spark of capital. This process literally alienated
producers from their products and their means of subsistence; this was
done, Marx argues, by blood and fire. Marx called this type of worker a
naked man, that is, a man without means of production to produce the
means of subsistence. In other words, primitive accumulation creates
perpetual structural social hunger for the dispossessed, the potential
salaried producers. In this way, the deprived have no choice but to sell
their labour power to produce the “free” plus-value for the individual
capitalist and so to obtain a salary to buy subsistence goods that he
and his family previously produced to meet their human needs. This
change, first initiated in England (Aston & Philpin, 1985; Marx, 1977;
Wood, 2002) is still an irreversible social tragedy that continues in the
globalized world of today, not merely with the same connotations, but
worse.
This book departs from Marx’s primitive accumulation but also dis-
cusses a radically different world-view that incorporates the relation-
ship between capital accumulation and women’s labour, as well as the
exploitation of nature. Ecofeminists have examined critically several
8 Introduction

of the underlying assumptions of the patriarchal capitalist conceptual

framework.
Hierarchical thinking is promoted. Capital (visible labour) is valued
over household, peasant, Indigenous peoples’, and nature’s work
(invisible labour). Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies
(1999), sociologists and women’s studies scholars, have defined the
housewife as central to the process of capital accumulation, in contrast
to Marx’s view of wage labour’s value. Ecofeminist analyses claim that
in a capitalist economic system, a patriarchal hierarchy usually domi-
nates or controls unwaged labour. Ecofeminists look at the system as a
whole and shift their focus from production towards social reproduc-
tion, or life-supporting labour (Mies, 1986, p. 58). Housewife means no
salary, no labour laws, and violence. Housework is not the only type
of work that is exploited at practically no cost to capitalism. The con-
cept of expropriation of women’s work applies not only to housewives
in industrial countries. Indigenous people and peasants have been
colonized all over the world and are not wage labourers either. They,
similar to women, are naturalized, their land labelled unoccupied or
unused, and thereby easily appropriated by those who can make it
productive. Economic man calls them externalities. These externalized
economic sectors are exploited not so much through low wages but by
their provision, free of charge, of service and material inputs to capital,
e.g., their knowledge of biodiversity, ecosystems. Claudia von Werlhof
(2007b, p. 16), a political science professor, argues that colonial peas-
ants and Indigenous peoples are treated as if there is no real value
attached to their labour, so they do not have to be equitably remuner-
ated, or remunerated at all.
As a result of this analysis, Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Werl-
hof maintain that the main contradiction in capitalism is not between
waged labour and capital, as Marx and orthodox economists argued,
but between all labour – wage labour (producing surplus), household
work, child labour, voluntary work, the work of peasants, Indigenous
people, and colonies, including nature – and capital. Werlhof states
that “none of these relations of production are to be understood as pre-
capitalist – they are all inherently capitalist” (2007b, p. 15). Thus, capi-
talism is not only about wage labour but also about unpaid labour or
the cheapest possible forms of commodity production.
This approach shows how women, peasants, Indigenous people, and
nature are integrated into the process of capital accumulation, repre-
sented visually by the Iceberg Model (see Fig. 0.1):
 Introduction 9

The Iceberg-model

Capital Visible:
GDP
vs.
Wages

Invisible: Women
Women and
other
colonized Peasants
subjects are
diminished,
primitivized Indigenous People
and resourced
Colonies
East Europe, Latin America,
Africa, Asia

Nature

Figure 0.1 The Iceberg Model of Capitalist Patriarchal Economics

Source: Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies (1999)

Dualism is encouraged. The man/woman dichotomy is sustained. Ariel

Salleh (1997), a sociologist, philosopher, and ecologist, also responds to
the ideology that women and their labour as nature can be appropri-
ated without cost. She argues that the powerful nature of Eurocentric
culture created the original contradiction from the Cartesian dualism
that places greater value on the mind (reason, male) than on the body
(emotion, female), and associates masculinity with productivity and
femininity with reproductivity. Applied to gender dynamics, this is
translated as man is different from woman and woman equals nature
(Salleh, 1997). Man is seen as a whole; he is the norm, unmodified
(represented by the number 1) whereas woman, by contrast, is lack-
ing (represented by zero, 0) (1997, p. 35). Salleh further argues that the
10 Introduction

most fundamental contradiction within the capitalist patriarchal world

system is that which splits off humanity (men) from nature (women,
natives, children, animals, plants), turning the latter into an extractive
commons. The Eurocentric economic regime privileges masculine sub-
jecthood, while women and other colonized subjects are considered
“not quite labour” and thus cannot achieve equality in the workforce
(1997, pp. 172–3). They are all linked by the discourses of naturalization
or otherization; they are defined as resources, all of them deemed by
capital to be inferior groupings (Salleh, 1997, p. 194).
A logic of domination is enforced. Sexism and naturism are seen as inter-
connected. Ecofeminists expressed the view that there is a direct link
between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature. For

The Main Contradiction

Visible:
Capital
Masculine
vs. Subjecthood
surplus Wages
Invisible: Household Work
Feminized
Subsistence,
social reproduction Peasants Work
All labour

Indigenous People’s Work

Colonies
East Europe, Latin America,
Africa, Asia

Nature

Figure 0.2 Fundamental Contradiction Incorporated into the Iceberg Model

 Introduction 11

example, patriarchal capitalist point of view sees animals as inferior

to men specifically and is used to justify the mistreatment of animals
(Dunayer, 1995, p. 11). This ideology sees humans as superior to other
animals, so superior that often humans don’t consider themselves ani-
mals. The language used to categorize animals as inferior is used simul-
taneously as an insult towards women and to justify genocides against
target minorities.
Speciesism, or discrimination against nonhuman animals, is similar to
classism, sexism, and racism towards humans. Carol Adams elaborates
on the relationship between women with animals as a means of patri-
archal oppression. Adams (1990, p. 62) believes that all oppressions
are interconnected. She argues that in Western societies, factory meat
is a symbol of patriarchal power and its hierarchical structure of class,
gender, and race. Industrial societies produce animal products through
so-called factory farming or by confining large numbers of animals that
will be processed into foodstuffs for mass consumption. This leads to
horrific experiences from the time the animals are bred to the time they
are slaughtered, when the body parts are transformed into edible por-
tions for human consumption. This androcentric (male-centred) culture
has built sex and meat eating into a cycle of violence, making animals,
like women, objectified (object-like treatment), fragmented (seen as
body parts), and consumed (literally and metaphorically) (p. 73– 91).
For ecofeminists, neoliberal global capitalism is the latest stage of
patriarchal capitalist civilization, in which women and nature are domi-
nated and used as resources in the market economy. For ecofeminists,
neoliberalism and economic globalization have been activated by global
capitalism’s assaults on the livelihood and resources of the world’s
populations. Claudia von Werlhof argues that the category ongoing
primitive accumulation implies that the expropriation of women, peas-
ants, and marginal mass is repeated everywhere. She defines neolib-
eralism as a war system based on a continuing process of primitive
accumulation that leads to a forced economic growth through the direct
expropriation of the peoples of the globe and the globe itself” (Werlhof,
2007a, p. 139).
The experience of Latin American countries shows that primitive
accumulation did not occur only once but has been repeated under cur-
rent globalization processes. How did neoliberal globalization occur
in Latin America? By the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s,
demand-side development economics (Keynes’s theory), where gov-
ernment action is seen to eliminate economic fluctuations, provide
12 Introduction

full employment through appropriate state spending, investment, and

fiscal and budgetary policy, gave way to the supply-side model (i.e., the
Milton Friedman “School”), where it is crucial to keep the state out of
economic life and, in general, to reduce its role to a minimum (Fried-
man, 1992). With the monetarist school in power in the United States,
official development assistance declined rapidly as a percentage of the
total resource transfer, and there was a switch from official to private
sources of funds, namely, commercial banks. The commercial banks,
according to a so-called outward-looking development policy, could
more efficiently fulfil the role the aid organizations played previously
(Corbridge, 1993).
The push of neoliberalism and the deterioration of the terms of trade
for Latin American countries, expressed in balance of payments (BOP)
deficits, allowed the world banking system to grow stronger after 1970.
The banks were able to expand their credit operations, owing to an
excess of capital in the industrial countries, resulting in a mushroom-
ing of international commercial loans to peripheral countries. Latin
America, in particular, seemingly began to offer a source of profits
for US and European banks that started a fierce struggle with their
Japanese rivals. By 1972, commercial banks were the creditors of 42%
of Latin American debt. In 1975, the banks provided 50% of the cred-
its. US banks in 1977 held 53.4% of the total international bank credit,
while by 1978, commercial bank credits were the sources of two-thirds
of the debt. By 1982, six countries – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico,
Peru, and Colombia – received 92.3% of their eurodollars (a US dollar
on deposit with a bank abroad, especially in Europe) from the United
States (Ugarteche, 1980, pp. 27–30). An increased portion of this debt
was short term.
James Petras (1977) argues that neoliberalism, a social and economic
policy approach first applied in Chile in 1973, played a central role in
asserting capitalist economic development and class power in Latin
American countries ruled by military and civil dictatorships. After a
military coup that deposed and killed the elected president, Salvador
Allende, the Chilean experience became the US model for neoliberal
politics and economics. The “Chicago Boys” (economists from the
University of Chicago’s Department of Economics and adherents of
Milton Friedman’s works) proposed economic growth by reducing
“superfluous” state expenditures and expanding private-sector poten-
tialities, particularly those of the minority faction linked to the interna-
tional market. It was argued that the benefits of this particular form of
 Introduction 13

wealth would trickle down to a country’s broader society as a whole.

This model of economic growth was strongly supported by the United
States and its allies, resulting in vast investments by the World Bank
($133 million),1 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ($420 million),
the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) ($400 million), commer-
cial banks (including First National City and Manufacturers Hanover
Trust, $680 million), as well as by some Japanese and European banks
(Petras, 1977).
In applying a neoliberal political economy model to build a neolib-
eral state, General Pinochet Ugarte, the chief commander of Chile’s rul-
ing military junta since the 1973 military coup, imposed state terrorism
to counter opposition. In 1998, a Spanish judge, Baltazar Garzón had
requested General Pinochet’s extradition from England. Pinochet orga-
nized and headed an international criminal organization, the Direc-
ción de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) (National Intelligence Direction).
The goals of this criminal organization were political and economic:
DINA’s aim was to conspire, develop, and execute a systematic criminal
plan for the illegal arrest, kidnapping, and torture of ideological oppo-
nents, such as communists, socialists, Mapuches (Indigenous peoples),
and Jews, followed by killings and disappearances. DINA had two
branches: the national, which coordinated officials and neo-fascist civil-
ian groups, responsible for the elimination of Chileans and foreigners
in Chile; and the international, Operación Condor (Operation Condor),
which coordinated the killings of its ideological opponents with other
military governments in South America (particularly Argentina, Para-
guay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru), or in any country where its
Chilean opponents resided, such as Spain, the United States, Portugal,
France, Italy, or Mexico (Mendo, 1980; Rodriguez, 2010).
In Chile, under Pinochet, a feminist movement using the slogan
“Democracy in the Country and at Home” began and spread through-
out Latin America. The authoritarianism of the military dictatorships
that pervaded public life combined with authoritarian machismo in pri-
vate life aggravated women’s impoverished living conditions. Wom-
en’s subordinate status became more visible after the military coup. For
instance, in Santiago in 1974, a group of approximately thirteen Chilean
women began to encounter each other in the same places – morgues,
hospitals, and torture centres. They had similar histories, principally
the detention of children and husbands and the subsequent disappear-
ance of their loved ones. These women invented strategies to challenge
their fear, feed their children, and engage in a new form of political
14 Introduction

activism and of struggle against authoritarianism. They developed

arpilleras, patchwork tapestries decrying human-rights violations in the
country, using worn remnants of fabric, even from their own closets,
to denounce and expose authoritarianism. Through the initial forma-
tion of these groups, the women acquired a deep sense of politics and
became radicalized. They undertook a collective dialogue grounded in
social justice and the commitment to transform an authoritarian poli-
tics into a democratic and cooperative one (Agosin, 1994). The criminal
methods used by the Pinochet regime were justified by the “success” of
the economic development program in Chile, success being measured
by the expansion of the goods and services that are in the market in
relation to the goods and services produced by subsistence households
(domestic work) and communities (peasant and Indigenous knowledge
systems), which are not in the market.
Months after the Chilean coup, so-called populist civilian-military
governments were overthrown in Bolivia in 1973, in Uruguay in 1974,
in Peru in 1975, in Argentina in 1976, and later in Ecuador and Gre-
nada, as well as in other Latin American countries. Military regimes
controlled the entire region. Women joined efforts to protect each other
from state terrorism during dictatorships and later from misery during
the debt crisis.
A similar situation in Chile arose in Argentina, where General
Videla imposed state terrorism. Between 1975 and 1983 more than
thirty thousand Argentineans were killed or disappeared. According
to the Comisión Nacional de Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP,
1984), among the disappeared 67% were men and 33% were women.
The “Argentina method,” as it is known in the region, involved the dis-
appearance of an opponent, systematic torture in jails and in clandes-
tine torture centres, and the kidnapping of babies. Around 480 babies
born to pregnant prisoners were kidnapped from their mothers and
offered for adoption to military personnel or others (CONADEP,
1984). The recurring use of terror destroyed almost every commu-
nity in Argentina, except organizations such as Families of Detained
and Disappeared for Political Reasons, and Mothers and Grandmoth-
ers of the Plaza de Mayo. Mothers and grandmothers confronted
government crimes by asserting their moral right as life givers, as
mothers. Through thirty years of struggle, they transformed the iden-
tity of the country and their own identity. Argentinean society has
finally come to support the political identity that mothers and grand-
mothers of the Plaza de Mayo won in the memory of their children.
 Introduction 15

From being mothers and grandmothers of subversives, as the govern-

ment propaganda portrayed their children, they are now recognized as
the mothers and grandmothers of those who struggled for social justice.
According to Sternback as cited in Radcliffe (1993, p. 94) these women
also have changed locations: From a starting point as housewives they
inserted themselves as subjects of history, claiming the role of witnesses
and recorders of events, which officially and socially, they had been
denied. By so doing, this generation of women changed the traditional
family model and the wider sociopolitical power relations in their coun-
try. Radcliffe challenges this view, however. She argues that perpetuat-
ing the gendered stereotypes of motherhood and women as life-givers
reinforces patriarchal hierarchies; these women did not generally voice
any gender issues, such as divisions of domestic labour or male vio-
lence against women (p. 110). Nevertheless, in the context of surviving
dictatorships in Latin America, the family was the source of resistance
and served as a protection against genocide (Isla, 2007).
By 1976, with cooperative dictators in place and terror imposed, Latin
America was ready to implement neoliberal development policies,
based on the export economy model that privileges international mar-
kets, deepens the exploitation of workers, households, and communi-
ties, and reproduces dependency on a major scale. Jacqueline Roddick
(1988) argues that in the name of neoliberal globalization, the United
States produced a new colonialism based on debt burdens. Between
1978 and 1982, a time of neoliberal politics in the United States, interest
rates increased, and Latin America’s total interest payments swelled. In
1982, the Mexican crisis marked the beginning of the generalized debt
crisis. The number of loans diverted and the increase in interest rates
prohibited the possibility of debt repayment by Latin American coun-
tries. Mexico was the leading recipient of capital inflows, as well as the
model for the neoliberal experiment celebrated by development banks
and the business press. When Mexico announced that it was suspend-
ing payments on its debt, most of which was owed to American banks, it
frightened the international financial community, which sought shelter
under the institutions they had created. In 1982, Mexico was a pioneer,
where the neoliberal International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank,
and aid donors went to rescue commercial banks because the country
could not pay its debt interest. The role identified for the IMF and the
World Bank was to guarantee private bank loans while simultaneously
imposing on debtor nations a package of conditions, the Stabilization
and Structural Adjustment Programs (SSAPs).
16 Introduction

Robert Devlin (1985) argues that since the 1982 test case of Mexico,
the IMF and the World Bank have compelled one country after another
to reorganize its economy around the priority of regularly servicing its
commercial debts. The conditions embodied in SSAPs are premised on
the belief that in order to pay the debt, indebted peripheral countries
must adopt market economies integrated within a deregulated inter-
national market and guided by free trade principles. The IMF growth-
oriented model takes a monetarist view and sees a balance of payments
(BOP) deficit as having been caused by a surplus of money over the
demand for money emanating from excessive domestic credit expan-
sion. To restore BOP viability, IMF programs try to reduce budget defi-
cits and thereby reduce governments’ credit needs. To reduce budget-
ary pressures, the World Bank and the IMF insist on cuts to education,
health care, and other public services. The privatization of public enter-
prises, raising prices, and eliminating subsidies are also stipulated. The
IMF’s approach is inflationary because of the price-raising effects of
devaluations and interest rate liberalizations. It often results in reduced
investment levels and shortages of imported inputs, reduced real earn-
ings, cuts in budget subsidies that impose large social costs, devalu-
ations of local currencies, increased poverty, and political instability.
These policies are based on the theory that Latin American countries
have brought their problems on themselves and, therefore, have to solve
those problems through their own efforts. They must repay the money.
The flow of loans that built the neoliberal states and enforced the
IMF and the World Bank’s SSAP also reorganized societies. In Peru,
the globalized economics of the debt crisis created conditions for an
armed conflict between the Peruvian state, and the Shining Path and
the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA). By 1990, the
Fujimori dictatorship prioritized a strictly military solution. It brought
the highest human cost in the country’s history (Peruvian Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, 2003). The principal victims were rural
populations living in the Andes and the rainforest. Rural women,
particularly Ayacucho’s women, as they worked on and participated
in defence of their communities, their families, and themselves, suf-
fered massive sexual violence through the general practice of gang
rape by state agents. Sexual violence was accompanied by ethnic and
racial insults. Kimberly Theidon, a professor at Harvard University,
worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Aya-
cucho and analysed an Andean theory “la teta asustada” (the fright-
ened breast). With that term, Theidon (2009) sought “to convey how
 Introduction 17

strong negative emotions can alter the body and how a mother could,
via blood in utero or via breast milk, transmit this disease [terror and
toxic memories] to her baby” (p. 9).
According to Jacqueline Roddick (1988), between 1982 and 1986,
“Latin America’s net transfer of capital reached $121 billion, or $20 bil-
lion more than the total net transfer of resources received after 1974”
(pp. 45–46). Yet, their total debt grew in more billions. With the loss of
capital flowing into the region, Latin American countries were forced to
open up even more to foreign investment and trade, and to restructure
their productive systems to fit world demand by replacing state-centred
policies with market-centred ones. ECLAC (UN Economic Commission
for Latin America and the Caribbean) coined the phrase lost decade to
reflect the gravity of the situation in Latin America in the 1980s.
In sum, the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government in Chile,
the uprising of important sectors of the middle class in Argentina in
despair over the failure of the ruling class to modernize the country
(1973–1976), the movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador that mobi-
lized communal organizations (1980), the debt crisis since 1982 and the
upheaval of the poor in Peru (1980), saw generations of Latin Ameri-
cans physically eliminated, that is, killed, disappeared, or exiled (Casta-
ñeda, 1994). Together, the military dictatorships and the debt crisis that
implemented IMF and World Bank policies defeated working-class and
grassroots organizations. In Central America, in places such as Guate-
mala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), a counterinsurgence anticommunist US branch,
disrupted and weakened a progressive union movements through per-
secution and clandestine methods by using USAID and US Informa-
tion Agency (USIA) funds (Brooks & Tate, 1999). The enormous setback
opened the door for further assaults on waged and unwaged workers
as well as on nature. These stories bring to light fifty years of US foreign
and development policy in the region that installed military dictator-
ships, facilitated the violation of human rights, and trained torturers in
the School of the Americas, or as it is known to many, America’s “School
of Assassins” (SOA Watch, 2013).
The alternative to military dictatorships and foreign debts is the sub-
sistence perspective. According to the pioneering ecofeminist Maria
Mies (2005): “Recent developments and insights in the field of ecology
have shown that the subsistence perspective is not only an approach
to overcoming exploitation by capital, patriarchy and colonialism, the
basic structure of the modern industrial system; it also constitutes a
18 Introduction

liberation of nature within us and around us from the self-destructive

growth logic of capital” (interview with the author). Subsistence means
independence (autonomy), self-sufficiency, and self-reliance (cultural
identity). It is the key to dissolve capitalist patriarchy, which threatens
to destroy the earth.
Salleh suggests that as women’s relation to nature, capital, and
labour has been constructed differently from that of men. Women’s
involvement across cultures in life-affirming activities has resulted in
the development of gender-specific knowledge grounded in a material
base and reality. Salleh uses the term meta-industrial class (Salleh, 2004)
to describe all invisible reproductive labourers (mothers, household
labourers, peasants, Indigenous peoples, informal economy workers,
volunteer workers, Third World workers) whose unwaged labour and
knowledge sustain natural processes but who are exploited by capital-
ist markets. She finds in the meta-industrial class the historical agent
par excellence who may be able to begin steps towards liberation and
subsistence living. Salleh argues that productive labour is historically
contingent, whereas reproductive labour is universal, necessary, inte-
gral, and attuned within an ecosystem.
The construction of minorities, so-called underdeveloped countries,
women, and nature in the capitalist patriarchal model provide a use-
ful theoretical framework to scrutinize the sustainable development
perspective. Vandana Shiva (1989), a physicist, uncovers an important
Western cultural bias in the myth of subsistence provision as poverty,
pointing out that “subsistence economies which satisfy basic needs
through self-provisioning are not poor in the sense of being deprived”
(1989, p. 10). These economies could only be universally labelled as
poor when, after World War II, gross national product (GNP), which
counts only goods and services that pass through the market, was
introduced as the international standard to measure a nation’s wealth.
Gauging value and wealth by money alone leaves the wealth of nature
and the everyday skills and production of women, peasants, and
Indigenous peoples invisible. It allows the very “maldevelopment”
(Shiva, 1989) that destroys this wealth and brings misery and depriva-
tion to these communities, to be legitimized as poverty reduction. Rec-
ognition of the wealth inherent in nature and support of the work and
knowledge required to ensure subsistence and survival will transform
the nature of our society and economy, including the existing sexual
division of labour, and give women autonomy over their bodies and
lives.
 Introduction 19

Marilyn Waring (1988), a political science scholar, argues that the

international economic system constructs reality in a way that excludes
the great bulk of women’s work, peasant and Indigenous labour, and
nature. Official economic measures of production only count produc-
tion for the market and give no value to nature, women’s work of repro-
duction, or other production work, largely in the economic South or the
Third World or the periphery. Consequently, the contribution or loss
of both reproductive work and nature to the community’s well-being
remains invisible in these systems, and is neither protected nor sup-
ported by policy-making (Waring, 1988, p. 176).
Neoliberalism also has a contradictory and contested political ecol-
ogy. For the current attacks on nature and its poor waged and unwaged
workers, I turn to the neoliberal environmental management approach
propounded by the World Bank.

Environmental Management and Sustainable

Development Policy

David Harvey (2009, pp. 10–18) argues that two important agreements
established new conditions for neoliberal globalization. First was the
Bretton Woods agreement for trade and economic development, which
in 1944 put in motion the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International
Bank of Settlements, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD). Second, the Washington Consensus, in 1989,
set policy prescriptions for market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.
The World Trade Organization (WTO), in 1995, was born by eliminating
GATT and assuming new roles for capital accumulation. Both Bretton
Woods and the Washington Consensus put the financial system or the
stock market (e.g., Wall Street) at the centre of capital accumulation.
Internationally, Mary Mellor (2010) argues that since the 1980s and
1990s, the financial system has had access to unlimited credit creation.
Selling debt has been a huge source of profits in the financial service
industry. If a person is indebted, he or she has to look for a job to pay
this debt, but if it is a country that is indebted, the creation of money
as debt is linked to bank-issued money. Money, as debt, is created
by private banks in order to speculate. This capital escapes from the
control of central banks. She continues: “This ability has enabled the
commercial sector to gain control of the money system via the bank-
ing sector and placed the state, and therefore the people, into the role
20 Introduction

of public debtor” (2010, p. 31). Since there is no limit to the creation

of money as debt, nor a system of supervision, the banking system
does not need to be transparent in its transactions and, as a result, the
financial system is at permanent risk of crisis and in need of rescue
using public money. According to Mellor (2010), in the age of “finan-
cialized capitalism … money is invested in financial assets to create
more money (M-M-M+)” (p. 85). The stock market became a forum for
speculation (p. 88).
Neoliberalism employs monetary economics assuming that macro-
economic problems, such as inflation and debt, originate in excessive
government spending. Harvey defines neoliberalism as “a theory of
political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can
best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms
and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the
state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate
to such practices” (2009, p. 2).
Since the recognition of the ecological crisis, monetary economics of
the neoliberal political economy is also applied to nature. According
to John Bellamy Foster (1999), the historical view of the environmen-
tal movement in the industrial world was that “industrial man was a
disturbing agent” (Marsh in Man and Nature, as cited in Foster, 1999); a
major concern was the rate of extinction of animals, birds, and forests.
Preservationists, such as Marshall in The People’s Forests (1933, as cited
in Foster, 1999), emphasized the intrinsic value of nature and wanted
to protect wilderness areas from commercial exploitation by expanding
public ownership. Conservationists, in contrast, “came to be dominated
by more business-oriented forces who sought not so much to oppose
the environmental depredations of the large corporations as to regulate
and rationalize the exploitation of natural resources for the purpose of
long-term profits” (Foster, 1999, p. 75). This environmentalism is instru-
mental where the ecology exists for human beings.
The United Nations assumed the conservationist model, since the
World Commission on Environment and Development’s publication of
Our Common Future (1987), also known as the Brundtland Report (BR).
The BR entangled the international debt crisis and the ecological crisis,
and suggested sustainable development as a means to eliminate pov-
erty and to contain environmental disaster (Sachs, 1999). Sustainable
development was defined as “development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
 Introduction 21

their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Develop-

ment, 1987, p. 8).
The 1992 Earth Summit opened the way for the direct management
of nature and human resource development by giving responsibility
for sustainable development to the World Bank. W. David Pearce and
J. Jeremy Warford (1993) of the World Bank Environment Department
stressed the importance of permanent growth and development based
on the industrial world’s experience. They argued that sustainable
development is good and desirable for the entire world, particularly
for the so-called underdeveloped world. If poverty is to be reduced
and the standard of living of the average person improved in devel-
oping countries, economic growth must remain a primary objective of
national governments and the world economy. Environmental destruc-
tion is simply part of the price that must be paid to achieve a higher
standard of living. Although they recognize that the industrial world
has sacrificed environmental quality for economic growth, they believe
that the industrial world has achieved sustainable development.
Pearce and Warford (1993) also argue that growth in real income per
capita can be achieved without major degradation, by getting the price
right. This means that price calculations to allocate the use of scarce
resources (e.g., water or air) should be based on the laws of supply
and demand operating in the marketplace. If markets function nearly
perfectly, prices in the marketplace will reflect their private costs of pro-
duction, and the rise or fall in price will deter or induce purchase. In this
way, scarce resources are allocated efficiently. However, proponents of
sustainable development warn that there are two possible forms of
market failure. First, although many marketed goods have prices that
reflect private costs of production, these prices ignore major externali-
ties such as social costs. Pearce and Warford (1993) also claim that these
externalities can be regulated through pollution taxes and tradeable
permits. Second, many goods have no markets at all; for example genes,
air, and scenery, and prices must be established for them. That is, the
economy requires a fully monetized world in order to be protected.
A World Bank official, Kirk Hamilton (2001, p. 21), argues that one
possible definition of sustainable development is the process of creat-
ing, maintaining, and managing a nation’s portfolio of assets in national
asset accounting. These assets include built infrastructure (roads), natu-
ral capital (minerals, energy, genetics, agricultural land, forests, rivers),
human capital (education, health care), and social capital (networks, the
court system, the political regime). Hamilton argues that many of the
22 Introduction

critically important ecological and life-support functions provided by

natural systems – the genetic material, the forest, water, and the atmo-
sphere – are not yet measured as part of the wealth of nations. These
elements must be embedded in the economic system as natural capital
to become integrated within the sustainable development framework
and thereby ensure sustainable growth (Hamilton, 2001, p. 30). Ham-
ilton also states, “Natural capital, the base for all life, is much more
equitably distributed than other forms of capital. What matters is how
this resource is managed and whether the rents from the natural capital
endowment are invested or consumed” (Fenech et al., 1999, p. 6). Fol-
lowing this logic, the World Bank developed genuine saving measures
that expanded the national accounts definitions of assets to include
minerals, energy, forest resources, and the stock of atmospheric CO2
(Hamilton, 2001), thus legitimizing the privatization of the commons
(areas not commodified such as air, forest, mountains, genes, biodiver-
sity, water, oceans and seas, atmosphere).
The idea of sustainable development is that there must be an exchange
process between those with money to buy and those with natural capital
to sell. This point of view assumes that the well-being of human agents
is of primary importance for economics, in terms of maximizing the
satisfaction of human wants. According to the World Bank, “There is a
considerable willingness worldwide to pay to preserve nature and the
critical functions that ecosystems provide” (World Bank, 1997, p. 20).
The impacts on the ecology and the local population are made invis-
ible and/or hidden under the cost and benefits theory. Critiques of the
environmental management position come from two main sources: eco-
logical economics and ecosocialists.
Ecological economists, economists who are also environmentalists,
judge this approach incapable of challenging the environmental crisis.
Instead, they propose a management focused on the adaptability of
human economies. Ecological economics, using an ecological economic
stewardship paradigm, rejects traditional economics’ use of the market
for determining economic optimality, because markets do not function
at all with goods and services that cannot be privately owned, such as
the atmosphere. Herman Daly and Joshua Farley (2011) identify sev-
eral fundamental limits to traditional economics, such as the belief that
growth is the only way to solve the ecological problem; that human
behaviour is driven by dynamics stemming from self-advantage; that
technology will find human-made replacements for lost ecosystem
materials and service; that the economic system is a self-sufficient whole
 Introduction 23

entity unto itself; that free markets exist in the absence of government
regulation and intervention; or “that the laws of thermodynamics are
irrelevant to economics” (Daly & Farley, 2011, p. xviii). These authors
also argue in favour of standard economics:

While we are especially critical of standard economics’ excessive com-

mitment to GNP (Gross National Product) growth and its neglect of the
biophysical system in which the economy is embedded, we also recog-
nize that much environmental destruction and other forms of misery are
caused by insufficient attention to standard economics. For example, sub-
sidized prices for natural resources, neglect of external costs and benefits,
and political unwillingness to respect the basic notions of scarcity and
opportunity cost are problems we join standard economists in decrying.
(Daly & Farley, 2011, p. xvii)

Their perspective proposes a social dialogue to establish what a soci-

ety would like itself to become, based on a new valuation system
where the ecosystem’s health is more important and human economy
is adaptable.
The second challenge to the environmental management school
comes from the ecosocialists who maintain that the planet is materially
finite, meaning there are biophysical limits to the volume of economic
activity the biosphere can support. Elmar Altvater (1994, pp. 84–85)
asserts that the first law of thermodynamics (i.e., the total amount of
energy in the universe is constant), and the second law of thermody-
namics (entropy always increases in the universe), are natural laws that
the economic system cannot overcome. He contends that ecological
modalities of time and space are irreversible and inevitable as disorder
increases in the universe. Ecosocialists argue that “one must therefore
ask questions about the physical limits of all growth, and, more pro-
foundly, about the entropic nature of all economic activity” (Deléage,
1994, p. 50). They also contend that capital cannot control the reproduc-
tion and modification of the natural conditions of production in the
same way it aims to regulate industrial commodity production (Altvater,
1994; Deléage, 1994).
Further, Michael Goldman (1998) declares that: “as long as the com-
mons is perceived as only existing within a particular mode of knowing,
called development, with its unacknowledged structures of dominance,
this community [the Global Resource Managers (GRMs) or large inter-
national environmental NGOs] will continue to serve the institution of
24 Introduction

development, whose raison d’être is restructuring Third World capaci-

ties and social-natural relations to accommodate transnational capital
expansion” (p. 47). Goldman elucidates that “GRMs have replaced the
barefoot peasants as the ‘experts’ on the commons; now, within the new
discourse, it is their knowledge, rules, sciences and definitions that have
become paramount for explaining ecological degradation and sustain-
ability” (p. 35). But these managers are more concerned with the expan-
sionary demands of the North’s industrial base than about the health
of the ecology. GRMs make sure that industry receives what it needs:
more raw materials extracted from the earth, rivers, forests, aquifers, as
well as cheap labour.
Radicals of many stripes understand the political ecology of neolib-
eralism – the transforming of global nature into “market natures,” but
they still deny that class politics of capital accumulation is tied to the
experience of the unwaged (women and Indigenous people) or poorly
waged (peasants and colonies), being resourced as nature. Their inter-
connection is the issue of this book.

Conclusion

This ecofeminist analysis departs from Marx’s concept of primitive

accumulation, and it advances the concept of housewifization to
uncover how a neoliberal political economy not only exploits the waged
but the unwaged as well. Ecofeminists show how the provisions of
women, peasants, Indigenous people, entire nation-states, and nature
are turned into an extractive commons whose provisions are taken
through violence. Ecofeminists look at reproductive labour or life-
supporting labour as an important area of human activity that needs
to be revalued, and they yearn for recognition of our naturalness, our
physicality and materiality, our carnality and mortality. By conceptual-
izing reproduction as part of capital accumulation, ecofeminists chal-
lenged the hierarchy that capital has created between wage workers
(paid) and non-wage workers (unpaid).
In this book I analyse how the political ecology of neoliberal politi-
cal economy, so-called sustainable development, has developed in
Costa Rica since the 1992 Earth Summit, when governments were seen
as responsible for organizing it. The “greening” in this book is a new
form of oppression on nature combined with a new kind of exploitation
of the unpaid and poorly paid worker. This new essentialism results
from the economist rejection of physical limits to growth, the biologist
 Introduction 25

fetish with such limits, and the indebtedness of peripheral countries.

The research hypotheses in this book are grounded in the fact that the
livelihood of subsistence forest-dwelling households in a market con-
text continue to be encompassed by two sets of objective conditions:
free access to natural and disposable resources and the knowledge and
means of production to use and transform them; and dependence on
the availability of natural resources and market goods. If the second
condition induces us to think that forest-dwelling societies are in a situ-
ation of dependence, knowledge of and free access to forest resources
also make them free. In the margin between dependence and freedom
thrives a forest-dweller’s art of life, which is at the source of the conflict
we observe today.
In the sustainable development framework, subsistence production
is replaced with commodities and local markets by a world market, in
which women and nature are forced to participate, by violent means.
The political ecology of sustainable development encourages a totality
of destruction by transforming into merchandise or paper money the
biodiversity we eat, the air we breathe, the scenery we enjoy, and the
water we drink. This is the “West End” referred to by Claudia von Werl-
hof (2007a), meaning the “end of capitalist rationality.”
Since the 1980s, the stock market has been a forum for speculation
and, for the most part, the source of investments: first, the income of
mutual funds, which collect money deposited by individuals and invest
it in an array of financial assets; second, pension funds, which are the
retirement savings of individuals; third, the earnings of hedge funds,
which are essentially pools of capital contributed by institutions, handed
over to a small circle of managers given licence to borrow heavily and
speculate aggressively, and which grow ever larger; and fourth, debt
swaps, which are financial mechanisms to exchange debt for ownership
in national industries, public enterprises, bank assets, and nature, in the
form of debt-for-nature exchanges, were also set in place.
This book is about relationships and communities, and it is struc-
tured into two parts. Part I gives an overview of the debt issues affecting
Costa Rica and the creation of national conservation areas as a means
meeting debt obligations. It includes Chapters 1 and 2, where I establish
the link between debt and debt-for-nature exchanges with the national
system of conservation areas. In Chapter 1, I also trace investment pat-
terns developed historically by the dynamics of capitalism in Costa
Rica. Since 1987, debt exchanges have been used to confront poverty
and environmental crises (Conservation International, 1991). In 1989,
26 Introduction

during President George H. W. Bush’s administration, the new secretary

of the treasury, Nicholas Brady, established a debt-restructuring plan
(Vasquez, 1996). As a result, an important part of financial capital was
created through trade in debts whereby ownership in national indus-
tries, public enterprises, bank stock, or natural resources is exchanged
for a reduction in a country’s indebtedness. My purpose is to show how
Costa Rica became the first green neoliberal project following the 1981
debt crisis, which brought the IMF and the World Bank, as well as the
Reagan administration, to its doorstep. During the debt crisis, the coun-
try agreed to a reconfiguration of its economy based on large capital
requirements to earn more hard currency to pay its external debt. This
process accelerated the concentration of land into large commercial
farms and was responsible for changes in rural activities, from agri-
culture to service-oriented work. The political economy described in
Chapter 1 sets the frame for the political ecology that Costa Rica initi-
ated in 1988.
In Chapter 2, I examine how, during the 1980s, indebtedness was
used by the United States to impose USAID as a direct agent in the
management of the Costa Rican state. During USAID’s tenure, the polit-
ical ecology of the country was manufactured at the ECODES confer-
ence (Conservation Strategy for Sustainable Development/ Estrategia
de Conservación para el Desarrollo Sustentable). At ECODES, it was
recognized that the pursuit of development as a means of fostering eco-
nomic growth, capital accumulation, and technology was the cause of
the debt crisis, poverty, dispossession, deforestation, and water poison-
ing in Costa Rica. Nevertheless, economic growth, capital accumula-
tion, and technology were offered as a cure, in the form of sustainable
development. Debt-for-nature proponents argue that conservation
areas, such as the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area highlighted in this
book, are based on the science of nature.
Part II, a discussion of what I call embodied indebtedness illustrates
how the lives of women, peasants, and Indigenous peoples, and
their relationships to nature, are entwined with issues relating to
Costa Rica’s foreign debts. This second part of the book begins with
Chapter 3: using the Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature agreement,
I describe how WWF-C and MINAE divided the 250,000 hectares of
ACA-Tilaran into three priority working units (PWUs): Bijagua, Río
Aranjuez, and La Fortuna. The history of the La Fortuna PWU is told
in detail because it has been described by its managers as a success
story. Each PWU was assigned a protected wildlife area where local
 Introduction 27

residents were encouraged to organize NGOs and set up ecotourist

lodges (albergues) as microenterprises using debt-for-nature funds.
The results in Bijagua, Río Aranjuez, and La Fortuna are very similar.
The social tensions between the demands of local communities for
security and livelihoods and the demands of private capital and national
governments for economic growth and globalization are exposed. In
local communities, Indigenous people and peasants have always played
a fundamental role in biodiversity conservation, improvement, adapta-
tion, and selection of species useful for human beings. This interaction
between people and nature has been possible only through the trans-
mission of collective knowledge from generation to generation, which
maintained family and community sustenance, as well as a recognition
that food sovereignty depends on the health of the ecosystem.
In Chapters 4 to 8 I establish links between foreign debt, political ecol-
ogy, and accelerated impoverishment and environmental degradation.
In Costa Rica, the territorial dynamics are undergoing intense transfor-
mation owing to the sustainable development agenda that promises to
address the debt and environmental crises through new natures and the
“rebranding” tactic of open-pit mining.
Chapter 4 demonstrates how land transformation trivialized and
excluded the traditional knowledge of Indigenous people and peasants
that has long been part of the subsistence economy of tropical rainfor-
ests. In 1992, the World Resources Institute, The World Conservation
Union, and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) produced a
global biodiversity strategy guide in which it was claimed that a funda-
mental reason for the loss or unsustainable use of biological resources
throughout the planet was the failure of societies to value the environ-
ment and the goods and services it sustains. The strategy argued that
wildlife-related activities should be incorporated into the economic
valuation of ecosystems and expressed in market terms to contribute to
national GDPs. Within this framework, biochemistry, genes, proteins,
microorganisms, and other products with actual or potential economic
value were placed directly in the hands of “ecological authorities,”
turning nature and community knowledge into arenas dominated by
secrecy and paranoia.
The International Convention on Biodiversity, which came into force
in 1993, abolished the idea that genetic resources are a common patri-
mony of humankind. Since then, the enclosure of genetic material for
economic prospecting has transformed biological organisms into mere
resources for scientific research. Moreover, local knowledge of native
28 Introduction

plants and animals has been expropriated through the legislation of

intellectual property rights. Indigenous species identified as having
valuable traits are collected and shipped to laboratories for modifica-
tion by pharmaceutical, medical, and agricultural companies.
Chapter 5 shows how the global environmental crisis has drawn
attention to the process of forest vegetation storing carbon that, when
released, traps heat in the atmosphere, driving up temperatures and
speeding climate change. In 1997, the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change committed its parties to set internationally bind-
ing emission reduction targets. It recognized that high levels of green-
house gas emissions in the atmosphere come as a result of more than
150 years of industrial activity. However, it placed a heavier burden on
the “indebted forest” as a source of carbon credits. Rainforests have
been converted into oxygen generators and sites of carbon credits for
the polluting countries of the global North. The goal of generating an
economic value from forests as carbon sinks has produced two crises: a
crisis of nature by establishing monoculture tree planting, and a crisis
for peasants by taking away their land and destroying sustainable ways
of living, creating destitution and misery as a consequence.
Chapter 6 exposes the enclosure of land for tourist attractions. Eco-
tourism has transformed the economy of the people living in the area
from one of agriculture, subsistence farming, and cattle ranching into
one of being service providers. Further, internal boundaries have been
built, separating local people from the nature that they had shared
equally and freely: volcanoes, waterfalls, rivers, hot springs, and wild-
life. Tourism promotion has also deprived local communities of access
to natural settings where families and neighbours came together during
their free hours, walking in the countryside, climbing hills, swimming,
and fishing.
The chapter asserts that the remaking of nature reproduces certain
negative gender politics originated in the ideology that women and
their labour as nature can be appropriated as free goods. It shows how
the redesigning of the rainforest as a primary ecotourism destination
made Costa Rica a sex-tourism destination for tourists and other trav-
ellers. Betsy Taylor and Herbert Reid (personal communication, Octo-
ber 2002) argue that “some people mistakenly come to see mainstream
environmentalists as the key to environmental and social justice. But
corporate environmentalism [or mainstream environmentalists] in the
industrial world has been dominated by a white male hierarchy, which
aims to conserve wild areas for recreation and aesthetic and spiritual
 Introduction 29

renewal, to free themselves from the space/time of industrial produc-

tion, and to enjoy relatively undamaged natural wilds.”
The natural wilds are women and nature that are seen as objects. New
gender politics of land enclosure and dispossession have enclosed and
restricted women and children. Although I was unable to include some
direct information about conditions in La Fortuna Conservation Area,
because of threats I experienced in trying to interview certain subjects, I
was able to find descriptions of women and children’s condition in the
capital city, San José.
Chapter 7 presents a case study of microenterprises that produce
medicinal plants with the stated but superficial aim of contributing to
women’s empowerment. Throughout the centuries rural women have
created a rich and elaborate culture, a culture of medicinal plants whose
biological value is intrinsically linked to social, ethical, and cultural
values. Medicinal plants were traditionally produced for a family’s
consumption, that is, they had no exchange value but only use value.
When medicinal plants and organic agriculture are put together for the
market, they shift from being a source of women’s power, as it was
women who provided the knowledge, to being a source of women’s
exploitation.
In this chapter research is also presented on rural women’s condition
through an Abanico microenterprises that produces medicinal plants. A
microenterprise is an economic unit that operates in the market. For any
enterprise operating in the market, accessing production factors such as
credits is crucial. Microenterprises usually get small amounts of capital
from government and from NGOs. The Abanico microenterprise is a
Women in Development (WID) income-generating activity with credit
facilities organized by NGOs. Since the 1970s, WID, as an international
policy, aims to integrate women into development. WID legitimizes the
claims of women to an equal share of the benefits of development. In
the effort to keep the growth model going, development recognized
gender relations as a central aspect to overcome if women are to be
taken into account and incorporated into the market successfully. WID
generally supports the current model of development, suggesting that
women’s status will be improved through evolutionary change.
The goal of WID is to mainstream women’s issues into the concep-
tion and design of economic policy as a whole; in other words, to push
states into recognizing the real differences that exist between women
and men as social subjects, and the need to consider the effect of macro
policies on the sexual division of labour. WID concentrates on women’s
30 Introduction

access to cash income via the market, either as individuals or members

of some form of collective, as the base strategy. This problematic WID
strategy has been incorporated into the political ecology of the World
Bank and is now one of the programming priorities of sustainable-
development agencies that NGOs use to expand markets. These WID
programs have been expanding the sexual division of labour and the
enclosure of labour.
Chapter 8 links land expropriation for open-pit mining with harass-
ment and intimidation. It describes how, women and men in the Mira-
mar community have for generations lived by traditional ways of life
and livelihoods based on agriculture. By custom, forests and moun-
tains provide rural communities with access to water, agriculture, and
animals. The Bellavista gold-mining project is located two kilometres
north of Miramar de Montes de Oro, in the province of Puntarenas.
Mining has pitted municipalities and communities against the national
government, which allows mining in its territory, despite its rhetoric of
rejecting mining.
At the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the designers of the
Global Mining Initiative, as a means of promoting sustainable develop-
ment, were the International Chamber of Commerce, the World Busi-
ness Council for Sustainable Development, and the Business Action
for Sustainable Development. Thirty mining corporations and several
NGOs, among them the International Union for Nature Conservancy,
and Conservation International, sponsored this initiative. Open-pit
mining produces new ecological abuses. It takes control of large areas
of land for mountaintop removal mining; uses the extremely toxic
cyanide lixiviation technique, which has led to severe pollution; opens
deep holes in the rock to remove entire mountains, forests, and glaciers,
with the aim of finding rocks with gold, silver, and other metallic min-
erals; kills the surface matter such as forests, mountains, glacier covers
through the use of dynamite; eliminates biological diversity of flora,
fauna, and microorganisms by employing heavy machinery; scars the
landscape with the creation of giant craters; destroys ecological cycles
and contaminates ecosystems; poisons hydro resources and pollutes the
atmosphere due to the release of poisonous substances, thereby affect-
ing all life. Mining leaves a legacy of permanent water contamination
from cyanide, metals, and non-metals.
Chapter 9 links the Earth Summits of 1992, 2002, and 2012, which
produced the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) in Central America, the Ini-
ciativa para la Integración de la Infraestructura Regional Sudamericana
 Introduction 31

(IIRSA) in South America, and “green” capitalism with the sustainable

development generated at ACA-Tilaran in Costa Rica. In documenting
the practices of NGOs such as WWF-C, INBio, and the ANDAR Associ-
ation, I challenge claims that debt-for-nature swaps, sustainable devel-
opment, and green capitalism reduce poverty, create equality, confront
ecological destruction, and combat climate change. Instead, the book
uncovers an inadequacy in market-based solutions.
To conclude, I should mention that as price mechanisms become
overextended with respect to the local commons (including species
biodiversity, forests, mountains, other scenery), and given that eco-
nomic growth has the objective of capturing these natural ecology,
each chapter of this book presents locality as a site of confrontations
and resistance.
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PART I

Foreign Debt, Debt-for-Nature, and the

National System of Conservation Areas
This page intentionally left blank
1 The Political Economy of Costa Rica’s
Neoliberal State

This chapter discusses Costa Rica’s recasting as a neoliberal state. It

examines the reasons why Costa Rica’s debt crisis had outcomes dif-
ferent than the other Latin American countries. In the 1980s, neoliberal
economic policies led to higher interest rates and the cut-back in new
commercial bank credit, resulting in increased difficulties in meeting
the conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. These condi-
tionalities prompted riots of the poor in Peru, uprisings of the middle
class in Argentina, and liberation movements elsewhere, such those as
in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Neoliberals and conservatives alike have
used these differences to showcase Costa Rica as a successful example
of IMF and World Bank neoliberal policies applied during the debt cri-
sis. Since 1981, the Costa Rican economy has been transformed from
one of state-sponsored entrepreneurial initiatives to a neoliberal state
management that articulates the political economy by private property
rights, deregulation, and free trade through free markets.

From State Intervention to Neoliberalism

In Costa Rica between 1948 and 1951, the formation of the ruling classes
and the early dismantling of the politicized and unionized working
class movement played a critical role in the events leading to the build-
ing of a neoliberal state (Cerdas Cruz, 1998). During the Cold War, the
United States could not tolerate a strong communist party in Costa Rica
because of the country’s physical proximity to the Panama Canal (Cer-
das Cruz, 1998). The victory of José Figueres in the 1948 revolution cre-
ated the general investment conditions required to develop individual
capital; and the United States, through Padre Nuñez, a Catholic priest
36 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

with links to US intelligence, created the climate necessary to fight the

communists (Cerdas Cruz, 1998).
Costa Rica’s working class was, in fact, the first casualty of the Cold
War, which virtually eliminated the working-class masses as a politi-
cal movement. Workers’ consciousness is still deeply marked by the
repression under which people lived during the 1948 revolution. Their
historical defeats have inflicted a deeply felt insecurity and fear about
the consequences of political organization. As a result, working-class
organizations were replaced by a union system linking entrepreneurial
state and private enterprises in an attempt to merge workers’ and own-
ers’ interests. These circumstances explain the current lack of organiza-
tion and participation of Costa Ricans in civil and public life and made
possible the three-decade rule of Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN)
(the National Liberation Party). With the union movement destroyed,
there was no longer any need for military forces. Since then, Costa Rica
has been demilitarized but is protected by US forces that remain in the
region (Cerdas Cruz, 1998).
Ana Sojo (1984) and Rodolfo Cerdas Cruz (1998) suggest that both the
Figueres (president in 1948–1949, 1953–1958, and 1970–1974) and Francisco
Orlich (president from 1962 to 1968) governments were committed to eco-
nomic development and saw the transition to industrialization and mod-
ernization directed by the state as central to successful development pro-
grams. The state’s entrepreneurial initiatives were advised and promoted
by the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (ECLAC). According to Prebisch (1963), director of ECLAC, the
cause of underdevelopment in Latin American countries “is their trade
dependence resulting from the specialization of the ‘periphery’ in raw
materials and the ‘center’ in industrial goods.” To overcome the condition
of underdevelopment, “a more comprehensive ordering than that afforded
by markets [is needed], and such an ordering is possible only through plan-
ning” (Hague, 1999, pp. 92–3).
Assuming that the national economy was the basic unit of develop-
ment, ECLAC proposed that Latin America follow its own industrial-
ization path to import substitution, through the domestic production of
industrial goods (Furtado, 1970). It promoted state intervention in food
production, roads, land tenure, and nationalization in key sectors of the
economy. ECLAC wanted to integrate the Latin American economies
more closely and attempted to ensure that transnational corporations
operating in these countries would never again threaten Latin Ameri-
can governments (Escobar, 1995).
 Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State 37

Table 1.1 Costa Rica’s Total External Debt and Debt Service

Year 1980

Total External Debt 2.744 billion

Debt Service 335 million

Source: World Bank (n.d.)

In Costa Rica, the move towards industrialization and agricultural

modernization required a strong state. By 1970, following ECLAC’s
prescriptions, the state had reduced its support of private accumula-
tion and organized the state as an accumulation centre. This situation
allowed the state some autonomy from the private interests that sup-
ported the 1948 revolution (A. Sojo, 1984). By the end of the 1970s, Costa
Rica was generally regarded, socially and economically, as one of the
best examples of the implementation of successful ECLAC economic
development programs in Latin America. Its health, education, and
gdp indicators were surpassed only by Cuba (A. Sojo, 1984). But by
July 1981, as a result of borrowing and high interest rates, Costa Rica
had become the first nation in Latin America to unilaterally suspend all
payments on its foreign debt. The IMF closed its doors and Costa Rica
was unable to obtain any further loans (Petch, 1988; C. Sojo, 1992; V.
Carballo, 1992).
In 1980, Costa Rica’s total external debt was $2.7 billion with a debt
service of $335 million (see Table 1.1).
During the 1980s debt crisis, the understanding of development
based on local knowledge promoted by ECLAC was replaced with IMF
stabilization policies and World Bank structural adjustment programs
(SAPs), which form the basis of neoliberalism. By 1982, the application
of neoliberalist stabilization and SAPs, through the daily devaluation of
its currency, coupled with high inflation, reductions in real wages, user
fees in education and health care, erosion of retirement pensions, dereg-
ulation of prices, polarization of income, growing unemployment, and
the spread of poverty, transformed Costa Rica.
Petch (1988) and C. Sojo (1992) argue that USAID funds were used
to avoid the turmoil and protests against the IMF and World Bank that
took place throughout Latin America during the debt crisis. The US
government needed Costa Rica’s territory to fight the Cold War against
Nicaragua; it thus turned the country into a strategic military resource
38 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

and forced the acceptance of USAID as a parallel state in Costa Rica. Luis
Alberto Monge, president from 1982 to 1986, sold Costa Rica’s geopo-
litical and military location in conflicted Central America to USAID and
the Reagan administration to help them in their fight against commu-
nism in Nicaragua (C. Sojo, 1992). The Monge administration adopted
USAID advice and renegotiated the debt with the Paris Club and US
commercial banks, and started full implementation of the IMF–World
Bank packages agreed to in 1981.
Carlos Sojo (1991, p. 59) cites Fernando Zumbado, Costa Rica’s for-
mer ambassador to the United Nations: “The country was in need of
foreign aid to re-establish the economy and the only possible funding
source was the United States. The Monge government understood the
Reagan administration’s obsession with Nicaragua and Costa Rica’s
importance for the United States politics of aggression.” In February
1982, the Washington Post reported that the Reagan administration had
allotted $19 million to overthrow the Sandinistas (C. Sojo, 1991).
Carlos Sojo (1992) argues that Costa Rica had an historical enmity
with Nicaragua; this was combined with the profound anticommunism
of the PLN. He states: “In August 1984, in answer to U.S. demands that
Costa Rica take a more confrontational stance, the Monge Administra-
tion accused the Sandinistas of penetrating Costa Rican territory” (p. 25).
This accusation produced a political crisis in Costa Rica that aimed to
create a consensus between poor and rich that a patriotic stand was
needed to confront the Sandinistas, thus discouraging strikes or upris-
ings against the economic policies imposed by the IMF and the World
Bank (C. Sojo, 1991). He also contends (1991) that USAID, as a parallel
state in Costa Rica, used the Iniciativa Cuenca del Caribe (Caribbean
Cuenca Initiative) and created the Programa de Estabilización y Recu-
peración Económica (ERE) (Stabilization and Economic Recuperation
Program), which had three components: the opening of US markets to
Costa Rica; increased investment; and direct aid from the United States
to Costa Rica.
The ERE corrected three economic difficulties. First, it relieved the
country’s financial problems by expanding the private banking sys-
tem and devaluing the currency to increase profit in the export sector.
Second, it alleviated an investment and export-promotion problem by
creating a private organization called the Coalición Costarricense de
Iniciativas para el Desarrollo (CINDE) (Costa Rica Development Initia-
tives Coalition). CINDE channeled foreign exchange and national cur-
rency to expand non-traditional export projects and buy goods from
 Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State 39

the United States. ERE also privatized eighteen public enterprises and
transferred the funds to the private sector. Third, ERE brought direct aid
from the United States.

US-Costa Rica Direct Aid

Building the neoliberal state in Costa Rica cost USAID $1.02 billion,
from which $926 million was poured into the ERE program: $193 mil-
lion (28.1%) was channeled to the private sector, and the import sec-
tor had $733 million (71.9%) to purchase goods and services from the
United States (C. Sojo, 1992). Dawkins (1992) acknowledged the use of
$80 million in debt-for-nature swaps.
Trevor Petch (1988) has shown that as the war between Nicaragua
and the United States intensified, USAID funds to Costa Rica increased.
In 1981, the United States contributed $15.3 million, two-thirds of which
came in the form of loans. In 1982, the amount rose to $52 million, only
$9 million of which were grants (money that pursued US initiatives)
(p. 203). In addition, the Monge administration received $2 million for
security assistance to equip and train for the Civil Guard. As the United
States escalated the war against Nicaragua, US direct aid, a voluntary
transfer of resources from one country to another to reward a govern-
ment behaviour desired by the donor, also soared. In 1983, US direct
aid was augmented to $214.1 million, of which only one-quarter came
in the form of a grant. However in 1984, the total fell back to $179 mil-
lion, two-thirds of which were grants, with an additional $9 million for
security assistance (p. 203).
The reduction of aid came when Monge “refused to cooperate with
plans for regional maneuvers and to support the U.S. invasion of Gre-
nada in October 1983” (Petch, 1988, p. 203). In 1985, to regain the US aid,
Monge allowed the setup of a military camp at El Murcielago, where
US advisers could train the Nicaragua contras, as well as an airstrip at
Santa Elena, for resupply efforts to the contras (Petch, 1988, p. 205). A
further reduction of aid came following the Oscar Arias administra-
tion’s (1986–1990) opposition to the presence of Nicaraguan contras and
President Reagan’s Central American policy. President Arias developed
in 1987 the Esquipulas II Accords, which called for an end to outside aid
for guerrillas, a ceasefire, more peace talks, and a ban on the use of one
country as a base for attacks on another. As a result, in 1987, “USAID
deferred $120 million from January until September, while the IMF held
back a $55 million standby loan and insisted on further reductions in
40 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

the budget and the fiscal deficit” (Petch, 1988) (p. 209). In addition, aid
to Costa Rica from Canada also plummeted from Can$16.17 million in
1989–90 to some Can$9.5 million in 1990–91 (Cox, 1992).
In 1989, Costa Rica and the IMF signed a new standby agreement for
the continuation of the neoliberal economic policy and the restructuring
of public finances. It soon became clear to the creditors that the targets
given in the letter of intent to the IMF would not be reached. Until the
government complied with their demands, the IMF and USAID with-
held millions (Petch, 1988). In 1990, USAID and the international finan-
cial institutions were satisfied with the application of their policies, and
Costa Rica was included in the Brady Plan Accord that restructured the
commercial banks’ loan agreements. Costa Rica’s inclusion in the Brady
Plan Accord restored investor confidence and capital investments from
the United States, Europe, and Asia were renewed.

The Agro-Export Development Model

Traditionally, US multinational corporations enclosed Costa Rica’s land

and converted it into cattle ranches in the north and banana planta-
tions in the south (A. Ramírez & Maldonado, 1988). The local business
community set aside the central valley for coffee plantations, with sup-
port coming mainly from the national government (Winson, 1989). To
support, encourage, and facilitate coffee production, the formation of
small- and medium-sized peasant property owners was crucial. By
the late 1970s, Costa Rica was seen as a successful Green Revolution
story. The Green Revolution introduced modern farming techniques
that increased agricultural productivity resulting from the introduction
of high-yield and pest-resistant varieties of crops. Costa Rica’s main
exports, from 1955 to 1984, were bananas from the south, coffee from
the centre, and meat from the north.
C. Sojo (1992) maintains that from the beginning of the 1981 debt
crisis, the IMF and the World Bank pressured the country to increase its
export income in order to earn more hard currency that could be used
to pay its external debt. The basic idea behind this new policy was that
the country’s structural problems could be solved by increasing non-
traditional export production. This so-called nontraditional agriculture
is also referred to as diversification of agriculture (agricultura de cambio),
or alternative agriculture production, or exchange agriculture.
During the 1980s debt crisis, two types of investments were designed
to augment productivity and diversification of production. The first
type was based on large capital requirements. To be successful with the
 Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State 41

IMF–World Bank SSAP policies implies a large land area, high capital
investment, and intensive use of agrochemicals, modern techniques,
and technologies. This necessarily means good access to credit, tech-
nology, and marketing. Coffee, banana, beef cattle, and non-traditional
agro exports (pineapples, oranges, lemons) are capital-intensive pro-
grams directed at agricultural entrepreneurs with sufficient resources
to invest in agribusinesses.
According to Alonso Ramírez and Tirso Maldonado (1988), from
Costa Rica’s Neotropical Foundation, the land appropriation policy
accelerated the concentration of land into large commercial farms and
was responsible for an increase in the number of rural landless Costa
Ricans. The increase in export production and revenue was based on the
application of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Accord-
ing to Ramirez and Maldonado (1988, p. 56), between 1981 and 1984,
Costa Rica consumed 2,251,400 metric tons of fertilizers; in 1985, pes-
ticide imports increased to 12 million kilograms; and by 1988, imports
had decreased to 8.4 million kilograms owing to an increase in internal
production. In 1984, the annual average application of pesticides was
4 kilograms per hectare and 139 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare in the
crop area in La Fortuna, Alajuela.
Since the Green Revolution (beginning in 1970), the use of chemical
fertilizers on coffee and banana plantations has been an integral com-
ponent of state programs aimed at intensifying agriculture. Table 1.2
shows the increase in productivity of coffee and bananas per hectare.
Between 1955 and 1984, coffee productivity increased by 39% while
banana productivity increased by almost 47%.
The rise of agro-industry productivity was as follows: Between 1957
and 1963, the agriculture sector grew by 4.3%; between 1963 and 1973,
by 7.1%; and between 1973 and 1985, by 2.3% (A. Ramirez & Maldonado,
1988) (p. 47).

Table 1.2 Average Productivity of Coffee and Banana per

Hectare, in Metric Tons

Years

Crop 1955 1963 1973 1984

Coffee 2.3 3.6 4.7 5.9

Banana 20.3 22.7 34.6 43.6

Source: Ramirez & Maldonado, 1988, (p. 50).

42 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

In 1985, 9.4% of the national territory was used for agriculture. A total
of 2.4% of land was used to grow coffee, 0.8% for sugar cane, 0.6% for
banana, 3.3% in annual cultivation, and 2.3% in other types of culti-
vation. Cattle-raising land occupied 32%, while 5.6% was in charrales
(abandoned pastures where forest regeneration occurs naturally) (Que-
sada, 1990, p. 20). The remaining 45.9% of land was composed of forest,
volcanoes and other nonresidential land areas.
Land seizures by foreign and local businesses deeply divided Costa
Rican society over the issues of land control and power. In 1973, land
concentration in farms of five hectares accounted for 45.8% of the total
and occupied 1.9% of the surface. Large farms of five hundred hectares
accounted for 1% and occupied 36% of the total surface area; in 1984,
44.4% of the first farms occupied 2.4%, while the latter accounted for
0.7% of the farms and occupied 27% of the surface (A. Ramirez & Mal-
donado, 1988 (p. 53). The application of neoliberal policies resulted in
further land concentration among just a few landowners. For instance,
in 1996, excluding the owners of one hectare of land or less, landown-
ers with less than one hundred hectares controlled a very small part of
the national territory, while few owners with more than one hundred
hectares owned more than half of the country’s territory (PEN, 1996).
In 1997, the US multinational corporation United Fruit (now Chiquita
Brand International), which covered the southern part of the country
with banana plantations, became the largest export producer in the
country (Costa Rica, Datos e indicadores básicos, 1998). Coffee repre-
sented the second most important crop.
The second type of investment in the wake of the 1980s debt crisis
was based on small loans. Credit was directed to thousands of peasant
families living on small farms (fincas) or in squatter zones (asentamientos
humanos), barely able to eke out a livelihood. Before implementation of
IMF and World Bank policies, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock
(Conservation) supported cash cropping among peasants. With the new
policy, peasants were urged to intensify productivity through the use of
agrochemicals, which increased production costs. They began to take
out heavy loans at high interest rates to expand their plantations. As
loans are productive loans, debt must be paid with revenue from subse-
quent harvests. As a result, they became more dependent on the politics
of international agriculture. The bank loans rested on the decisions of
Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería (MAG) agronomists who con-
trolled the peasants’ land. Agronomists forced peasants to use specific
fertilizers and specific pesticides in the production process and forced
 Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State 43

the sale of harvests to repay the loans. All these precautions were taken
to ensure the repayment of the loans. Between 1980 and 1990, the land
dedicated to basic food staples (maize, beans, and rice) increased by only
5%, although this was when Costa Rica had one of the highest rates of
population growth in Latin America (Brockett, 1988).

Women’s Unwaged and Waged Labour

In a country like Costa Rica, where historically the majority of the popu-
lation lived in rural areas (51% in 1998), livelihoods depended directly
on access to nature.
Table 1.3 shows that in rural areas, men have outnumbered women
over the past thirty years, mainly because men worked in agriculture
and owned the farms. Women were legally barred from owning farm-
land and were prone to leave the area to find jobs elsewhere. Women’s
work in the rural areas of Costa Rica was frequently linked to produc-
tion for family consumption, food security, and working without salary
at their husbands’ farms because there is no marital title to land, and not
for the market. Therefore, most rural women had no salary, so that there
are no figures reflecting the length of their workday or their participa-
tion in agricultural activities (T. Valdes & E. Gomariz, 1995).
Grettel Baldizán and Francisco Guido Cruz (1987) demonstrate that
in general during the 1980s, rural women’s labour could be divided
into three main areas: (a) domestic workers coping with a lack of basic
services, such as treated water, electricity and toilets, and child care and
health care; (b) agricultural workers, maintaining the subsistence fam-
ily unit while men went to work for a salary outside the home and/
or outside the area, significantly increasing women’s workday; and (c)
seasonal agricultural salaried workers, with no social or economic ben-
efits, and at a lower salary than men’s.
In 1985, the General Direction of Women and Family, a government
institution cited in Cruz Ramirez et al.(1988), reported that close to
60% of rural women earned salaries less than the legal minimum,
and 34% earned less than half of the minimum salary. These kinds
of jobs were generated at the cost of subsistence agriculture, which
provided food security to all. Despite women’s contributions to both
subsistence agricultural production and market production, they
were unrecognized labourers. The bulk of work performed by women
is overlooked, and women’s productivity is assumed to be low.
According to Marilyn Waring (1988), women’s exclusion is achieved
44 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 1.3 Sex Ratios of Costa Rica’s Rural Population (Women per 100 Men), 1970–2005

1970− 1980– 1990–

Year 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2000 2000 2000
(Percentage change)
91 91 91 91 92 92 92 92 0.38 0.39 0.22

Source: CELADE/CEPAL 1999a, cited in Davis, 2003.

by making women’s contribution to subsistence production and to

market production invisible, and by leaving the negative impact of
economic development and growth on women unrecognized and
unrecorded.
The inequality crisis faced by Costa Rican women became recognized
during the debt crisis (Cruz Ramirez et al., 1988). To confront women’s
perception of growing poverty, the Arias administration created the
Women’s National Program. This program was aimed to incorporate
women into the production process. However, training programs only
included women who were close to the leaders and the activities were
limited to the traditional role of cooking, sewing, and cleaning. In real-
ity, no real policy of job creation for women was implemented. The eco-
nomic crisis pushed women outside the household anyway, looking for
jobs to earn an income.
As Table 1.4 shows, since 1980 women’s participation in rural eco-
nomic activity has become more visible. It increased from 13% in 1980
to 21% in 2000, but the proportion of women reported is probably lower
than it was in reality due to the underreporting of women’s activity in
rural areas and given that their work also includes family subsistence
production.

Changes in Productive Structures and in Livelihoods

By 1984, the agro-export model had deregulated the traditional instru-

ments that protected agriculture. The agricultural policy of deregula-
tion was developed expressly for export purposes, consequently it dis-
couraged subsistence agriculture for family consumption, and peasants
restricted their own food security to a very few varieties also in demand
on the international market. Very few peasants produced vegetables
for their own family’s consumption and the weekly market (feria). As
a result, hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables started to disap-
 Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State 45

Table 1.4 Evolution of Rural Economically Active Population in Costa Rica: Activity Rates
by Sex (per 100 population aged 10 years and over), 1980–2000

1980–2000
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 (% change)

Males 78 79 79 78 78 78 −0.17
Females 13 14 17 19 21 24 68.98

Source: CELADE/CEPAL 1999b, cited in Davis, 2003.

pear. Biodiversity in general, biodiversity for agricultural production,

and food security have been decimated, magnifying not only the pov-
erty of the peasants but of the ecological environment itself.
Since 1990, a new feature appeared in the employment profile: the ser-
vice sector. It was accompanied by a tendency towards self-employment
and waged work in small businesses and microenterprises. These waged
jobs have usually been low paid and insecure, representing what Maria
Mies (1986) describes as the housewifization of labour. Since 1998, due
to the changes forced in economic production, MAG agronomists were
replaced by the Consejo Nacional de Producción (CNP) (National Pro-
duction Council), and a Productive Reconversion Program (PRP) was
created under Law No. 7742. The PRP’s goal was to increase the competi-
tiveness of small- and medium-sized peasant farmers in the international
market through the creation of new enterprises and the modernization of
the old ones through the incorporation of modern technology. The pro-
ducers of pineapple, tropical flowers, heart of palm, ginger, medicinal
plants, ornamental plants, and foliage are in this category of enterprise.
Some of these are classified as “organic agriculture” (Gonzalez, 1998).
With these policies in place, Table 1.5 shows how Costa Rica changed its
economic structure, from agricultural producer to service provider.
In 1999, there were also marked differences between women’s
employment and men’s employment at all levels of the job structure.
Women became salaried workers in the service sector, representing
42.0% of such workers. If services are added to the 24.6% that com-
merce, hotels, and restaurants represent, working women constituted
66.6% in that sector. On the men’s side, 11.6% worked in services; 42.9%
worked in agriculture and 12.7% worked in industry. In the rural areas,
women’s and men’s wages remained both depressed and unregulated.
With depressed wages in the rural areas, having a job or being employed
does not necessarily ensure that people can cover their basic needs.
46 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 1.5 Distribution of the Rural Economically Active Population in Costa Rica, by Sex
and Sector, 1999

Commerce, Services
hotels, & (personal, public,
Country/Sector Agriculture Industry restaurants and social) Other

Females 9.9 19.5 24.6 42.0 4.0

Males 42.9 12.7 12.8 11.6 19.9

Source: CEPAL (2002b), cited in Davis, 2003, based on special tabulations of national
household surveys.

Environmental Impacts

As agriculture is the main source of Costa Rica’s income, it has orga-

nized the country’s social relations but has created major environmen-
tal impacts. Fundación Neotrópica (the Neotropical Foundation) (A.
Ramirez & Maldonado, 1988) argues that deforestation was caused
by the expansion of commercial agricultural areas to produce coffee,
bananas, and sugar cane, and to develop cattle ranching. In addition,
commercial logging to exploit a few selected species accelerated defor-
estation. The timber industry flourished, producing wood for both
export and local consumption. In the process of extracting key species, a
large number of non-commercial trees and plants were destroyed, while
at the same time legislation promoted tree clearing as a mechanism to
enable access to land property titles. This legislation included the Law
of Private Possession (Ley de Informaciones Posesorias No. 139); and
the Law of Land and Colonization (Ley de Tierras y Colonización No.
2825). Application of the law was in the hands of the Agrarian Develop-
ment Institute (Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario), or IDA.
The Neotropical Foundation also points out that the repayment of the
debt, between 1981 and 1985, required high levels of pesticide and fertil-
izer application to increase agricultural productivity. With the expansion
of export agriculture, the results of applying chemicals are far-reaching,
destroying watersheds and spreading the effects of deforestation to
other areas, because runoff fouls waterways and increases flooding.
Guha and Martínez-Alier (1997) argue that the social and environ-
mental costs of the production of coffee, banana, sugar cane, and cattle
cannot be integrated into the price of export products. In other words,
they represent an ecological subsidy to the international market. These
 Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State 47

authors claim that the recent ecological history of Costa Rica must be
interpreted as a history of ecological dependence and exporting natural
capital. From an ecological point of view, there is no value brought to
Costa Rica by the export of bananas, coffee, sugar cane, and meat. Cash-
crop exports include not only solar energy captured through photosyn-
thesis but soil nutrients as well. Consequently, Costa Rican export-
oriented production subsidizes the international market but destroys
the biomass of local communities, at great social and environmental
cost to local inhabitants. Only a very few benefit. According to Vega
Carballo (1992), by 1990, a small number of families from the Central
Urban Area monopolized the national income, while controlling the
state apparatus, financial capital, bonds market, investments and trans-
fer of credit, information communication technology, and tourism.

Conclusion

Costa Rican governments did not undergo military coups, or military

and civil dictatorships, as elsewhere in South America, to impose neo-
liberal policies. USAID funds arrived to use Costa Rica’s geopolitical
location for the Cold War in Nicaragua, as well as to implement a neo-
liberal policy. These policies have changed the role of the state, from
being a public accumulator and organizer to a supporter of interna-
tional private accumulation, and reoriented the economy towards non-
traditional export agriculture for international markets. Non-traditional
export agriculture increased dependence on activities related to natural
resources extraction and increased the use of high input agriculture
applications derived from the Green Revolution, leading to the inten-
sive use of soils and increased deforestation.
This model, by concentrating property and wealth among a few
landowners, has had tremendous implications for Costa Rican society.
Meanwhile, peasants face international markets that define their pres-
ent and future possibilities. In these conditions, peasants’ male chil-
dren, who eventually might own the farm, remain there to engage in
non-traditional agriculture, while their daughters go to the city to look
for work in the service sector. Chapter 2 shows in detail how this neo-
liberal political economy produced its political ecology.
2 Political Ecology, Debt-for-Nature, and
National Conservation Areas

The political ecology of the sustainable development framework proposes

to address the debt and the environmental crises by expanding natural and
human capital through marketing tropical nature and using poorly paid
and unwaged work for capital accumulation. Sustainable development is
a process whereby the natural resources base is not allowed to deteriorate.
During the 1980s, the Costa Rican state effectively accommodated itself
into this new framework, while USAID funds manufactured the political
ecology of the country and pressured local powers to share geopolitical
and commercial interests with transnational corporations. USAID took
control of Costa Rica’s economy, and biologists took control of its ecology.
Since then, debt-for-nature exchanges directed Costa Rica’s ecology into
the hands of private and commercial enterprises. Since 1992, USAID and
the WWF have portrayed Costa Rica as a poster child of economic growth
and environmentalism in the so-called underdeveloped world.
Chapter 2 uses the Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature exchange to begin
the analysis of sustainable development. Within this framework, the stated
aim of Canadian debt-for-nature investment in Costa Rica is to develop
a model of environmental management that reduces poverty and envi-
ronmental degradation. This is done through funding the activities of two
non-governmental organizations, or NGOs: the Costa Rican National Insti-
tute of Biodiversity (INBio) and World Wildlife Fund-Canada (WWF-C).

Neoliberal Political Ecology

During the debt crisis, throughout the decade of the 1980s, indebtedness
was used by the United States to impose USAID as a direct agent in the
political economy and ecology of Costa Rica. USAID, as a Costa Rican
parallel state, was inspired by the World Commission on Environment
 The National System of Conservation Areas 49

Table 2.1 Costa Rica’s External Debt and Debt Service (in US$ million), 1980–1996

Year 1980 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

Total External Debt 2.744 3.756 4.021 3.933 3.863 3.905 3.793 3.454
Debt Service 335 440 376 513 527 462 576 541

Source: World Bank, (n.d.).

and Development, or the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Envi-

ronment and Development, 1987) to organize a conference with the title
Estrategia de Conservación para el Desarrollo Sostenible de Costa Rica
(ECODES) (Conservation Strategy for Sustainable Development) (Que-
sada, 1990), held in October 1988, during the Arias administration. “The
project was consolidated thanks to the economic support and cooperation
provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN),
the World Wildlife Fund (WWF-US), the Conservation Foundation, Con-
servation International, The Nature Conservancy” (Quesada, 1990, p. v),
and local organizations. The purpose of ECODES was to evaluate past
economic development strategies and to propose new ones.
At the centre of the discussion was the financial obligation of Costa
Rica, with a population of 2.6 million (in 1985). Debt service represented
around 60% of the total exports. Table 2.1 shows a debt approaching
$3.5 billion by 1990, one of the highest per capita external debts in the
world. At that time, selling debt at high interest rates was a major source
of profit for the financial services industry.
Carlos Quesada (1990), president of the ECODES conference, reported
that government organizations, such as the then Ministry of Natural
Resources, Energy and Mines (MIRENEM), recognized deforestation
as the price imposed by development and modernization. MIRENEM
showed that from 1970 to 1980, Costa Rica had one of the highest defores-
tation rates in the world: from 36,000 hectares per year in the 1950s to an
average of fifty thousand hectares of old-growth trees in the 1980s (p. 43).
Biologist Christopher Vaughan, head of the World Wildlife Fund in the
United States, while discussing Costa Rica’s sustainable development
programs, emphasized the role of human population growth and peas-
ants in hastening environmental degradation (C. Vaughan, 1988). He
defended the case that local biodiversity would be seriously threatened
if the ecological and social landscapes were not transformed into conser-
vation areas. For instance, he notes that Costa Rica had more than 8,000
species of vascular plants, 2,000 orchids, 1,239 species of butterflies, 205
mammals, and 850 different kinds of birds (p. 5). Carlos Quesada (1990)
50 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

informs that Vaughan also estimates that between 1940 and 1977, the for-
ested habitat for twenty-eight species of wildlife in the process of extinc-
tion was reduced by 40%; and by 1983, these species had only an average
of 28% of their natural habitat (pp. 50–51).
Participants of ECODES recognized that development aimed at eco-
nomic growth and capital accumulation had caused the Costa Rica’s
debt crisis, increasing levels of poverty, dispossession, deforestation,
and water poisoning. Nevertheless, economic growth for capital accu-
mulation was offered as a cure, in the form of sustainable development.
Sustainable development, like economic development, was supposed
to bring wealth, progress, social achievements, and environmental pro-
tection standards, while also enabling debt repayment.
During the ECODES conference, a reconfiguration of Costa Rica’s
territory through neoliberal conservationist concepts of enclosure
and preservation prevailed as top priorities. Quesada reported that
at ECODES, the debates concerned how to create and maintain con-
servation areas. In the end, participants agreed that “an effective way
to achieve national unification and consolidation of existing protected
areas is the creation of the National System of Conservation Areas
(SINAC) under the supervision of the Ministry of Natural Resources,
Energy and Mines. As reported by the Directorate of National Parks,
SINAC will require approximately $160 million for its operation. [This
will be obtained] through a National Conservation Fund, and major
resources will be obtained through donations from friendly countries
and international organizations” (Quesada 1990, p. 48).
The conservation area model in Costa Rica was not new (PEN, 1996).1
Within these areas, local communities were permitted to hunt, gather,
and fish. However, the ECODES conference marks the point when the
conservation model and the control and management of these areas
under the sustainable development framework were extended to incor-
porate new international actors.
A megaproject, the Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservación
(SINAC) (National System of Conservation Areas), was designed by
linking three ministries: Forestry, National Parks, and Wildlife.

SINAC: The National System of Conservation Areas

Through the creation of SINAC, the conservation area model was

implemented to manage the country’s wildlife and biodiversity. SINAC
divided the country into eleven conservation areas: Guanacaste, Arenal-
Tempisque, Arenal-Tilaran, Arenal-Huetar Norte, Cordillera Volcánica
 The National System of Conservation Areas 51

Central, Pacífico Central, Tortuguero, La Amistad Caribe, La Amistad

Pacifico, Osa, and Isla del Coco. The national park system was organized
into public areas, including twenty-five national parks, eight biological
reserves, of wetlands or mangroves, two national monuments, and two
natural reserves. It was also divided into privately owned areas that
include thirty-two protected zones, eleven forest reserves, fifty-eight
wildlife refuges, and twelve other categories in which farms have been
subdivided. In 2007, the total size of public and private conservation
areas was about 1.3 million hectares. Private land remains private prop-
erty but is subject to conservation restrictions on land use (PEN, 2007,
p. 403). As the organization responsible for directing sustainable natu-
ral resources in Costa Rica, SINAC’s goal was to act as policymaker
and planner. Hence, SINAC created Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía
(MINAE) (the Ministry of Environment and Energy), later rechristened
as Ministerio del Ambiente Energía y Telecomunicaciones (MINAET),
with offices in each conservation area.2 MINAE was set up to manage
the conservation areas through these regional offices and to set poli-
cies for the use of energy, natural resources, mines, and water. SINAC’s
eleven conservation areas are shown in Figure 2.1.
New organizations for environmental management were created: the
Consejo Nacional Ambiental (National Environmental Council), whose
institutional mandate is unclear; the Secretaría Técnica Nacional Ambi-
ental (National Environmental Technical Secretariat), which conducts
environmental impact evaluations of productive activities; the Oficina
del Contralor Ambiental (Environmental Inspector’s Office), which
receives complaints on such things as poor garbage disposal and tree
cutting without permit; the Tribunal Ambiental Administrativo (Envi-
ronmental Administrative Tribunal), which created a price system for
environmental damage; and the Consejos Regionales Ambientales
(Regional Environmental Councils), whose institutional purpose is also
unclear. The establishment of the new conservation areas resulted in the
enclosure of 24.8 % of the national territory by 1996 (PEN, 1996, p. 120);
this figure had increased to 26.3% by 2007 (PEN, 2007, p. 245), and to
28.5% by 2009 (PEN, 2010, p. 194).
The ECODES conference also decided that sustainable development
was to be achieved through the backing of the Costa Rican state, with
debt-for-nature investment. To obtain international money, USAID
and the WWF have promoted Costa Rica as a successful example of
sustainable development. USAID supported Asociación Costarricence
para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (the Costa Rican Association
for the Conservation of Nature), and Centro Científico Tropical (the
52 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Figure 2.1 Costa Rican National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC)

(Isla, 2000)
 The National System of Conservation Areas 53

Centre for Tropical Science); while the WWF and other private multi-
national corporations (e.g., Bayer, Merck, and Sharp) have provided
money for MINAE’s operational costs (E. Mora, 1993). As a result,
at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil, Costa Rica was among the coun-
tries that received an international award for its conservation policies
(Boza, 1993).
In 1999, more than ten years after ECODES, I interviewed its for-
mer president Carlos Quesada, then director of the Sustainable Devel-
opment Research Centre based in San José, Costa Rica. He criticizes
ECODES’s framework: “In the neo-liberal monetarist paradigm, civil
society, represented by NGOs, is part of a discourse formulated out-
side Costa Rica with the goal of reducing the state’s capacity to orga-
nize itself as a country” (C. Quesada, personal communication, August
1999). Quesada suggests that in the name of conservation, a whole range
of foreign actors had become authorities on Costa Rica. Eduardo Mora
(1994), editor of the journal Environmental Sciences, published by the
National University of Costa Rica, also criticizes ECODES.. He argues
that although economic development was supposed to have become
sustainable development by definition, economic development con-
tinued to determine what needed environmental protection. In other
words, the cart preceded the horse. Mora critically appraises the sus-
tainable development framework for structuring conservation around
specialized institutions to plan, organize, and order the relationship
between society and nature; selected beautiful scenery, wildlife species,
and natural resources as service providers; and exploitation of the com-
munities themselves. Mora indicates that in the ECODES framework,
environmental protection is a by-product of economic development,
and economic development is at risk if natural resources or ecosystems
collapse. Succinctly, environmental protection is seen as important only
if it ensures profit; it is not about resource protection.

Debt-for-Nature Exchanges

As previously noted, one result of the 1988 ECODES conference was

the setting up of national and global partnerships for public-private
land conservation. These global partners established a management
system in the conservation areas. The protection of natural resources
through central management is very costly, because it involves acquir-
ing land, hiring personnel to protect and control areas, and training
staff to oversee administration and infrastructure. As a result, northern
54 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

powers, for example, USAID and involved NGOs, decided that direct
donations by international institutions, as well as debt-for-nature
exchanges, would fund both public and private conservation projects.
From the management perspective, debt-for-nature exchanges are one
way of getting the price right (see the introduction to this book). Follow-
ing the Earth Summit in 1992, debt-for-nature exchanges, led by the
World Bank, became a financial mechanism to reduce the burden of
third world countries (TWCs), while opening new areas to environ-
mental management.
Debt-for-nature exchanges, in which debt instruments held by credi-
tors such as commercial banks, and governments, are exchanged for
natural resources, are core mechanisms of sustainable development.
Supporters of debt-for-nature exchanges argue that they address both
debt in poor countries and environmental crises. This approach was
supported by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO, 1991) and the IMF (Asiedu-Akrofi, 1991), and
was favoured by core countries (United States) and semi-periphery
countries (Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom), devel-
opment agencies such as the Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA, 1992), and many environmental NGOs, such as Con-
servation International (CI, 1991). These nations, agencies, and insti-
tutions developed the policy whereby, in times of environmental and
development crises, the national-level agencies would be superseded
by international agencies. Currently, debt-for-nature exchange contin-
ues to be central in the Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TFC) which is
the political ecology of sustainable development (Sheikh, 2007, 2010).
In Costa Rica, there have been two generations of debt-for-nature
swaps. The first generation started in 1987 when Costa Rica’s debts
were sold by commercial banks in the secondary market at discounts
of up to 70%. Non-governmental organizations or other foreign orga-
nizations purchased highly discounted foreign debt bonds in this sec-
ondary market and then presented these bonds to Costa Rica, which
committed itself to allocating resources to finance ecological projects.
In such swaps, Costa Rica channeled resources in local currency, bonds
or cash, corresponding to all or a major portion of the original value of
the debt in foreign currency to the ngos or other foreign organizations
(Conservation International, 1991; Cuoto Soarez, 1992). An example of
this type of swap is the Guanacaste Conservation Area (GCA). Its major
funding came from debt-for-nature swaps. GCA is managed as a public-
private partnership between MINAE (the Costa Rican government)
 The National System of Conservation Areas 55

and the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF) directed

by biologist Dr. Daniel Janzen, an NGO established in the United States.
Second-generation debt-for-nature swaps started in the 1990s.
They became a financial mechanism to exchange loans for sustain-
able development. The second-generation debt-for-nature initiatives
are not typical swaps because there is no transaction of debts (buying
in the secondary market) and there are no intermediary organizations
(donors and brokers). The transaction is a bilateral one between a cred-
itor government and a debtor government whose central bank creates
debt-for-nature money. Signatory governments donate the value of
the debt to their environmental organizations to promote sustainable
development. The 1995 Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swap,
detailed in this book, is an example of this kind of swap agreement.

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)

The sustainable development discourse developed by the World Bank

argued that environmental issues are international, part of the global
economic rationale, which means that individual states lose their
decision-making power over use of their own territories. In 1988, dur-
ing the Conservation Strategy for Sustainable Development conference
(ECODES), the duties of the Costa Rican government were handed
over to environmental NGOs, most of them biologists obsessed with
the natural limits to growth, thereby making them responsible for the
establishment and guardianship of the conservation areas. In Costa
Rica, three NGOs became central actors in international negotiations to
manage the conservation areas: the Natural Parks Foundation, which
focused on national park creation and maintenance; INBio, a laboratory
for biodiversity collection; and the Neotropical Foundation, dedicated
to resource management and sustainable development. Organized
as private for-profit enterprises, these NGOs managed international
donations for environmental programs with the authorization of the
government. Thus, they were central to most commercial debt-swap
transactions (Hitz, 1989).
Behind the changes in environmental policies rest structural changes
in the nature of governance and class formation. Regarding the nature
of governance, USAID during the ECODES conference created envi-
ronmental experts (biologists grouped in environmental NGOs) and
markets to facilitate conditions for capital accumulation. It generated
a sustainable development framework of political ecology in which
56 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

nature is conceived of as natural capital. As natural capital, innovations

in nature happen to produce new kinds of markets based on genetics,
forests, scenery, medicinal plants, and mountains, among other inno-
vations not discussed in this book. To spark economic growth, Costa
Rican nature became natural capital, and rural women, peasants, and
Indigenous people became human capital. As a result, Costa Rica
became the centre of natural and human capital extension proposed
by the World Bank.
Costa Rica also assisted in the development of a new class formation
around the management of nature and the construction of sustainable
development. The basis of class changed from production to service,
managing work and flows of capital. A privileged relationship to state
power played a central role in controlling large segments of public
assets, particularly nature. These assets freely passed into the private
domain of NGOs, securing their tremendous economic power. USAID
and WWF-US played central roles in this new class configuration as
they put into action their transnational influence over global affairs and
mobilized to sell the image of Costa Rica as an environmental state. Not
coincidentally, the greening of the state also allowed fast fortunes to be
made.

Debt-for-Nature Exchange with Canada

The debt-for-nature investment agreement between Canada and Costa

Rica is a bilateral agreement, signed in May 1995. This exchange is the
result of Costa Rica using Official Development Aid Loan Agreements
with Canada for three lines of credit to purchase fertilizers between
1983 and 1985 (Government of Canada & Government of Costa Rica,
1995). Costa Rican economic development during the 1980s debt crisis
focused on increasing revenue from agriculture and cattle ranching,
and led to the application of the highest rate of fertilizers in Latin
America.
By 1995, as Costa Rica’s debt was bargain priced in the second-
ary market, Canada took steps to obtain parliamentary approval
to reduce the portion of the debt owed to Canada by 50%. A Costa
Rica-Canada trust fund for biodiversity (FIDEICOMMISSA) was
created to receive Costa Rica’s payment in local currency (colónes)
for the equivalent of approximately Can$11.36 million, which retired
50% of Costa Rica’s outstanding debt to the Canadian government
 The National System of Conservation Areas 57

(Government of Canada & Government of Costa Rica, 1995). This

meant that half of the debt was forgiven. The Canadian and Costa
Rican governments were not allowed by the designers of the policy to
receive the debt titles directly; they were to be donated to the so-called
environmental NGOs (ENGOs) that became the government’s credi-
tor. The FIDEICOMMISSA funds resulting from the Canada-Costa
Rica debt-for-nature investment were channeled to the Arenal-Tilaran Con-
servation Area (ACA-Tilaran), co-directed by the Canadian chapter of
the World Wildlife Fund, the creditor NGO, and by the Costa Rican
National Biodiversity Institute (INBio), the debtor NGO.
Half of the money went to ACA-Tilaran, which in 1995 covered
940,000 hectares (MINAE, 1993); in 1998 it covered 250,561.5 hectares
(M.E. Mora, 1998 , p. 1) and was administered by WWF-C and Costa Rica’s
Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE). The memorandum of
understanding between Canada and Costa Rica, Stage II, is based on an
agreement between MINAE, the Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA), and WWF-C. The mission of CIDA in the Arenal Project
was to provide technical and financial support to SINAC, to organize the
management of nature and the establishment of MINAE regional offices
(Garcia & Tremblay, 1997, p. 7). The other half of the money went to
INBio’s Biodiversity Prospecting Division, the main objective of which
is the systematic search for new sources of chemical compounds, genes,
proteins, micro- and macro-organisms, and other forms of biodiversity
that may be of commercial interest. The division identifies opportuni-
ties to profit from products and services that originate from biodiversity
resources, including, for example, new agricultural or pharmaceutical
products.

World Wildlife Fund-Canada

The World Wildlife Fund-Canada has played a crucial role in green-

ing the Costa Rican state. Since 1989, WWF-C has been involved in
genetic research at the privately owned Monteverde Cloud Forest
Reserve (MCFR). It is one of the most important protected areas and
research establishments in Costa Rica. MCFR started in the 1960s, when
a Quaker community set up a forest reserve on the mountaintop to pro-
tect a water spring for its dairy herds. In 1975, MCFR joined another
private reserve, the Tropical Science Centre (TSC), and began by man-
aging 10,500 hectares in Monteverde. In 1988, MCFR began to purchase
58 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Figure 2.2 NGOs in Canada-Costa Rica’s debt-for-nature (Isla, 2000)

 The National System of Conservation Areas 59

additional lands financed by donations from children’s schools, initially

from Sweden and eventually from more than forty countries. Now,
MCFR is the largest private reserve in Central America, located within
the large protected area of ACA-Tilaran, where WWF-C established its
genetics research.
In 1991, the event that defined the future of WWF-C in Costa Rica,
already working in the area, was the assignation to the ACA-Tilaran of
the protection and preservation of a dam and a hydroelectric plant con-
structed in the Arenal Reservoir (Lago Arenal), an artificial lake with an
area of 87.2 square kilometres. This reservoir is central to the country and
particularly to the Costa Rican Hydro-Electric Institute. The ACA-Tilaran
is, in fact, considered the energy heart of Costa Rica because of its electri-
cal projects, including the Arenal Sandillal Hydro-Electric Project and the
Arenal Tempisque Irrigation Project. It also hosts the Miravalles geother-
mal project, Aeolian wind projects such as Plantas Eolicas S.A. in Ranchi-
tos de Tilaran, Aeroenergia S.A. in Tejona de Tilaran, and Molinos de
Viento Arenal S.A. (MOVASA) in Tierras Morenas de Tilaran. How these
electrical projects relate to WWF-C is not an issue addressed in this book.
Since 1991, CIDA has covered the operating costs of WWF-C in ACA-
Tilaran. The aim of the project, according to WWF-C, was to protect the
area from further environmental degradation, to help stabilize land use by
strengthening natural resource management capacities, and to improve
the quality of life of the Costa Rican people (Tremblay & Malenfant, 1996a,
pp. 9, 10, 11). In ACA-Tilaran, the management strategy was called “the
Land Plan” (MIRENEM, 1993), described as the “science of nature,” and
was an instrument for regulating land access and use.
Vandana Shiva (1989), an ecofeminist scholar, exposes this science as
presenting reductionist ontological assumptions, based on uniformity,
which reduces complex ecosystems to a single component, and a single
component to a single function; separability, in which the object of study
is isolated from its natural surroundings, from its relationship with other
objects, and from the observer; and experts and specialists, who are con-
sidered to be the only legitimate knowledge seekers and justifiers. Mean-
while, nonexperts – rural women, peasants, and Indigenous people – are
deprived of the right both to access knowledge and to judge claims made
on their behalf (pp. 22, 23). Shiva concludes that the rise of the reductionist
paradigm of science is related to the destruction of the knowledge of non-
Western cultures, which she called “maldevelopment” (p. 22). Malde-
velopment “is the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected and
interdependent systems, which sets in motion a process of exploitation,
60 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

inequality, injustice and violence” (p. 6). The ultimate reductionism is

achieved when nature is linked with a view of economic activity in which
money is the only gauge of value and wealth.

WWF-C and Sustainable Development

WWF-C is qualified as a conservationist organization, and in 1998 biol-

ogist Claude Tremblay, the director of WWF-C in Costa Rica had this
definition of sustainable development:

For sustainable development I understand the conservation of nature, the

use and conservation of the natural resources in a way that maintains
the economic capacity of the finca (farm), the community, the enterprise,
the cooperative and the country. In this concept the richness of biodiver-
sity and economic prospecting are fundamental ingredients. Biodiversity
must be seen as a scenic value for tourism, and as an area for protection,
for academic research, and for economic prospecting. The sustainable
management of animals, micro-insects, plants, etc. must be useful for
the economic activity that the market requires. The market is an impor-
tant element to consider in the protection of wildlife and in the need to
give them a use and sustainable management, particularly considering
the demographic pressure and the globalization elements that in the eco-
nomic sphere polarize the situation between rich, poor and destitute.
(C. Tremblay, personal communication, July 1998)

Tremblay advocates the classical capitalist patriarchal theory of eco-

nomic growth in which the earth and nature fail to provide enough for
all, and economic growth is the only way to escape scarcity. The market
is the central element in his definition of sustainable development. This
paradigm maintains that if markets are used in conjunction with prop-
erty rights systems, the world will never run out of minerals or fossil
fuels, although they may well become so expensive that few people
will be able to afford them. In this framework, ecological resources are
treated as substitutable, and extinction of a resource is not a problem as
the economy accepts the substitution. Current human preferences and
market forces determine the value(s) of natural resources. As the direc-
tor further notes:

The challenge is how to manage the balance between conservation and

usufruct [i.e., the right to enjoy the use of another’s property]. If we just
take into account the protection of the resources [the historical vision of the
 The National System of Conservation Areas 61

environmental movement] we are in a deadlock situation, unable to think

of the future, of how we can sensitize others about the existence of poor
populations living in highly risky environments. In addition, how can
we offer to poor populations eco-friendly economic opportunities in the
production of their fincas, cooperatives, and enterprises? With the concept
of sustainable development, the economic and the socio-organizational
dimensions of life are finally brought together in an optimal way. (C.
Tremblay, personal communication, July 1998)

The WWF-C vision of sustainable development sets out two concepts

of nature management expressing market criteria. First, nature has a
price; this view supports the privatization of enormous sections of the
land and assumes that natural resources can be freely appropriated up
to the limits of their availability, and waste and excess outputs from
economic production processes can be assimilated by the environment
without affecting the production processes themselves. Second, the mar-
ket is considered to be the best organizer of social and environmental
relations. This position holds that the maximization of benefits, growth,
and capital accumulation will minimize the impact of the transactions
on nature itself. The WWF-C vision of sustainable development mobi-
lizes local groups in favour of a service economy where scenery is sold
for ecotourism, and forests are promoted as carbon credits; where col-
lectively organized local knowledge is used to initiate the collection of
biodiversity or bioprospecting. Further, the WWF-C director noted that
ACA-Tilaran intended to establish a model of environmental manage-
ment that could be reproduced in other conservation areas and around
the world (C. Tremblay, personal communication, July 1998).
This view ignores how economic growth leads to ecological degrada-
tion when growth means that more and more raw materials and energy
are being used, and hence more and more waste is being produced. It fails
to address the structural conditions shaping the ecological crisis, such as
capitalism (Foster, 1999), industrialization (Sachs, 1999), economic growth
(Daly & Cobb, 1994), inequality (Mies, 1986), and the asymmetric power
relations in the labour market, which are “rapaciously dependent on the
resources and labour of an ‘underdeveloped Other’” (Salleh, 1997, p. 24).

INBio

The National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica, INBio, was established

on 24 October 1989. It is a Costa Rican NGO with fifteen shareholders,
most of them high-level functionaries in the Costa Rican government.
62 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Under the neoliberal framework, these functionaries were able to

transfer to INBio the right to sell the biological resources that belonged
to the nation and to the local communities. As a transnational project,
INBio was supported by national and international scientific interest
groups, by the private sector, and by the Costa Rican government. In
1994, it established a partnership with the Ministry of Environment and
Energy (MINAE) to collect samples of plants and animals from the con-
servation areas for interested industries. It also established a partnership
with WWF-C, and as part of the Costa Rica’s debt-for-nature arrangement
with Canada, detailed previously, WWF-C became a member of INBio’s
board of directors. INBio’s main objective was to provide the country with
research and development in the areas of biotechnology and chemistry of
the rainforest by prospecting for industrial products of high value.
To organize the extraction, exploitation, and control of biodiversity from
the conservation areas, INBio created four divisions. The Inventory Divi-
sion generates properly identified reference collections and field guides,
provides electronic identification services that offer knowledge of the
organisms’ natural history, and documents their distribution throughout
the national territory. The Information Dissemination Division promotes
the commercial possibilities of conservation areas, trains staff, produces
field guides and other types of biodiversity literature, and holds national
and international workshops. The Information Management Division
develops biodiversity software to help companies find commercial uses
for the medicinal and therapeutic plants listed in the database. The Bio-
diversity Prospecting Division does systematic research of new sources
of chemical compounds, genes, and proteins produced by plants, insects
and micro- and macro-organisms that may be of use to pharmaceutical,
medical, and agricultural industries, worldwide (Mateo, 1997).
INBio invested the Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature funds in three
areas. One area was Social Management, which supports the develop-
ment of the “intellectual and spiritual” (to quote INBio’s Management
Plan) uses of biodiversity, such as films produced by the Information
Dissemination Division. A second investment was the Bioprospecting
Division, which supports the development of industrial uses of bio-
diversity. This division absorbs most of the funds because it has the
most sophisticated buildings, equipment, and processing facilities. The
third was the Heritage Maple Leaf Foundation (in honour of the Cana-
dian maple leaf), which aims to increase cooperative activities between
INBio and Canada, such as encounters between the Indigenous peoples
of Canada and Costa Rica.
 The National System of Conservation Areas 63

The INBio Approach to Sustainable Development

In May 1995, Spain awarded INBio the Prince of Asturias (Principe de

Asturias) prize for technical and scientific research for opening the for-
est to multinational corporations. In response, the director of the Bio-
prospecting Division stated: “[INBio] operates on the philosophy that,
unless biodiversity is economically and intellectually valued, it is diffi-
cult for society to continue to pay for its high level of maintenance and
resist the political pressures that have guided the mismanagement of the
resource” (Sittenfeld, 1994, p. 1, as cited in Rodriguez, 1995, p. 12). For
him, biotechnology is an alternative to biopiracy. This vision of INBio’s
sustainable development, which can be summed up as “selling to save,”
sees the market as providing the best incentive to maintain natural
resources and proposes converting the commons into private property
in order to assign it a market value. However, the market is interested in
conservation only if there is a profit to be made and thus, this is one of the
weakest parts of INBio’s conservation program.
INBio does not retain the property rights to its biological resources.
Instead, it claims royalties that range from 1 to 10 per cent, depending
on its interest in the product and potential benefits. This is an extremely
serious loss to the local communities that are home to the resources, as
all the biodiversity in plant and animal forms in Costa Rica come from
the eleven conservation areas that now rest in the hands of MINAE
and INBio. The neoliberal conservation model allows the extraction of
resources without accountability to legal control of the state. As Gudy-
nas (1995) declares, “INBio is outside of public opinion and control,
outside of government apparatus, and not liable to the executive power
nor to Parliament, despite the fact that INBio manages a national patri-
mony” (p. 6). This anti-democratic characteristic exemplifies the weakness
of the neoliberal state.
Under the auspices of INBio, the inventory, prospecting, and com-
mercialization of Costa Rica’s biodiversity have been put mainly into
international, private hands. To be specific, in 2001, INBio was funded
by bilateral agencies, US NGOs, international organizations, research
agreements with universities, and private institutions (see Table 2.2).
Behind the changes in environmental policies rest structural changes
in the governance of gender. Rural women, from being life-sustaining
productive workers, have been integrated into formal sectors of the
global economy, such as ecotourism, and micro-entrepreneurs. Here, the
everyday life of gender and sexuality of rural women is not separated
64 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 2.2 INBio’s Funding Sources

Bilateral International Research Private

Agencies US NGOs Organizations Agreements Institutions
Norwegian CRUSA World Bank University of Earth
Agency for Foundation Pennsylvania Foundation
Development Inter-American
(NORAD) Conservation Development Duke University
NGO: Bank University of
Swedish Missouri Guelph
International Botanical
Development Garden
Agency
(INBio) Nature
Conservancy
Government of
Holland
(Castañeda)

Source: http://www.inbio.ac.cr/es/memorias/Memoria2001/en/losfondosen.html

from the family, the economy, or the politics specifically embedded in

neoliberal ecological policies. NGO practices generally support the
Women in Development (WID) concept, suggesting that involving
women in market-based projects will improve their status.

ANDAR: Women in Development

The microenterprise, Abanico Medicinal Plant and Organic Agri-

culture, was a project organized under the framework of Women
in Development (WID). It was organized by ANDAR, a Costa Rican
NGO. According to Carlos Ulloa (personal communication, August
1998), Coordinator of La Fortuna Priority Working Unit of ACA-
Tilaran, ANDAR has benefited from the Netherlands-Costa Rica
debt-for-nature exchange, also called eco-cooperation, signed in
1994. ANDAR’s work emphasizes the important role of women in
working with biodiversity, knowing that rural women take care of
the medicinal plants and are knowledgeable about them. The micro-
enterprise is organized in a way that is intended to increase gender
equity as well as ensure sustainable development.
WID critiques of economic development were incorporated into
the neoliberal economic practices of the World Bank and are now
 The National System of Conservation Areas 65

one of the programming priorities of development agencies. The

WID approach arose because of a failure of economic development
to recognize women’s productive role. To explain women’s lower
status in “developing” societies, early feminist researchers, such
as Boserup (1970) in her study of agricultural societies, calls “for
the use of a distinction between two patterns of the sexual division
of labour in production: the male and the female farming systems.
Men were taught to apply modern technology in the cultivation of
cash crops while women were relegated to the subsistence sector of
food production using traditional methods which are omitted in the
statistics of production and income” (p. 65).
Furthering Boserup’s work, Barbara Rogers (1981) argues that the
division of society into public and private spheres and the fact that
women are placed within the private domestic sphere is responsible for
women’s subordination. She claims that this process ignores women’s
productivity and renders it invisible. Both Boserup and Rogers, sepa-
rated in time, called for education and integration of women into devel-
opment as a way of legitimizing the claims of women to an equal share
of the benefits of development. Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen (Beneria &
Sen, 1981) critique Boserup’s work that offers a capitalist accumulation
model to discuss the specific ways in which women in the Third World
are affected by capitalist penetration. They propose to look at women in
relation to the tensions existing between gender and class.

Conclusion

This chapter has presented a close analysis of the structural changes

in the nature of governance of Costa Rica’s ecology. ECODES repre-
sents the archetype for the neoliberal political ecology to promote
conservation areas. It shows class formation by the complex Canada-
Costa Rica debt-for-nature investment relationship and the projects
developed by WWF-C and INBio. In this context, the chapter also
highlights the work of ANDAR, a result of the Netherlands-Costa
Rica debt-for-nature arrangement, in gender formation through the
microenterprise Abanico Medicinal Plant and Organic Agriculture
Project. The activities of the three NGOs operationalize the commitment
of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), the World Bank, and the IMF to pursue sustainable devel-
opment and gender equity by means of the market. The putative
experts, created in the name of conservation, have advanced a process
66 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

of capital accumulation in ways that the World Bank and private

capital could not have achieved on their own. In this framework, the
less successful countries are responsible for the destruction of their
biological wealth, and only biologists of industrial societies, through
scientific knowledge, have the capacity to preserve it. In Chapter 3 I
discuss this transformation in more detail.
PART II

Embodied Indebtedness:
The Remaking of People and Nature
This page intentionally left blank
3 Nature and People in the
Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area

In this chapter, which is divided into two sections, I first describe the
process of sustainable development in transforming nature and people
into “natural” and “human” capital. In the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation
Area (ACA-Tilaran), this transformation was accomplished by the land
plan designed by WWF-C, and the Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía
(MINAE), advancing, as they see it, the possibility for a new era of eco-
nomic growth in a material finite planet based on the local nature and
the provisioning activities of subsistence economies. Secondly, I focus
on local communities and their repositioning as expenditures or rev-
enues within a sustainable development framework. The inhabitants of
these local communities are Indigenous women and men whose ances-
tors were colonized in the sixteenth century. European culture, with
its strategy of domination over the native population and exploitation
of their natural resources, tried without complete success to destruc-
ture the functioning life cycles of the ecosystem by imposing monocul-
tural economies; to destroy the key to survival in the ecosystem of the
forest to remove the material basis of their culture; and to disrupt the
millennia-old exchange of energy between the Indigenous population
and its ecosystem (Alfaro, 2005). The inhabitants are also peasants with
household holdings ranging from five to twenty hectares, who were
beneficiaries of the agrarian reform of the Figueres Revolution in 1948.

I. The ACA-Tilaran Land Plan

The ACA-Tilaran covers more than 250,000 hectares. Between 1991

and 1993, ACA-Tilaran drafted the General Land Use Plan (Area de
Conservacion Arenal, 1993), hereafter referred to as the Land Plan,
70 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Figure 3.1 Communities of Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area (Courtesy of

Loris Gasparotto)

as a first step for their management strategy. It took twelve months

and Can$140,000 to develop (Tremblay, 1998). The Land Plan was an
instrument of land organization that regulated land access and use.
It brought together natural science (biology), applied science (bio-
technology), economics, and machinery. It outlined the territories,
and produced an analysis of the area, as well as cartographic maps,
plan regulations, and development proposals. According to the Land
Plan, the area’s environmental problems were deteriorated natural
resources as a result of over-exploitation of the land; contamination
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 71

by agrochemicals; biodiversity extinction; deforestation; and destruc-

tion of scenic beauty.
The Land Plan provided an argument for new programs, including
microenterprises, ecotourism, environmental services, environmen-
tal education, biotechnology research, a documentation centre, and a
computerized geographical information centre (Tremblay & Malenfant,
1996a).
Parallel to the Land Plan, another plan was drafted, the management
plan for the development of the Arenal Lake, designed to administer,
organize, and manage the country’s hydroelectric production. (The
Management Plan for the Arenal Lake is not covered in this book.) Both
plans have had a significant impact on the resource use of the 108 com-
munities in the area. The communities have neither been informed of
nor included in the decision-making processes that changed their lives
and livelihoods.
In the plan, WWF-C is in charge of the market incentive mechanism
that brings the model of competition and inequality into the social and
ecological domains, and MINAE is in charge of governmental admin-
istrative mechanisms such as state regulations and legal and political
institutions. ACA-Tilaran has two directors: a Canadian and a Costa
Rican. The Costa Rican director of ACA-Tilaran, Maria Elena Mora,
describes the functioning of ACA. She argues that administratively,
ACA-Tilaran was divided into two subregions: Tilaran and San Ramon.
The Tilaran subregion head offices are in charge of the Arenal Volcano
National Park, as well as the Quebradón, Río Naranjo, and seven other
operative centres. It is involved in researching the area’s biodiversity
resources and biodiversity knowledge; patrolling protected wildlife
areas; receiving, evaluating, and approving forestry incentive programs
(i.e., selling carbon credits); and publicizing the carbon credits provided
by the wildlife areas and other forestry areas (M. E. Mora, 1998). Elias
Badilla, director of the San Ramon subregion’s head offices, is in charge
of Cedral and Bajo la Paz-Colonia Palmerena. San Ramon coordinates
payments to owners of forestry plantations or to owners of land suitable
for forestry regeneration who are participating in the forestry incentive
programs and also develops registration programs for hunting, fish-
ing, and tree cutting. The tree cutting program is enforced by control
units, teams that patrol the protected wildlife areas. The San Ramon
head office also supports and monitors on organized groups, encour-
ages new socio-productive activities, and promotes environmental edu-
cation (Badilla, 1998).
72 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 3.1 Fundaca Loans, July 1996–July 1998

Organic
Agro-industry Agriculture Infrastructure Agroforestry Artisans Zoo-criadero

Apabi Abanico Asociación de Agencia de Asociación de Sociedad de

Medicinal Mujeres de Extensión Mujeresde Mujeres de
Plant and Cedral Agricola MAG Cedral Cedral
Organic Cedral
Agriculture
(a case study
in this book)
Coopemontes Asociación FUNDACA Coopemontes
de oro de Desarrollo de oro
Integral de
Zapote,
Bijagua
Coopeldos Albergue
La Catarata
(a case study
in this book)
Conservas El
Lago S.A

Source: FUNDACA Financial Book, 1998. The total amount of the loans was 15,449,650.92
colones (Can$83,428.11).

ACA-Tilaran established Fundación para el Desarrollo del Area de

Conservación Arenal (FUNDACA) (the Development Foundation for
the Arenal Conservation Area), an organization that provides loans for
microenterprises. Table 3.1 lists the organizations that obtained micro-
credits from debt-for-nature funds to finance local projects with an
interest rate a few points less than that charged by the banking system.
In 1996, FUNDACA charged 20% interest on its loans. The results are
discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.

II. Groups Affected by the Establishment of ACA-Tilaran

La Fortuna’s Priority Working Unit

In ACA-Tilaran, three priority working units (PWUs) were organized:

Bijagua, Río Aranjuez, and La Fortuna. The PWU committee formulated
short-, medium- and long-term working plans for the communities
under its jurisdiction in the so-called Proyecto de Conservación y
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 73

Desarrollo Arenal (Convenio: MINAE-ACDI-WWF-C) (Arenal Proj-

ect for Conservation and Development, 1996). It was used to establish
programs and microenterprise projects that were supposed to gener-
ate conservation practices and sustainable development. Carlos Ulloa
Gamboa, the La Fortuna PWU coordinator, stated that, in the initiative:
“Government, NGOs and communal actors set up mechanisms for
community direct participation in the formulation, design and execu-
tion of strategies that contribute to the better use and management of
the natural resources and the quality of life of the local population” (C.
Ulloa, personal interview, July 1999).
In this book only the La Fortuna PWU, which involves La Fortuna
City and Z-Trece, is discussed. The La Fortuna PWU is located in La
Fortuna de San Carlos Canton, in Alajuela Province, in the northwestern
part of the country. The climate is tropical, with a rainy season that lasts
eleven months of the year. La Fortuna covers 14,567.3 hectares (145.67
square kilometres). Water is the area’s main resource, around which
many development projects are based. They include El Tabacon, a tourist
resort that uses the hot spring waters from the Arenal Volcano to fill its
numerous swimming pools; La Cataráta del Río Fortuna, another tourist
resort and community project, which is located around a waterfall from
Cerro Chato Mountain; and the Arenal-Corobicí basin, a hydroelectric
project. The water from the basin is also used for community consump-
tion, although it remains untreated for locals, in Z-Trece and El Castillo.
In 1996, the La Fortuna PWU had 3,439 permanent inhabitants, of which
46.6% were women and 53.4% were men. Men outnumbered women by
7%, except in La Fortuna Centre. The urban population of La Fortuna was
concentrated in the downtown of La Fortuna Centre (1,645 inhabitants),
while the rural population was divided among El Bosque (220 inhabit-
ants), San Francisco (230 inhabitants), El Jauri (140 inhabitants), La Palma
(66 inhabitants), Z-Trece (420 inhabitants), el Castillo (259 inhabitants),
and Zona Fluca (935 inhabitants in 1999) (Ulloa, 1996a).
The case study also includes Abanico Town, where the women’s
medicinal plant microenterprise supported by FUNDACA, using the
Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature agreement, was located; and the
town of Miramar, where a Canadian mining company had set up head-
quarters.

la fortuna city
La Fortuna is the major city in the area. Its original name was Burio,
due to its closeness to the Burio River. But in 1932, peasants changed the
name from Burio to La Fortuna to reflect the beauty of the surrounding
74 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

nature. Fortuna means feeling lucky to live in a place surrounded by

beautiful mountains and rivers.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Latifundio1 of coffee producers in
Meseta Central (Winson, 1989) and banana plantations in the Atlantic
South (Fallas, 1961) controlled the land in Costa Rica. Displaced peas-
ants were motivated to search for an alternative to insecure wage labour
in the cities. Landless peasants from Naranjo, San Ramón, Grecia, Pal-
mares, Ciudad Quesada, and Tilaran moved into La Fortuna. Land colo-
nization in La Fortuna began about 1941. However, when landless peas-
ants arrived in the La Fortuna area, there was already a high concentra-
tion of land in the hands of a few cattle ranchers who were integrated
into the international markets. The director of Ministerio de Agricultura
y Ganaderia (MAG) described a significant event: “In 1999, 70 percent
of productive land in La Fortuna was for cattle ranching, 30 percent was
for agriculture. Agriculture was produced mainly in small fincas and
almost all of them are beneficiaries of Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario
(IDA) (Institute for Agricultural Development). This means that the gov-
ernment bought the land and divided it among the beneficiaries. IDA
was created to solve land conflicts” (Alfaro, personal communication,
August 1998). In the La Fortuna area, since the 1980s, IDA was respon-
sible for resolving land conflicts. It bought almost 90% of the land used
and divided it among the landless peasants. Therefore, the majority of
the population formed a peasantry with small landholdings. Neverthe-
less, peasants and cattle ranchers, who controlled almost all the available
land, were organized to produce solely for the international market.
The average size of the peasants’ farms depended on when the land
was claimed for possession. For instance, in 1962, Abanico peasants
each received 10 hectares, but in the 1980s, Z-Trece peasants received
only 3.5 hectares. To claim the right of possession, the land needed to
be cleared. The value of the land was calculated using the number of
trees the owner cut down, an action referred to as “development.” Old
growth trees in the area were between 40 and 50 metres high. Histori-
cally, there had been a huge diversity of trees, many of them fruit bear-
ing, which along with the surrounding vegetation provided shelter and
sustained a wide range of animals and plants. But by 1998, only two,
laurel and cedro, were cultivated because they had commercial value.
Dora Hidalgo, who was born in La Fortuna in 1942, stated:

My grandmother was a nurse and the first director of the Hospital in Ciu-
dad Quesada. My mother, Amelia Alfaro Rojas, was the first woman to vote
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 75

in La Fortuna in 1950. My father, Antonio Hidalgo Quesada, and my mother

immigrated with a family of six children from Aguas Arcas. They occupied
a piece of land in the area, then bought almost half of La Fortuna for colones
c/400 [currently, less than $2.00]. My father started a general store where
they sold basic food and meat. It was also a bar and pharmacy. To supply
the store, my father travelled, once a month, from La Fortuna city to Ciudad
Quesada (capital city) for 14 hours by horse. Horses were an important way
of travel, and all items had to be transported on horseback. Travelers used
horses to cross rivers, such as the Peñas Blancas River, which was high in
those days. (D. Hidalgo, personal communication, July 1999)

During the 1940s, life was difficult, but nature provided most peo-
ple with a means of livelihood. In order to survive, families built a
community and the community permeated every aspect of their lives.
As Dora noted:

We lived like a family. Actually, we still live in La Fortuna Centro like a

family, because most of us are relatives in different ways. For instance,
my mother attended pregnant women; my father helped anyone who
required his attention. He was not a medical doctor; however, he cured
snakebites, broken legs, etc. I learned from them to help the community
members. (D. Hidalgo, personal communication, July 1999)

The Quiroz family used to live in Ciudad Quesada. Vital Quiroz

worked to build a community in both the physical and emotional sense.
He built the church, the Pastoral Centre, the elementary school, the first
section of La Fortuna’s high school, and most houses in La Fortuna.
He remembered what La Fortuna was like when he and his family first
arrived. At that time, the town had government offices, a small jail, an
elementary school with two rooms, a meat shop, two general stores,
and a restaurant. The restaurant also functioned as a rooming house for
visitors. Calle Ronda was the only street. Vital Quiroz stated:

My family and I arrived in 1951. We came on a tractor that my father-in-

law contracted to make a road in order to bring in the needed merchan-
dise. From the top of the tractor we saw a road surrounded by fields laying
fallow (charrales), trees, and wide rivers. During the time I have lived here
I have seen how rivers have become small mountain streams. In less than
50 years, trees have been cut down and the area deforested. The leaves of
the few standing trees are dragged away by rain. When leaves are not able
76 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

to decompose where they fall, erosion of the land is inevitable. Without

trees to stop the sediment from going into the rivers, the streams become
dry corridors. (V. Quiroz, personal communication, July 1999)

Cattle ranching and rubber plantations were the first development

projects established in La Fortuna in the 1950s. Quiroz remembers the
ferocity of the clear-cutting, when areas were deforested right up to
banks of the rivers to increase the size of the farms, so that more cattle
could be raised there. He says that “clearing the forest with axes and
machetes was very labour-intensive. Cutting down a tree first required
the construction of a three- to four-metre ladder because the trees were
too wide to cut at the base. The most important trees were guayabón (ter-
minalia oblonga), laurel (laurus nobilis), and cedro (cedrus) (V. Quiroz,
personal communication, July 1999). He also remembers the scars left
on rubber trees to produce a kind of milk used to make bags and rain-
coats for horseback riding, as well as for export to the United States,
where companies used this byproduct to make car tires.
Even though La Fortuna was a cattle-raising area, much of the area
was cleared, drained, and brought under cultivation during the Green
Revolution era, starting in 1970 (Nygren, 1995). The Green Revolu-
tion subverted the system of the commons in La Fortuna, further
marginalized the Tonjibe Indigenous people, who owned the land,
and began to eliminate common access to the land for livelihoods like
hunting, fishing, and gathering, as well as subsistence farming. How-
ever, subsistence farming, hunting, and fishing continued to survive
in the middle of the Green Revolution because the economic system
did not pay sufficient wages for workers to survive. Consequently,
wild animals and fish from the rivers constituted their main source of
animal protein. But with the destruction of the forest, rivers became
small mountain streams and the fish, which got most of their food by
scavenging on the fruit and litter of the submerged forest floor during
the rainy season, disappeared.
After 1970, La Fortuna became cattle-raising land owned by rich
absentee landowners living in San José or Europe, whose foremen lived
on and worked the large landholdings. Cattle ranching were supple-
mented by raising cattle for dairy products associated with the Dos
Pinos Cooperative, which collects milk from the various producers for
transport to the San Carlos regional plant.
By the 1980s, the rainforest of La Fortuna had degenerated from a
place of abundance to a place of scarcity. Quiroz noted that “when we
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 77

arrived in La Fortuna, heavy rains used to fall for three months and
rivers would flood. Cattle ranching dried up rivers, and reduced rain.
Until recently, Costa Rica never had extremely hot summers. In Guana-
caste, hot weather is killing earthworms, a major factor for land fertil-
ity. We are still lucky in La Fortuna, because we still have trees on the
mountain, the reason for the rains” (V. Quiroz, personal communica-
tion, July 1999).
La Fortuna City had basic services installed at different times. The
first pipeline was built in 1953; since 1992 the Costa Rican Institute
for Aqueducts and Reservoirs (Instituto Costarricence de Acueduc-
tos y Alcantarillados) has been in charge of the aqueducts. A rustic
electricity system was installed in 1951. In 1975 the Instituto Costarri-
cense de Electricidad (ICE) (Costa Rican Hydro) installed the existing
hydro services, which are administered by Coopelesca, a cooperative.
Health care was established in 1963. Public transportation is good and
inexpensive (Ulloa, 1996a). An elementary education infrastructure
exists in every community; however, the illiteracy rate is 7%. Second-
ary students find it difficult to finish their education because families
need the young to work on the farm or generate income elsewhere
(Ulloa, 1996a).

the town of z-trece

Z-Trece is a small town of peasants and Indigenous inhabitants located
to the north of La Fortuna City, at the foot of the Arenal Volcano. Due
to their proximity, they are almost indistinguishable. The average tem-
perature is 28°C, with high humidity and a precipitation of thirty-five
hundred to four thousand millimetres per year. Z-Trece was originally
a cattle farm whose branding iron was Z-13. The town was planned in
1983 as a shantytown by the Costa Rican Bank, and was established in a
way similar to many other small Costa Rican towns. Landless peasants
occupied haciendas or large farms and took a piece of land to build their
homes and their livelihood. The government, through the Institute for
Agricultural Development (IDA), purchased the conflicted land and
divided it among the landless people. People who received the land had
fifteen years to pay the cost of the land to the government. In Z-Trece,
the IDA bought the land and divided it into fifty-eight small holdings
of 3.5 hectares. Peasants from Naranjo, San Roman, Palmares, Cartago,
San Carlos, and Tilaran were the first inhabitants.
With the advent of the debt crisis, the government attempted to
introduce non-traditional agriculture or agricultural diversification in
78 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Z-Trece. Agricultural diversification in this context did not mean the

abandonment of specialization or monocultural production, but only
added the cultivation of exotic species with the aim of exportation.
These projects promoting the establishment of new kinds of products
required huge investments in modern technology, in fertilizers, and in
pesticides. Peasants living in Z-Trece, therefore, became dependent on
loans, which were to be paid for with the harvest. Every year, poor
peasants are convinced to participate in the production of new products
for export proposed by the government. A Z-Trece peasant, Rosita Rios
stated:

In 1994, the majority of the Z-Trece community produced cocoa, carda-

mom, and ornamental plants because government policies promoted
non-traditional production. The government promised export for those
products and we saw a possibility of obtaining some money to survive.
We all got credit to buy fertilizers, agro-chemicals, and technical assistance
from the banks. The seeds were certified by CATIE; they supposedly had
studied the soil of the area and supposedly produced a hybrid seed for
this area. The seeds were supposed to give a high quality product and
more products per hectare. However, after months of hard work, pro-
duction was low and it soon become apparent that no one could survive
with that, nor repay the loan. We all had to mortgage our land. (R. Rios,
personal communication, July 1998)

The use of the agrochemical technological package with Dibro-

mochloropropane (DBCP) produced residues, new pest infestations,
and sickness (Glass, Lyness, Mengle, Powell, & Khan, 1979; Thrupp,
1991; Ugalde, 1993). Heavy rains washed agrochemicals into La For-
tuna River, Chiquito River, Burio River, Burro River, Tabacon River,
La Palma Ravine, Agua Caliente, Aguas Gatas, the Cano Negro River
basins, roads, and the Arenal Lake. As a result, La Fortuna and Z-Trece’s
communities of abundance degenerated into communities of scarcity.
When Arenal Volcano became a tourist centre in 1992, the Z-Trece
community began to change. By 1996, many of the original owners
who received land from the IDA sold their properties because they
were indebted. Many of the original landowners were reduced to liv-
ing on a tiny portion of the land they once owned. Tourist centres
and resorts continued to be constructed in the area and the price of
land rose. In 1994, when the Arenal project arrived in Z-Trece, the
peasants’ livelihoods were in ruins. By 1998, only twenty-four of the
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 79

fifty-eight families who were provided land in Z-Trece continued to

live in the town.

abanico town
Abanico covers 520 hectares, parceled into forty small plots of ten hect-
ares each. Abanico was the site of the first land occupations that took
place in Costa Rica. Two hundred and seven landless peasants invaded
the Pinto hacienda in 1960. Eugenio Araya, President of the Abanico
Association in 1998, was a pioneer settler and one of the three leaders
of the occupation:

Abanico was a treed land and belonged to one owner who, in order to
avoid taxes, had title only to the area of the front of the land but not the
interior. We learned about this situation from a representative of parlia-
ment who knew about our need for land. He told us that we could have
part of that land. Then, a group of landless people initiated a process of
taking the land, but our first attempt ended up with many of us in jail.
However, we started building our houses until the government mediated
because the situation was getting out of hand. The government created a
commission to solve the conflict. We cut the forest and cleared the land by
ourselves. (E. Araya, personal communication, August, 1999)

Anaden Mora Costa was twelve years old when the invasion took place.
She recalled how her family participated:

In 1960, 207 landless peasant families organized to invade the Pinto haci-
enda, a property of 1,500 hectares. We went into the hacienda and started
building our houses. The police arrived with orders of eviction. We
decided to stay there and confront the police. The police started to burn
our houses and throw out our belongings. We confronted the police for two
years, and some of us went to jail. However, when some members were
jailed, other members continued the struggle. When prisoners were free,
they went straight back to the invaded land. One night, around 7 p.m. the
police arrived at Isabel Murillo’s house. The young woman, whose parents
were too sick to fight and had left town, valiantly confronted the police sur-
rounding her house. She was thrown out of the house and it was burned
to the ground. She was left in the middle of a mountain without a house.
She was helped by other members with whom she left for San Isidro, but
the next day they came back to rebuild the house. Because her parents
were old, she was the victim of police brutality many times. The number
80 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

of women resisters was almost the same as the men, because they were
mostly couples. (A. Mora Costa, personal communication, August, 1999)

Women’s participation in this invasion made history. Many women,

including Flor Jímenez, Luisa Zúñiga, Isabel Murillo, and Tulia Alvarado,
confronted the police with sticks and stones.
In 1961, the Orlich administration established the Land and Coloniza-
tion Institute (Instituto de Tierras y Colonización or ITCO), to regulate
the land conflicts initiated on the Pinto hacienda. In 1962, ITCO bought
the land and divided the hacienda into four peasant settlements: Ivco,
La Cruz, Los Angeles, and Abanico. Thirty-three families were granted
land; each family obtained ten hectares of land and single men over
eighteen years old received seven hectares. Only single women with
children received ten hectares.
In 1982, ITCO became the Agrarian Development Institute (IDA). The
IDA’s mission, financed by international aid agencies, was to acquire
land that could then be made available as private property to the
rural poor in order for them to start productive projects. The IDA was
also in charge of land reform and conflict resolution. In the 1980s, the
peasant settlements of Ivco, La Cruz, Los Angeles, and Abanico were
linked with Chachagua for administrative reasons. The five settlements
became Colonia Trinidad, with a total area of more than twenty-five
hundred hectares, much larger than the original Pinto hacienda. The
example of the Pinto hacienda served as an inspiration to landless peas-
ants in Guanacaste, Limon, and elsewhere. The formation of Abanico
and the entire surrounding area was of historical significance because
it led to the informal organization of Costa Rica’s poor and landless
peasants, who continue to press for land.
In Abanico, the major export crops are plantain, papaya, ginger, chili,
yucca, tiquisque, and nampi (tubers). Bananas are produced through-
out the year and are in permanent demand. The PROUDESA packing
factory contracts with local peasants to grow the bananas. It provides
for the collection, transportation, and delivery to markets. Banana col-
lection uses a two-box system: red boxes for first-class bananas exported
mainly to the Netherlands and England, and green boxes for second-
class bananas sold in weekly markets (M. Alfaro, personal communica-
tion, July 1998).
During my research interviews, the peasant community in Abanico
noted two main problems in their community. One problem was the
abuse of agrochemicals and the use of machinery. All the producers were
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 81

engaged in intensive agriculture, characterized by the use of machinery

to prepare the soil and the use of high levels of agrochemicals. The abuse
of veneno (poison), as agrochemicals are called, is the cause of plagues
and sickness. Heavy rains wash agrochemicals into the rivers and roads.
The excess of agrochemicals was believed to be affecting the health of
both children and adults while the excessive use of machinery was
believed to be affecting the soil structure and the crop output.
The second problem was the rise in the level of indebtedness, inflation,
and daily devaluations. Deregulation of the banking sector contributed
to the peasants’ economic instability. Loans carried exorbitantly high
interest rates, such as 25.5% from the bank, or among NGOs using debt-
for-nature, for example, 20% through FUNDACA and between 27% and
33% from ANDAR, charges in practice amounting to indentured servi-
tude through loan sharking.
Fincas or farms could be self-sufficient but they are not. Since their
main production is intended for the international market, campesinos/
as also became dependent on the market for their own consumption.
Their basic foodstuffs (rice, beans, tomatoes, and cabbage), eaten daily,
are bought in the market. Costa Rica imports its food grain mainly from
the United States (see Chapter 6). Policies to import grain are justified
because of the lower cost compared to domestically produced grain.
Food production lands are diverted to produce cash crops for export.
In this way government policies, under the IMF and the World Bank
advice, reduced support for domestic consumption, transferring Abani-
co’s food security to international markets.

Miramar City

Like the other towns, Miramar City (Miramar de Montes de Oro) was
once agricultural land occupied by peasants and Indigenous people.
But now the Miramar area is referred to as “Costa Rica’s gold belt,”
owing to the fairly large deposits of buried alluvial gold found there.
The gold belt includes the towns of Montes del Aguacate and Cordillera
de Tilaran, in the mining district of Abangares. The towns of Libano,
Miramar, and Montes del Aguacate also belong to this district. The gold
prospectors in this area are Canadian mining companies.
When conducting research in Z-Trece, the author was contacted by
Sonia Torres, a forestry engineer, who was the president of the Frente
Nacional en Oposicion a la Mineria (National Front Against Gold Min-
ing) between 1999 and 2000. She informed me that clean water had
82 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

become the focus of a struggle for survival and health in the three prov-
inces: Puntarenas, Guanacaste, and Alajuela. She disclosed that in addi-
tion to her group, other opposition groups had been created, including
the Pacific Regional Front of Opposition to Gold Mining, the Miramar
Front in Opposition to Mining (Miramar Front), and the Northern Front
in Opposition to Open Pit Mining.
In August 2001, the author interviewed sixteen members of the
Miramar Front in Miramar City. Among them were Alexander Flores
Aguero, who won the National Award of Traditional Music in 1999;
Sonia Torres, president of the National Front Against Mining and
also a member of the Miramar Front; Juan Venegas, from San Isidro;
Julian Morales, from Delicias; Alván Herrera, from San Isidro, Marta
Ligia Blanco Rodrígues and Luis Alberto Arguedas, municipal coun-
cil members from Montes de Oca; and Alice Matamoro and Arnoldo
Torres, from Miramar. Community members were and continue to
be united in fighting Wheaton River Minerals, a Canadian mining
company, which opened for business in Miramar city. Sonia Torres
stated:

We welcome investments, if they respect our identity as agricultural peo-

ple and our wish to live in peace and harmony with nature. But we won’t
accept projects we have not asked for. If foreign investors want to invest
here, they must accept people’s participatory processes because we won’t
accept projects that conspire against our well-being, even if they were
accepted by the central government. We already have our own devel-
opment based on land, clean water and air, community, and solidarity.
(S. Torres, personal communication, August 2001)

The Miramar Front uses two examples to illustrate the disaster

brought on by Canadian mining companies: Ariel Resources Ltd. in
Abangares and Mina Macacona in Esparza, Puntarenas. From 1978
to 1990, Ariel Resources Ltd. and its subsidiaries extracted gold in
La Junta de Abangares. One Ariel Resources subsidiary was located
on a hillside, where gravity helped to draw the mining contaminants
towards the rivers and the area’s modest homes. In this case, the gold
mining was conducted underground and the material was extracted
mechanically through tunnels dug along the quartz vein. The gold
and silver were extracted by a process called cyanide lixiviation, or
leaching, which consists of dissolving the metals using sodium cya-
nide for later precipitation. The process is not only a health risk for
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 83

the workers in many ways but is also deadly for the environment and
local communities.
Even though the mining has finished, the legacy of the company
remains, as cyanide continues to leach into the river, streams, and soil.
Sonia Torres stated that, “in addition to the destruction created while
the company was in operation; neither the government nor the com-
pany was held responsible once the contract ended” (S. Torres, personal
communication, August 2001).
In 1997, at the urging of local communities, a socio-environmental
impact study was done by AQYLASA Laboratory. Torres indicated that
AQYLASA discovered cyanide into Lagunas de Lamas, in Matapalo
(S. Torres, personal communication, July 2001). Torres stated:

The destruction of the natural resources of local communities has impov-

erished community members at every level. Once they extracted all the
ore, the mines were abandoned. Their abandonment is an example of colo-
nialist practices because if these mines had been located in a powerful
country they would have been cleaned up. Instead, farming families have
lost fertile land to erosion and their water is contaminated. They have been
forced to abandon their fincas (farms) and emigrate to shantytowns or to
the capital city of San José. (S. Torres, personal communication, July 2001)

Mina Macacona in Esparza, Puntarenas (Fundacion, 1997), also

known as Mina Mondongo, is another example of strip mining dev-
astation. Mina Mondongo was the first instance of open-pit mining in
Costa Rica. This mine was owned by the Canadian company Barranca
Mining, a subsidiary of Hearne Ltd. It operated for seven years until
the community took it upon itself to close it down at the end of 1989.
The corporation controlled two hundred hectares but exploited only
twenty. In those twenty hectares, the forest and its wildlife had been
cleared so the company could make a vertical cut 150 metres deep,
breaking the aquifer stratum for 925 metres (Fundacion, 1997). In addi-
tion, the cyanide and other toxins used in the process of mining the
gold killed the forest and contaminated the mountain streams of Tur-
bina, Rio Paires, Rio Jesus Maria, and the mangrove swamps of Tivives,
including Nicoya’s Gulf. The pollution killed fish, wildlife, cattle, and
even people. Franklin Casares Villalobos (a community member) drank
water in Turbina and died instantly (Fundacion, 1997). Land sedimen-
tation still contains cyanide that continues its destruction when rain
carries the poison down the mountain and the wind disseminates it
84 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

throughout the surrounding areas. No one has been held responsible

for this destruction. Sonia Torres explains:

People have never received compensation for the destruction of their

health, loss of life or for the degradation of nature. No amount of money
could recompense the losses to these communities. The lies are the same,
that we should sacrifice our quality of life for job creation. That was never
the case because mining produces few jobs for the locals. One character-
istic of mining is that the operation is short-lived (a period of 10 years
on average) but its environmental and social implications are permanent.
Local communities are contaminated during the operation, and long after
a mining company leaves the abandoned infrastructure continues the con-
tamination because of tanks and deposits of acid left behind. (S. Torres,
personal communication, July 2001)

These catastrophic experiences have increased the resistance against

mining in Miramar. After our interview, Torres and I went to Aban-
gares to see the destruction left by Ariel Resource Ltd. While we
walked through the devastated area surrounding the mine, Torres
pointed out many dried-up mountain streams. Water pollution from
mining activity treated with cyanide has also been deadly for fauna,
flora, and mangrove swamps essential to maintaining biological diver-
sity. The worst effects can be seen in the water of Rio Agua Caliente,
which is now yellow and fetid with the odours of the chemicals used
by the Ariel subsidiary. Rio Agua Caliente is a warm river, because of
its geothermal activity, which in the past was used for recreation, thera-
peutic treatments, and as a source of food. It is now badly polluted.
Until recently, local community members used the waters because
knowledge about the discharge was not widespread. As a result of the
poison, aquatic life has been exterminated and community health has
been undermined.
Despite the evidence collected, the National Health Minister declared
there was no contamination. In opposition to this declaration, Elizabeth
Pizarro (1998) from the Ministry of Health of Abangares has shown that
the population has experienced an increase in illnesses such as asthma,
allergies, skin irritation, gastritis, and neurological disorders, and in
particular women have had high rates of miscarriages. Furthermore,
three out of four children are born with birth defects and many children
die. The rate of child mortality in Abangares is higher than in other
parts of the country, and the number of children with Down syndrome
 The Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area 85

is double. It is widely believed that mining contamination has been a

cause of children’s illnesses and high mortality rates; however the gov-
ernment has never responded to this study.

Conclusion

As has been shown in this chapter, the Land Plan in ACA-Tilaran was
considered an instrument for opening new areas for managing nature,
following the hope expressed in the Brundtland Report for a future con-
ditioned on decisive political action for indefinite economic growth
within a finite ecosystem. Also discussed were the local actors whose
nature and human nature have been codified as capital. From an eco-
socialist perspective this process of the capitalization of nature signifies
a deepening of political control over all aspects of social life. From an
ecofeminist perspective this process of the capitalization of nature and
human nature creates a new logic of domination, one that I call greening.
4 Biological Diversity and the
Dispossession of Peasants’ Knowledge

In Chapter 4, I show how the Convention on Biological Diversity

(CBD) of the 1992 Earth Summit opened Costa Rica’s gene resources
to NGOs and corporations, turning nature and community knowledge
into areas of secrecy and paranoia. Different levels of dispossession
and expropriation from the land are necessary to establish a wide ter-
rain for corporate scientific research. The collection of highly selec-
tive genes from plants and animals was initiated in the conservation
areas by parataxonomists working for international NGOs, and further
developed through experiments by the pharmaceutical, medical, and
agricultural industries of the developed world. Currently some scien-
tists act as intermediaries between local and global laboratories and
foreign government agencies, associated with some large local and for-
eign environmental NGOs. In 2004, intellectual property rights were
expanded by the implementation of a free trade agreement between
the United States and Costa Rica, in which bioprospecting permits are
defined as “investment accords,” in order to make the case that invest-
ment ought to be protected by intellectual property rights, that is, the
privatization and monopolization of the results (Rodriguez, 1995). This
chapter also discusses the resistance from Indigenous peoples and
peasants.
The Convention on Biological Diversity gave countries sovereignty
over their genetic resources, and left questions of ownership to national
legislation. In Costa Rica, the Biodiversity Law is the judicial instru-
ment for the application of the Biological Diversity Covenant signed
in 1992 and ratified by Costa Rica in 1994. In 1998, Costa Rica cre-
ated Biodiversity Law No. 7788, in which Article 6 determines that
biochemical and genetic properties of wildlife and domestic biodiversity
 Convention on Biological Diversity 87

Figure 4.1 Cerro Chato Genetic Reserve in Z-Trece (Courtesy the author)
88 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

are in the public domain; therefore, the State authorizes exploration,

investigation, bioprospecting, use, and exploitation of biodiversity
elements. Since then, access to wildlife species has been regulated
by licences, permits, and auctions. The government created Comis-
ión Nacional para la Gestión de la Biodiversidad (CONAGEBIO) (the
National Commission for the Management of Biodiversity), to develop
and coordinate policies on biodiversity. It established four types of per-
mits, one of which was for bioprospecting, which CONAGEBIO placed
at the centre of its activities.
Bioprospecting, genetic engineering, and other genetic systems
that classify and research biodiversity for commercial ends involve
the search for new and potentially profitable biological samples by
corporations, NGOs, and aid organizations. These organizations
look for new uses for biodiversity and their products, monopolize
the information gathered, and create barriers that limit the use of
biodiversity by local communities. Bioprospecting often becomes
biopiracy. Biopiracy amounts to the appropriation of the traditional
knowledge and biogenetic resources of Indigenous peoples and peas-
ants to feed the knowledge systems of colonialist corporations. For
instance, the success of contemporary agriculture in the industrial
world is due to biopiracy of the gene diversity of the Global South,
as Foster (1999) notes:

The old system of botanical gardens … has now been replaced by a system
of International Agricultural Resource Centers (IARCs), which are part of
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
system headquartered at the World Bank. The IARCs serve as mechanisms
that transfer the plant genetic resources of the third world to the gene
banks of the advanced capitalist states. (pp. 94–95)

The World Bank, since its inception, has taken action to save genetic
resources for industry. For instance, the International Center for Maize
and Wheat Improvement in Mexico provides hybrid seeds for corn
breeding to Pioneer Hi-bred (owned by DuPont), the largest corn-
breeding corporation (Foster, 1999). The International Potato Cen-
ter, based in Peru, serves as a bank of germ plasm for the varieties of
domesticated and wild potatoes from the Andes (Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru, and Bolivia). Another agricultural experiment on cassava and
beans was based in Colombia (Weatherford, 1988).
 Convention on Biological Diversity 89

WWF-C and Corporate Science Research

In 1991, WWF-C, CIDA, and MINAE, as a first step of the ACA-Tilaran

management plan, released the General Land Use Plan (El Plan General
de Uso de la Tierra) (hereafter referred to as the Land Plan). As was noted
earlier, at ACA-Tilaran there are two directors, one Canadian and one
Costa Rican. According to the Canadian director (C. Trembley, personal
communication, July 1998), the Land Plan in ACA-Tilaran was based on
the characteristics of the territory and its biophysical potentialities. He
argued that it also provided some knowledge and identified the limits
of acceptable human intervention for the sustainability and the qualita-
tive improvement of its natural resources.
In fact, the Land Plan has had several unintended results.
It reduced and changed the community land availability. Some 100,000
inhabitants, grouped into 108 communities, were reduced to living in
little more than half of the area they had been living in, that is, from
204,000 to 133,871 hectares. Table 4.1 shows that nearly 77,000 hectares,
almost 40% of this enclosure, are nucleus areas reserved for the research
of genetic material on behalf of multinational and environmental cor-
porations.
ACA-Tilaran’s territory is considered one of the richest biodiversity
areas in Costa Rica. Eight of twelve life zones existing in Costa Rica are
found in ACA-Tilaran. Table 4.2 shows that ACA-Tilaran is one of the
most biologically diverse areas in Costa Rica, containing 4,283 plant
and animal species, representing 36% of the natural flora and fauna of
Costa Rica (MINAE, 1993).
The Land Plan allowed managers, such as WWF-C and MINAE,
to strategically move the right to land from small- and medium-
sized farms, and placed the farmland into the hands of NGOs and
MINAE. This action was taken in order to promote competition for
inventory and prospecting of the local folkloric knowledge of plants
and animals.
Like other enclosed nucleus areas, these lands are governed by inter-
institutional agreements (Tremblay, 1999; Tremblay & Malenfant, 1996).
Since 1994, for example, ACA-Tilaran and MINAE, in partnership with
INBio, conducted research under the Biodiversity Resources of the
ACA-Tilaran Development Project. This research was jointly financed
by the World Bank and INBio. ACA-Tilaran and MINAE also collabo-
rated on the Development Knowledge and Sustainable Use of Costa
90 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 4.1 ACA-Tilaran Nucleus Areas

Miravalles (Protected Zone) 11,670 ha

Volcan Tenorio (National Park) 12,819 ha

Volcan Tenorio (Protected Zone) 3,852 ha
Volcan Arenal (National Park) 12,10 ha
Volcan Arenal (Forestry Reserve) 231 ha
Arenal Monteverde (Protected zone): Bosque Nuboso Monteverde 28,261 ha
and Bosque Eterno de los Ninos
Alberto Manuel Brenes (Biologic Reserve) 7,800 ha

Source: MINAE, Proyecto de Conservacion y Desarrollo Arenal, 1997.

Table 4.2 ACA-Tilaran’s Flora and Fauna Compared to Costa Rica’s

Flora Fauna Total

Total in ACA 3,451 832 4,283

Endemics 25 45 69
% of total endemism 2.2 73 5.98
(no insects)
% of total species 33.33 57.61 36
Total in Costa Rica 10,353 1,583 11,936
(no amphibians,
birds, or reptiles)

Source: Plan General de Uso de la Tierra, Resumen Ejecutivo-ACA, MINAE, 1993.

Rica’s Biodiversity Project (ECOMAPAS), financed by the Netherlands

in partnership with INBio and SINAC (Sistema Nacional de Areas de
Conservacion de Costa Rica) (Kappelle, 1999; M. E. Mora, 1998).
It recolonized the country by appropriating community genetic material.
WWF-C, in partnership with the Monteverde Conservation Association
(Asociación Conservacionista Monteverde, ACM), collects material and
researches flora and fauna in national parks, biologic reserves, protected
zones, the National Sanctuary of Wildlife, and forestry reserves (Aso-
ciación Conservacionista Monteverde & WWF-C, 1996). The WWF-C and
ACM Project, called PROACA, consisted of two research components,
each of them limited to five years. It aimed to “help regenerate the tropi-
cal forest” and to carry out an inventory of flora. In the first phase, the
 Convention on Biological Diversity 91

project was limited to ACA-Tilaran’s boundaries: San Gerardo (Tilaran),

La Tigra (San Carlos), Arenal Volcano (National Park), Alberto Manuel
Brenes (Biologic Reserve), and Tenorio Volcano (National Park). In the
second phase, after a detailed inventory of flora and monitoring of soil
regeneration, the production of commodities, such as perfume, from
products originating in the areas of biodiversity was to be attempted.
In the third phase, an additional five of ACA-Tilaran’s nucleus areas –
San Bosco de San Carlos, Miravalles (a protected zone), Cano Negro
(a national wildlife sanctuary), Juan Castro Blanco (a national park),
and Cureña Cureñita (a forestry reserve) – were mapped.
An example of huge transformation under the Land Plan was the
altered state of the Arenal Volcano, declared a research area for science
and technology. MINAE Decree No. 23774 changed the Arenal Volca-
no’s category from “Forestry Reserve,” with five protected hectares in
1969 (Law No. 4380), to “Arenal Volcano National Park” in 1994, with a
protected area of 12,010 hectares, which subsequently became the cen-
tre for bioprospecting or biopiracy. Today, the Arenal Volcano National
Park markets biological diversity. Parataxonomists are taking an inven-
tory of the park’s species at a biology station in Cerro Chato, located
in the park. Once research centres were organized, these areas became
off-limits to rural communities. Local community members’ intimate
knowledge of and connections with the land were broken, unless they
agreed to become part of the taxonomist research program.
It made criminals of community members. The Land Plan regulated
access to and use of the area. The newly declared nucleus area became
private land patrolled by seven park rangers organized into a Police
Control Unit, trained and designated to counter land invasions. When
park rangers find community members in designated research areas
without permission or without having paid the necessary fee, they
confiscate any fish or game these individuals might have obtained and
whatever tools they used to do so. They then report the offence to the
Office of the Public Prosecutor. In July 1998, one park ranger stated
that “a year ago, three of us were patrolling Quebradon Patusi, where
many people used to hunt. We heard barking dogs and saw a chavalo
(young man) walking behind the dogs. We walked in silence to corner
him, but one of us tripped. The chavalo, scared to death, started to run,
then swam, and then ran again, this time on a wall of rocks. To try to
stop him, we shot at the air, but he never stopped, because he knew
that he was breaking the law” (park ranger, personal communication,
August 1998).
92 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

The Land Plan continues to undermine the rights of local communi-

ties to use their surrounding environment because conservation areas
are used as collection centres of single samples for potential profits by
interested industries.

INBio: Establishing Hegemony

Biotechnology is the use of biological processes in industrial produc-

tion. The Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992 established rules
and regulations to benefit all of humanity, which became a justifica-
tion for technologically advanced countries to be able to expropriate the
biochemical components from diversity through biotechnology. Since
1992, international multinational industrial corporations have started
to use rainforests around the world to expropriate genetic material from
natural resources, medicinal plant systems, indigenous food systems,
and indigenous bio-agricultural systems, claiming that biodiversity is
for everyone. By that they mean who can first register patents for this
material. As a result of the patent system, the laboratories of large mul-
tinational seed companies and genetic banks are allowed to accumulate
and preserve biodiversity, and to enjoy a monopoly over its commercial
exploitation.
Consequently, the Convention devalues peasants’ and Indigenous
peoples’ knowledge because official economic measures of production
only count production for the market. Bioprospecting for biotechnol-
ogy ignores Indigenous peoples’ collective property and knowledge,
and the fact that they have been enjoying and using biological diversity
for millennia. It also ignores peasants’ contributions in the creation of
biodiversity.
Similar to WWF-C and MINAE, INBio uses the Convention’s frame-
work in ways that have harmed local residents.
Establishment of monopoly on local knowledge. In Costa Rica, in 1994,
INBio was granted rights with respect to conservation areas or state-
owned land in order to sell biodiversity to global industry. INBio
established a partnership with MINAE to collect samples from the con-
servation areas for interested industrial concerns. In the partnership
agreement, INBio and MINAE assume that the areas are common goods
in the hands of the state and bioprospecting is promoted as a model, as
an alternative to biopiracy. In exchange, INBio looked for customers
to purchase conservation area resources, proposed the use of scientific
knowledge to manage wild lands, generated financial opportunities,
 Convention on Biological Diversity 93

and promoted corporate ecology in territory planning. The tenth clause

of the partnership agreement stipulated that in cases of bioprospecting
research, INBio must contribute at least 10% of the original budget to
support the management and protection of the conservation area. Part
of this clause stated that any royalties awarded to INBio from successful
discoveries were to be shared fifty-fifty with MINAE for management
and conservation of the land.
INBio’s bioprospecting began with the appropriation of some of
the attributes of the non-human life forms that thrived in the conser-
vation areas. It hired daughters and sons from rural communities as
parataxonomists who initiated the collection using common local rural
knowledge. An official from the Ministry of Environment and Energy
(MINAE) who wished to remain anonymous made the following
observation:

A parataxonomist is a person (woman or man) with a deep love for nature.

Nature is part of her/his life and she or he feels emotion for it. She/he
knows that her/his work represents not just a salary, but important work
for the country in its intellectual growth. This person must necessarily be
from the rural area because there are many adverse factors, such as walk-
ing at night under heavy downpours to visit the hatch, with the added risk
of falling branches and snakebites. As a rural person, the parataxonomist
brings intimate knowledge of the ecosystem. In the work process, she/he
acquires information of the protected area and becomes an information
generator. (MINAE official, personal communication, August 1998)

Parataxonomist workers are necessarily from the local rural area

because they know how to avoid the many risks in prospecting. Most
importantly, as a rural person, the parataxonomist brings intimate
knowledge of the ecosystem. Parataxonomists are considered non-
specialists because they have no formal degree, although INBio uses
the parataxonomist’s knowledge to initiate every process. At INBio,
parataxonomists only receive a six-month intensive training course,
during which they acquire the philosophy and technology necessary
for participating in the project experience. They work at the biological
stations in the conservation area and bring their collections to INBio
on a monthly basis. Technicians then assign each specimen a barcode
and a label containing geographic data – family name, altitude, type of
weather, the collector’s name, and the date – and process and prepare the
material for taxonomic identification by the curator. Parataxonomists
94 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

and technicians receive feedback, planning, and guidance from INBio’s

curators. They work within a larger network of national and interna-
tional taxonomy experts.
INBio has a complex organizational structure to perform a variety of
functions, including cataloguing natural history data, producing field
guides and software, researching and disseminating information on
commercial possibilities to be extracted from the wild, and organizing
workshops. However, the only sector that is considered by biotechnol-
ogy to add value to biodiversity is the Biodiversity Prospecting Divi-
sion, where corporate scientists appropriate nature’s power and poten-
tial. Corporations are interested in identifying genes or cells that can be
reproduced to make drugs that could be worth a fortune in the global
economy. The manipulation of ecosystems for the exploitation of their
genes initiated in INBio’s laboratory is then further developed through
experiments in the laboratories of pharmaceutical, medical, and agri-
cultural companies of the industrial world (Mateo, 1997).
Privatization and facilitation of the property rights of multinational corpo-
rations for value added. INBio is a private institution that enjoys jurisdic-
tion over the prospecting, sampling, inventory, and commercialization
of the whole of Costa Rican biodiversity (Gudynas, 1997). It receives
donations from industry and participating core countries. Both the
donors and INBio seek to commercially exploit biodiversity, especially
from the rich rainforest, yet they do so under the guise of conserva-
tion. For instance, Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature funds were used
to set up a microbiology laboratory and associated labs that fragment
and extract essences of major interest to industry (INBio, 1995). These
labs extract a desired ingredient from other components of the organ-
ism. The process is repeated many times until an active component is
identified and isolated from the myriad of other components present in
the natural product. To cite another example, for decades scientists in
the industrial world have been attempting to isolate the active ingredi-
ents of the cannabis plant, which can provide medicinal relief for glau-
coma, multiple sclerosis, AIDS-related conditions, chronic pain, nausea
accompanying cancer chemotherapy, as well as other maladies. Despite
a large measure of success in the lab, many patients reject the manufac-
tured pharmaceutical product in favour of the original plant material.
Isolated active or mimetic products function poorly in comparison with
the same ingredient ingested with substances coexisting in the natural
plant. Nevertheless, millions of dollars continue to be poured into this
line of research.
 Convention on Biological Diversity 95

Although a prolific plunderer of nature, INBio appears to be less effi-

cient in the identification of nature’s secrets. INBio’s inventory division
houses tons of inert plants, leaves, dead butterflies, pieces of wood, and
microorganisms, which lie all over the floors, walls, and shelves of vari-
ous rooms, waiting to be catalogued. Only a very small proportion of
these species have been identified under their biological families, and
only a minority of those classified has been identified by genus or spe-
cies (Mateo, 1997). By the time INBio comes to discover the biotechno-
logical benefits and impacts, the institution may find that development
has destroyed the ecological niches in which species in its collections
had originally thrived.
Though INBio has a legislated monopoly on nature, Indigenous and
local knowledge, and profits, it has not shared these profits with those
whose knowledge and labour it has exploited. INBio has had agree-
ments with Bristol Myers Squibb, Recombinant Biocatalysts, Ana-
lyticom AG, Merck, INDENA (a phyto-pharmaceutical company in
Milan, Italy), Givaudan-Roure Fragrances of New Jersey (to identify
and collect interesting odours from forest organisms), British Technol-
ogy Group, Strathclyde Institute for Drug Research, and many others
(Gudynas, 1998; Mateo, 1997). With INBio’s first agreement in 1991,
Merck awarded INBio a $1.1 billion research budget to carry out a two-
year, non-exclusive collaboration.
Intellectual property law assures Merck exclusive rights over the
industrial use of plants, insects, and microorganisms. Under the terms
of the 1991 agreement with Merck, INBio used 90% of the funds for
research, certain start-up costs, and training four Costa Rican scientists
at Merck, while conservation areas received 10% of the original budget
to support their conservation efforts.
INBio is subject neither to public control and information disclosure,
nor to parliamentary control. Its negotiations with respect to Costa
Rican biodiversity are secret (E. Vargas, 1992). Under this kind of deal-
making, financial details of the contracts are hidden from the public.
INBio’s director has explicitly stated that under Costa Rican legisla-
tion, the agreement with Merck is not a public document, and there-
fore there is no reason for it to be approved by the Congress (Gamez,
as cited in Gudynas, 1997). Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) identified
two problems in the Merck-INBio agreement: the “poor sell cheap,” and
biodiversity belongs to a larger ecosystem. These authors assert that
“what INBio is selling is a service, the collection and preparation of a
large number of samples of biological diversity, samples of the plants,
96 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

insects and micro-organisms … and only pays the cost of collection by

‘parataxonomists’ (who possess their own knowledge, which they sell
cheap), and the cost of preparing the samples. … INBio does not pay the
direct cost of establishing and guarding the natural parks, nor the costs
of maintaining these wildlife reserves” (p. 119). These authors conclude
that as a result, the ecological market cannot be an effective instrument
of environmental policy (Guha & Martinez-Alier, 1997).

Resisting Sustainable Development

Within the Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature agreement, INBio orga-

nized a conference in 1998 between some business-oriented Indigenous
people from Canada and some subsistence-oriented Indigenous people
from Costa Rica. The Indigenous people from Canada told the Costa
Ricans that they could help them defend themselves, and at the same
time, reap the benefits from biodiversity negotiations. The Talamanca
Indigenous People, who saw biodiversity as priceless and therefore as
non-negotiable, answered: “We do not want to know about making busi-
ness with biodiversity, we are happy living like we are. What we want is
just to keep and use the land, with the knowledge our ancestors handed
down to us” (INBio worker, personal communication, July 1999).
Similar to Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, the knowledge produced
by peasants’ traditional selection and improvement of plants has
become invisible. Because this knowledge is not monetized, it is not
included in the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA).
But biodiversity is not an exclusive product of nature; peasants have
actively bred and improved traditional plants and medicines, and they
continue to identify and produce genetic material of great value, by
developing local varieties. These materials reflect the creativity, inven-
tiveness, and value of peasants’ production knowledge.
In the Arenal Conservation Area, some peasants and Indigenous
people still manage to live a traditional lifestyle and work in groups
because of the risks of bites from poisonous snakes, broken legs, and
rolling boulders ejected from the Arenal Volcano. But the separation of
people from nature has created a sense of disorder, alienation, fragmen-
tation, and uncertainty.
According to some women in La Fortuna interviewed in 1999, their
husbands were seen as enemies of the state because they did not have
the money to pay the fees required by recently enacted laws. Because
they could not afford to pay for licences to hunt, animal protein was
 Convention on Biological Diversity 97

missing from family diets, resulting in malnourishment. In 1995, hunted

food accounted for almost half of their families’ daily needs (Male hunter,
personal communication, August 1999). By 1999, when they hunted and
fished for survival, self-sufficient local people were labelled as criminals,
even though, they argued, their hunting methods were less harmful than
those used by outsiders who could afford the required fees. Traditional
hunters are skilled ecological managers of their own local resources; they
know, for example, about the tepezcuintle (paca), a forest rodent and valu-
able game species weighing from six to ten kilogrammes, which bears
offspring twice a year. In his interview, the same hunter pointed out that
while locals hunt male pacas, they leave the females for reproduction.
Community members resisted bans on the hunting of tepezcuintle and
other animals because by paying a fee the rich can hunt while poor local
residents are prohibited from doing so. A male hunter reported:

If ACA-MINAE stops selling licenses for hunting to the rich who can pay,
I will stop hunting, because I will see that it is not just the poor who have
to conserve wildlife. I can live happy if this inequality stops. If they permit
hunting to the rich but bother the poor, I cannot be happy. I can see rich
hunters drinking in bars, while in their station wagon dogs bark and dead
tepezcuintles hang in baskets. They are openly showing off the proceeds
of their hunting. But if I have a tepezcuintle in a bag, MINAE confiscates it
from me, and if I do not confront them I also risk losing my dogs, because
I do not have a car and I am walking. That is the reason why we do not
stop hunting. Why is it that those who have money can hunt and those
who are poor must become “conservationists”? (Male hunter, personal
communication, August 1999)

Fishing was also outlawed: “We fish with arbaleta [spear] in Embalse
Arenal. We believe that this is the only legal fishing because I choose
the fish I want. I won’t fish a small fish; I will fish a big one. MINAE
disagrees with our methods. MINAE prefers the use of fishing poles.
With that instrument I cannot differentiate which fish is adult or young.
Because we do not pay fees, fishing is also prohibited for us; thus, we
must hide from the control unit” (Male hunter, personal communica-
tion, August 1999).
Hunters and fishermen strongly defended their rights to the land and
water resources on the grounds that they have been doing so forever
without harm to the land. These restrictions have stimulated a great
deal of resistance in ACA-Tilaran and the Guanacaste Conservation
98 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Area (GCA), which borders it. GCA is the consolidation of three

national parks and several reserves into one large (153,000 hectares)
management unit within the park’s boundaries. The 1,430-square-
kilometre park is managed by MINAE and BioGuanacaste, a private
NGO, using debt-for-nature swaps. Within GCA, Daniel Janzen (Con-
servation International, 2008), a US citizen and professor of biology at
the University of Pennsylvania, manages the Santa Rosa National Park.
Janzen argues that only biologists have the competence to decide how
the tropical landscape should be used. He was also an INBio adviser.
In Guanacaste, hunters who have lost their means of survival have ini-
tiated a campaign against national symbols. On 9 May 2001, at 1:25 a.m.,
“illegal hunters,” as the Costa Rican government calls them, allegedly
burned La Casona de Santa Rosa in Guanacaste in retaliation for their
loss of livelihood. La Casona represented slavery built by William Walker,
a US citizen slave-owner, and a 1955 historical power struggle between
President José Figueres Ferrer and ex-President Dr. Rafael Angel Calde-
rón Guardia’s partisans. This symbolic act revealed the existence of these
traditional local hunters and their status as a marginal segment within
society. Then Minister of the Environment, Elizabeth Odio, acknowl-
edged that the hunters were acting in retaliation to being harassed by
park guards when hunting deer and other species (Loaiza & Zeledon,
2001). But the Costa Rican government refused to accept the survival
claims of subsistence hunters and instead criminalized their response.
Two hunters were convicted and sent to prison, Geovanny Mora Cruz,
forty-one years old, and Roy Calvo Barquero, twenty-two years old
(Arguedas, 2001). According to the police Judicial Investigation Organiza-
tion (Organismo de Investigacion Judicial, or OIJ), Mora had violated the
Wildlife Conservation Law in May 1993, February 1995, and May 2000. He
had been declared a criminal for hunting in the conservation area. Calvo
saw his family’s livelihood disappear and witnessed MINAE harassing
his father every time he hunted. He was also accused of participating in an
attack on a park guard in May 2000 (Loaiza & Zeledon, 2001). I was unable
to obtain information on what fate had befallen the jailed men.

Conclusion

The Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992 has consummated the

plunder of biodiversity. It changed the meaning of biodiversity and
assured the flow of genes from the undeveloped South to the techno-
logically advanced industrial North, with little or no compensation.
 Convention on Biological Diversity 99

The WWF-C formulation of the Land Plan transformed wildlife into a

mere resource for genes. The science of the Land Plan, in fact, reprivat-
ized part of the land for the exclusive purpose of carrying out research
on genetic material. The commercial interests of industry and corporate
NGOs put conservation areas that enclose reserves of genetic material
under pressure, creating the conditions for the misappropriation of
nature and the local folkloric knowledge of plants and animals. As land
rights were removed from small farms and placed into the hands of
government, competition for inventory and prospecting began in the
conservation areas.
Bioprospecting for bioproducts has transformed Costa Rica. With
the advent of biotechnology, the biophysical world of genetics can be
owned. Molecular biologists have described genes as keys to the blue-
prints of the organism. The potential for gene separation and manipu-
lation reduces an organism to its genetic components, but molecular
biologists for the most part seem unable to understand or explain envi-
ronmental and social crises. Instead, this reductionism to the lower
levels – the genes – has granted power to atomized fragments that
are patented. INBio’s laboratory initiates the manipulation of Costa
Rican ecosystems to optimize a single component of gene exploitation,
which is then further developed through INBio’s technology partners;
for example, INBio and Merck are shareholders in the research of new
pharmaceutical products. Supposedly, if Merck patents mimetic prod-
ucts, INBio will receive an equal share and MINAE will receive roy-
alties. If INBio and Merck are shareholders there is no trespass upon
the ownership of biodiversity. This relocated power and value is trans-
ferred from periphery to core.
These acts of sustainable development expropriate public knowl-
edge without compensation. In carrying them out, WWF-C and INBio
became firmly established as participants in biopiracy. This transfor-
mation of nature into a commodity has robbed communities of their
means of livelihood. Living organisms became raw material and living
knowledge linked to first-hand sensuous experience of these organ-
isms is eliminated. Local communities are impoverished. Their work of
centuries as the keepers of nature has no value, while scientific labour
is perceived to add value. While biotechnology dispossessed peasants
and Indigenous communities from their oral traditional knowledge,
Chapter 5 shows how the selling of forest as carbon credits dispos-
sessed them from their land and their forest.
5 Forests and Peasants’ Loss of Access

The aim of this chapter is to establish who pays the price of carbon cred-
its, and to make the argument that by introducing carbon credits, the
Kyoto Protocol launched a reconceptualization of the world’s rainfor-
ests. It also looks at the crisis of nature in the context of global warming
as well as the crisis and resistance from the peasant communities.
Since Kyoto, rainforests have been valued economically in terms of
the amount of carbon they sequester. As carbon emissions became sub-
ject to trading on the open market, the rainforests in Costa Rica became
valued as carbon sinks. Costa Rica was the first country to package
the UN Joint Implementation Program (United Nations, Framework
Convention on Climate Change, 2005). After the ECODES Conference
in 1988, it voluntarily collaborated to achieve emission reductions by
selling carbon credits. In February 1995, Costa Rica approved three
projects – Carfix, Ecoland, and Amisconde – and in the second round
of negotiations under the Climate Change Convention, it presented ten
additional projects.
Governments first agreed to tackle climate change at the Earth Sum-
mit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Scientific theories have asserted that forest
vegetation absorbs and stores carbon that might otherwise trap heat in
the atmosphere, thereby driving up temperatures and accelerating the
pace of climate change (Lohmann, 2005). Selling forests to act as carbon
sinks to reduce any greenhouse effects, by absorbing carbon dioxide
from the overflowing waste of industrial countries, has become part
of the sustainable development agenda. At the Climate Change Con-
vention held in Kyoto in 1997, industrial countries proposed creating
mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol
was the follow-up to the United Nations Framework Convention on
 Access to Forests 101

Figure 5.1 Teak Monoculture Plantations as Carbon Sinks (Courtesy of

Sonia Torres)

Climate Change (UNFCCC), which set a non-binding goal of stabilizing

emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. Among the six kinds of gases
targeted for reduction is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is discharged
more by the industrial world than by the so-called underdeveloped
world. However, reducing gas emissions would entail high costs for
industries. The major emitting corporations, with the backing of their
governments, proposed a self-interested solution: create a global mar-
ket in carbon dioxide and oxygen, focused on the forests of indebted
countries. It was easier to create a global air market in indebted coun-
tries, because they need to generate revenue to pay their foreign debt.
According to the scheme of the Climate Change Convention, countries
or industries that manage to reduce carbon emissions to levels below
their designated limits would be able to sell their credits to other coun-
tries or industries that exceed their emission levels (The United Nations,
1994). Following the protocol, a clean development fund evolved into
the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) (United Nations, n.d.). The
102 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

mechanism has two objectives: to assist developing countries in achiev-

ing sustainable development to prevent dangerous climate change; and
to assist the industrial world to meet part of their caps using carbon
credits from CDM emission reduction projects in developing countries,
wherever a carbon sink is cheaper to produce.
Most Kyoto signatories failed to meet their greenhouse-gas reduc-
tion targets. Replacing the Kyoto Protocol were the Reducing Emis-
sions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) programs, officially
launched in 2008 as a UN initiative in coordination with the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Environment Program
(UNEP). In maldeveloped countries, REDD has the same goals as the
Kyoto Protocol, which is to generate an economic value from forests,
cast in a role as carbon sinks.
Since the industrial world is not held responsible for mitigating its
emissions, this type of solution allows the industrial world to con-
tinue polluting as long as it can purchase carbon credits from indebted
rainforest-dense countries. Meanwhile, energy-related emissions pro-
duced by the increase in the amounts of coal and oil burned, mainly in
the industrial world, proceed unimpeded.

Costs of the Kyoto Protocol

Costa Rica was the first country to enter the carbon sinks business
because its ecological policy was organized and implemented by
USAID and foreign NGOs during the 1988 ECODES Conference (see
Chapter 2). In 1991, Costa Rica initiated a bilateral debt-for-nature
transaction with the United States under the Enterprise for the Amer-
icas Initiative. This project had a $12,600 budget cost; $2,500 of pri-
vate funds leverage, with an unknown face-value reduction of debt;
$26,000 in conservation funds generated; and sixteen years’ duration
(Sheikh, 2007, p. 12). In 1994, Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figue-
res Olsen and U.S vice president Al Gore signed a Letter of Intent for
Sustainable Development, Cooperation, and Joint Implementation
(PEN, 1996). In 1995, the Joint Implementation opened an office in
the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), with the support
of three NGOs: Fundación para el Desarrollo de la Cordillera Vol-
canica Central (FUNDECOR) (the Foundation for the Development
of the Cordillera Central); Coalición Costarricense de Iniciativas
para el Desarrollo (CINDE) (the Costa Rica Investment Promotion
 Access to Forests 103

Agency); and Asociación Costarricense de Productores de Energía

(ACOPE) (the Costa Rican Association of Producers of Energy). Dur-
ing the Figueres administration (1994–8), forestry law no. 7575 and
the decree daj-d-039-98 were signed to regulate payments for envi-
ronmental services. Certification for forest conservation is currently
legislated by Articles 46 and 69 of the forestry law, which are under
the jurisdiction of MINAE. In 1995, the government of Costa Rica
signed agreements for forest conservation, management, reforesta-
tion, and the sale of environmental services to Norway, Germany, the
Netherlands, and Mexico, and initiated contacts with Canada and
Japan (PEN, 1996, p. 129). In February 1997 and in May of that same
year Costa Rica’s first chief technology officers sold carbon credits on
Wall Street (Alpizar, 1997).
The Kyoto Protocol included a sustainable development discourse
for reducing climate change by altering the use of the soil through refor-
estation, in order to capture atmospheric CO2. Consequently, it created a
framework for “certified tradable offsets,” in which the environmental
benefits that forests and forestry plantations produce should be paid for
by the beneficiaries (i.e., the industrial countries), thus increasing the
income of those who own the reforested land (World Resources Insti-
tute, 1998).
In the sustainable development framework, forests have become nat-
ural capital for sale on Wall Street and other financial markets, but in
reality they are much more. In the forest, trees and other plant life are
an essential mechanism for flood control. Trees are connected directly to
each other through the multitude of creatures that depend on them for
food, shelter, or nesting places; through their shared access to water, air
and sunlight; and through an underground system of fungi that links
all the trees as a superorganism. Rainforest peoples are also members
of this superorganism.
Vandana Shiva, in referring to the Chipko Movement, an Indian anti-
deforestation movement, has argued that there are two paradigms of
forestry, one life-enhancing, the other life-destroying (1989, p. 76). The
first emerges from the forest and the feminine principle and creates a
sustainable, renewable forest system, supporting and replenishing food
and water sources; the other emerges from the factory and the market,
with its primary objective the maintenance of conditions for renew-
ability and maximized profits. From this perspective, the carbon credit
project in Costa Rica is clearly life-destroying, for it has created a crisis
of nature and a crisis for peasants.
104 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Crises of Nature

Both Costa Ricans and the international aid community are subsidizing
a new arboreal monoculture of introduced species for commercial export
in the name of sustainability, while drastically reducing the diversity of
pre-existing ecosystems. Costa Rica’s forests are home to hundreds of
species, but the scheme to sell oxygen or carbon credits is transforming
the rainforest biomass. Through MINAE, the Costa Rican government
sets a value for commercial wood. It also appraises the ability of private
forest farms to sell carbon credits, particularly promoted by large-scale
agricultural entrepreneurs in association with international corpora-
tions. This commercially produced wood has encouraged monocultural
tree planting. Lands categorized as forest reserves, which receive envi-
ronmental service payments, are exempted from property tax. This tax
relief, under a scheme called Fiscal Forestry Incentives (FFI), is used to
subsidize international business-owned plantations to promote foreign
forest species of high yield and great market acceptance, such as gme-
lina (gmelina arborea, used by Ston Forestall, a US corporation) and teak
(tectona grand, used by Bosques Puerto Carrillo, a US corporation, and
by Maderas de Costa Rica S.A., or MACORI, now Precious Woods Ltd.,
a Swiss corporation). These trees are native to south and southeastern
Asia. Arboreal monoculture has been defined in this system as refores-
tation, even though these plantations constitute artificial ecosystems,
and corporations are allowed to cut the trees down after fifteen years
of growth and transform them into wood for floors or paper, boxes for
fruit export, or furniture. With credit provided by the World Bank, the
Costa Rican government enthusiastically promoted the conversion of
forest ecosystems into sterile monocultures by planting homogeneous
forests (Baltodano, 2004; Figuerola, 2005).
Between 1996 and 2001, 121,000 to 147,000 hectares of foreign tree spe-
cies were planted in Costa Rica. Fifty per cent of the species were gme-
lina and teak (De Camino et al., 2000; PEN, 1996; MINAE, 2001; Moya,
2004; Sage & Quirós, 2001); the rest were eucalyptus. By 2005, the area
of this monoculture had expanded to 380,000 hectares (Arias & Murillo,
2005). From the beginning, several controversies surged around envi-
ronmental services. Between 1990 and 1994, according to the official
annual rate of deforestation, the average annual rate of deforestation
was reduced to 15,600 hectares; in 1995 it was further reduced to 8,000
hectares and, in 1996, to 7,000 hectares (PEN, 1996). However, the offi-
cial statistics were disputed by Rodriguez and Segura (ibid., p. 126),
 Access to Forests 105

who argued that the estimation of the forested area is controversial,

owing to different methodologies and definitions used. They maintain
that the real annual rate of deforestation is double that claimed by state
institutions.
Ecologists from Costa Rica are opposed to paying environmental
services to arboreal monoculture, because a monoculture is not a for-
est; a monoculture does not reproduce itself but rather needs external
inputs such as agrochemicals to grow to maturity (Shiva, 1989). Many
biologists and forestry engineers were not against selling environmen-
tal services; instead, they promoted reforestation through the natural
and simple regeneration of secondary forests, which conserve biodi-
versity and regulate hydrology (Figuerola, 2003; Franceschi, 2006).
They argued that conservation of forests with native wood species and
associated plants and fauna should be a priority, that restoration and
natural regeneration, with its own ecological complexity, is a legitimate
goal, and that local peasants must be taken into consideration to avoid
irreconciliable conflicts.
Jorge Lobo (2003), a professor at the University of Costa Rica, says the
practice of cutting trees and vegetation on plantations in the service of
monoculture can be highly damaging to soil carbon, which is important
to the carbon mass existing in the ecosystem. He argues that “it is ridic-
ulous to promote carbon fixation as an environmental service separated
from the other ecosystem services and properties” (p. 7). Large-scale
commercial arboreal monocultures applied chemical fertilizers on a
massive scale, with negative effects on soil fertility, water retention, and
biological diversity. Javier Baltodano (2003), an environmentalist, notes
that “a large part of tree monocultures are set in forested grounds, some
with a variety of primary tree species that remain biologically active
(they provide food for wildlife, they exchange genetic material with
surrounding populations, etc.). If the plantation facilitates the felling of
these primary trees, then it would be damaging one of the environmen-
tal services (biodiversity conservation) for which they are paid” (p. 4).
Most monoculture plantations have been established in primary for-
est areas that were biologically active and providing food to animals,
plants, and people. These monoculture tree farms first required the
removal of all native trees and vegetation, which augments the extrac-
tion of nutrients and devastates the soil’s productive capacity. It also
damages the genomes, which are the entirety of an organism’s heredi-
tary information. Juan Figuerola (2003), a forestry engineer, makes the
following point about arboreal monoculture: “At the time of the harvest
106 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

the land is devastated by the initial uprooting, which also destroys

underbrush, epiphytes, nests, dens, fauna, and soils. The incipient bio-
diversity is exterminated before it can begin. The soils remain exposed
to erosion by the sun, rain and wind” (p. 11).
This means that under the forest management model, thousands of
old trees and slow growth native trees have been reduced to fragments.
Therefore, the diversity of forests has been compromised and reduced
(Figuerola 2003).
The monoculture of tree species has become a time bomb for biodi-
versity in Costa Rica. The natural forest of the humid tropics is a highly
productive ecosystem. A hectare of tropical forest has more than three
hundred species of trees. Biodiversity means that a forest will have a
great number of leguminosae (trees, shrubs, plants) with leaves of differ-
ent sizes, which lessen the impact of rainfall and prevent erosion. Sonia
Torres, a forestry engineer, explains how teak plantations have resulted
in the erosion of flatlands:

Since the planting of these foreign species, I have observed that teak has a
root system that grows deep into the soil, but in the rainforest the systems
of nutrient and water absorption are at the surface. In general, nutrients
and water are concentrated at a depth of between 70 and 100 centimetres.
As a result, teak trees are encircled by flaked soil. In addition, when it
rains, the large-sized leaf accumulates great amounts of water that then
pours violently onto the soil. A drop of water, at a microscopic level, forms
a crater; when water falls from 15 metres or more it forms holes. Water
descending on soft soil destroys the soil. The far-reaching spread of the
roots and the shade produced by the leaves obstruct the vegetative growth
on the lower forest layer, which could prevent the soil damage from the
violent cascades. (S. Torres, personal interview, August 2000)

Torres advocates the planting and protection of domestic tree species

that can also feed the Indigenous population, animals, and bacteria.
With monoculture, plants that used to feed the rural population have
turned into unwanted trees, and agrochemicals are destroying the fish
culture as lakes and rivers are contaminated.
From a biological point of view, the sustainable development of car-
bon credits has facilitated a model in which the forest, rich in biodi-
versity and a source of goods and services, has been reduced to wood
for paper and floors. In commercial forestry, the only useful part is the
biomass that produces the profitable species. The issue for Costa Ricans
 Access to Forests 107

is to plant ecologically appropriate trees. Thus, the argument against

monocultural plantation is that it has produced degradation, deforesta-
tion, water contamination, and soil erosion. There is even the possibil-
ity of native species contamination with illness or an invasion of non-
native plants that could damage the ecosystem irreparably.
Further, this kind of reforestation has been unable to be self-sustaining
financially and has deepened Costa Rica’s colonization and dependence
on funding from the World Bank and creditor countries. Thus, monocul-
ture tree plantations are not meant to protect the environment but to make
profits from the sale of carbon credits. And making profits from carbon
credits in Wall Street necessarily has meant simplifying the structure of
the forest and accelerating the natural cycle of its growth, with the aim of
producing more quickly inexpensive lumber and pulp for paper.

Expropriation of Peasants’ Land

In 1996, to comply with a letter of intent for establishing a sustain-

able development, cooperation and joint implementation of a debt-
for-nature system, President Jose Maria Figueres signed a decree,
Forestry Law No. 7575. He also put into effect Article No. 2, on land
expropriation:

Article No. 2 – Expropriation to Empower the Executive Branch, through

the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), to establish protected
wildlife areas on private land, irrespective of their current management
category (land use). … These lands may be voluntarily integrated into
wilderness areas protected or purchased directly when there is agreement
between parties. Otherwise, they will be expropriated in accordance with
the procedure under the Expropriations Act, no. 7495 of 3 May 1995 and
its Reforms. When, on scientific and technical evidence in the public inter-
est, it is determined by law that the land is essential for preserving bio-
diversity or water resources, this shall be constituted a limitation to the
property that will prevent cutting down trees and change of land use. The
property owner must register this restriction in the Public Registry. The
State will give priority to the expropriation of the land. (Ley Forestal, 1996)

Since then, acts of dispossession and plunder are reframed as initiatives to

advance conservation. The state’s project of selling carbon credits has meant
expropriating land from small- and medium-sized landholders, in most
cases without compensation to the owners. By August 1999, according to
108 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

La Nación, the government owed $100 million to evicted small farmers.

Around that time, it offered to pay them $6,703.45 per hectare (Vizcaíno,
1999). In 2001, the Costa Rican Minister of the Environment, Elizabeth Odio,
openly admitted not paying for land expropriation: “A symbol of pride of
Costa Ricans, the national parks constitute a unique model in the world,
which offer innumerable benefits to society in particular and the planet in
general, but they are in a critical situation due to the lack of resources to give
them sustainability and cancel the debt to the former property owners whose
lands were expropriated or frozen for the sake of conservation” (Odio, 2001).
Costa Rican experts recommended that instead of paying for arboreal
monoculture, Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento Forestal (FONAFITO)
(the National Forestry Financing Fund), a MINAE office, should finan-
cially compensate peasants who have been protecting or recuperating
degraded areas, in order to augment their livelihood and facilitate their
productivity. They believed that peasants’ knowledge could help recu-
perate thousands of hectares that had been eroded, stop the destruction
of water sources, and reconnect fragmented forests (Baltodano, 2004;
Figuerola, 2005).
The Kyoto Protocol has become an instrument to expand poverty.
Under the Forestry Incentive Programs (FIP), ACA-Tilaran receives,
evaluates, and approves the terms of the program and promotes and
compensates forest plantation owners. FIP recognizes small farmers
(finca owners) as providers, who are eligible to receive payments for
the environmental services they provide. In this system, MINAE gives
peasant landowners $50 dollars per hectare, in recognition of the envi-
ronmental services generated from privately owned lands. These pay-
ments are short-term, usually contracted for five years. These short-
term contracts give rise to insecurity among farm owners. In addition,
tree plantations require ten to fifteen years to grow before any income
can be obtained. Peasants, however, are annual cash croppers, and cash
crops are their only source of income and livelihood. But the law on
land expropriation prevents or dissuades peasants from changing the
land use. If they have a contract to produce carbon credits, peasants
cannot use their land for short-term income or subsistence production
because their land can be expropriated with or without compensation.
Expropriation in Costa Rica is not new. For instance, in the Arenal
Volcano area peasants’ land was expropriated in 1977 and declared
a forestry reserve, with five hectares used by the Costa Rican Hydro
Institute (ICE) to build the Arenal Hydroelectric Project. It transformed
the lives of the local people. Countless numbers of peasants who had
 Access to Forests 109

organized their lives by clearing land for agricultural production and

pasture around the Arenal Basin were thrown off the land. In 1990, at
the Costa Rica’s Supreme Court (Division IV of the judicial system), an
injunction (recurso de amparo) reports heavy losses suffered by peasants
who lived around the Arenal Volcano. They lost land, pasture, houses,
dairies, and roads. Their personal effects, such as cars and small electri-
cal appliances, were taken by the commercial banks when they could
not afford to repay their agricultural loans (Monestel Arce, 1999). For-
mer property owners became hut renters (ranchos) or slum inhabitants
(tugurios) in the capital city. But in 1994, MINAE changed the Arenal
Volcano category from Forestry Reserve to National Park, by Decree
No. 23774, extending its area from five hectares to more than twelve
thousand hectares. This expansion completed the expulsion of peas-
ants. Monestel argues some of the expelled families returned to the
land to plant yucca, beans, corn, and other subsistence foods. It was
declared that they had broken the law, and they were thrown in jail in
Tilaran (Monestel Arce, 1999). According to ICE, in 1991, the govern-
ment, through ICE, created a trust fund to pay for the land of those
evicted, at prices determined by the government. ICE, which was offi-
cially in charge of the Arenal Basin, in an effort to disassociate itself
from the trouble created by MINAE, made public that it granted 200
million colones (US$1 million) in bonds to pay for the 1977 expropriated
land (Obregon, 1999).
FIP also recognizes conservation areas as sellers of carbon credits. For
example, the ACA-Tilaran national parks, such as the Arenal Volcano
National Park, and forestry reserves, such as Cerro Chato, sell oxygen.
One can imagine why the Arenal Volcano extension was changed.

Resisting Dispossession

From the 1981 external debt crisis, and the 1990s implementation of the
neoliberal political ecology, peasants became cannon fodder in the face
of sustainable development policies that consider them and their con-
crete needs to be obstacles to reducing carbon emissions, a process that
will supposedly “benefit all mankind.” For rural women, peasants, and
Indigenous peoples, the living forest provides the means for sustain-
able food production, basic necessities, nutrition, overall good health,
and dignity. The redefinition of the rainforest as an oxygen generator,
by expropriating or diminishing the capacities of the forest to sustain
its dwellers – whether people, animal, plant, or bacteria – destroys the
110 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

rainforest and its accompanying traditional sustainable ways of living,

thus creating in its wake real material poverty and misery.
The 1996 expropriation law left thousands of peasants without land
and without money, because they were not paid for their expropriated
land. Communities that used to live off the forest were declared ene-
mies of the rainforest. In 1996, La Cuenca de Aguas Claras in Guana-
caste, now part of Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area, was declared
a forestry reserve and the land was expropriated. In July 2001, at a
public town hall meeting there, more than two hundred farmers, men
and women, were present and ready to be interviewed. The attendees
chose two men, Abel Fuentes and Luis Guimo, to speak on their behalf.
According to Mr. Fuentes, MINAE had said that their “survival way of
life is producing deforestation and pollution, and reducing the water
level of La Cuenca de Aguas Claras. MINAE exaggerated the level of
deforestation to oust almost all the inhabitants because it is reforesting
our land in order to sell the oxygen to other countries and get dona-
tions” (A. Fuentes, personal communication, July 2001).
Peasants throughout Costa Rica understand that land has been
expropriated by the government in exchange for crumbs of money
from international markets, while they have been abandoned. In Aguas
Claras, MINAE’s argument for expropriating farmers’ land was based
on the claim of water scarcity in the area and the resulting need for
reforestation. Mr. Fuentes had seen the forced eviction of the rainforest
dwellers and the breaking of the regenerative cycle of life. The forced
eviction of peasants for carbon credits was destroying sustainable ways
of living of entire communities, he said:

Until 1996, in La Cuenca de Aguas Calientes, three hundred families lived

there and the land was organized as follows: 70% was pastureland, hold-
ing around two thousand cows; 10% primary forest; and 20% combined
secondary forest with farmland, which was used for beans and pig pro-
duction. By 2001, we were only three families; the majority was forced into
exile. And the land has been reorganized as follows: 90% is primary and
secondary forest; 10% is pastureland with less than two hundred cows;
and land to produce beans has been eliminated. (A. Fuentes, personal
communication, July 2001)

Moreover, Mr. Fuentes said that the 1996 expropriation law had vio-
lated his rights and his community’s rights, and that as soon as the
law was made public, some farmers and landowners went to MINAE’s
 Access to Forests 111

office to get more detailed information about it: “The government

denied our right to know the law. When we requested a copy of it, a rep-
resentative of MINAE showed us a giant book, saying that he couldn’t
give us a copy, because the decree was so large. However, later, one of
our members found the legislation on the Internet and printed it on just
a few pages” (A. Fuentes, personal communication, July 2001).
In the forest, contacting a neighbour takes peasants several days and
finding a phone takes weeks; so searching for a document on the Inter-
net is a very difficult task. Mr. Luis Guimo added:

When we ask MINAE officials for information, they decide when and where
we can get it. When we propose a meeting, they decide when and where we
can meet, then they change the hour, the date, or they cancel the meeting
without telling us. Many of us live far from the meeting place and sometimes
we have to ride a horse for three hours to go to a meeting and it is disap-
pointing to arrive and learn that the meeting has been cancelled. (L. Guimo,
personal communication, July 2001)

The eviction of rainforest dwellers was also justified by claims that

displaced people would find employment in the cities. Rural Costa
Rican women know that the ideology where cities purportedly offer
rich opportunities for well-paid jobs and upward mobility is a myth.
Table 5.1 presents female unemployment as a percentage of the female
labour force among 15- to 24-year-olds. It shows that in 2011, the rate
was at 21.60, its highest level of unemployment over the past twenty-
one years. The lowest level was 9.50, in 1992 and 1993, at the beginning
of the greening process. Female labour in rural areas is not counted as
work, therefore their employment or unemployment is not included in
the nation statistics. As they leave rural areas and join the unemployed
in the cities, they are counted as “problems” for the government. Since
1994, young female unemployment has been rising systematically. For
more background on young women’s economic status, see Chapter 6.
The theft of the forest from local communities who have used it
to sustain themselves for centuries has become a death sentence for
small- and medium-sized landholders. Peasants know that their human
rights have been violated, both by MINAE and by organizations that
call themselves environmentalists. As Mr. Guimo stated: “They used to
come to us for information, and we provided it. I personally boarded
people and allowed them to use my horses to move about comfortably.
Things are changing, we cannot collaborate any more. MINAE told me
112 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 5.1 Youth Unemployment among

Females, Ages 15–24 (in %)

Year Percentage

1990 10.00
1991 13.20
1992 9.50
1993 9.50
1994 11.10
1995 13.00
1996 16.30
1997 16.00
1998 17.10
1999 16.00
2000 14.50
2001 16.40
2002 17.20
2003 18.00
2004 18.50
2005 21.50
2006 19.50
2007 14.80
2008 13.40
2010 20.90
2011 21.60

Source: IndexMundi, (n.d)

that I have to sell my finca to the state at the price the state decides. We
are not leaving. They have to kill us if they want our land” (L.Guimo,
personal communication, July 2001).

Conclusion

According to the Kyoto Protocol, tropical forest ecosystems naturally

provide benefits in the form of environmental services, meaning that
forest vegetation absorbs and stores carbon. This non-material world
has become an important area for capital accumulation. As a result,
Costa Rica has emerged as one of the pioneer countries selling the
 Access to Forests 113

environmental properties of the rainforest. Through international cov-

enants, it organized conservation, management of forests, and refores-
tation with the goal of exporting the resultant commodities.
In 1996, the Figueres administration signed a forestry law to regulate
the government payments for environmental services. Environmental
services are particularly promoted among large-scale arboreal mono-
culture entrepreneurs, who also benefit from tax relief under Fiscal
Forestry Incentives (FFI). FFI reforestation involves international cor-
porations using foreign forest species of high yield and great market
acceptance, such as melina, eucalyptus, and teca. Under FIP, MINAE
receives, evaluates, and approves the terms of the program and pro-
motes and compensates owners of forestry plantations. When the trees
reach the age of ten to fifteen years, the corporations, or the finca owners
selling the environmental services, can apply for authorization to fell
the trees and subsequently sell the wood products and by-products.
Several controversies surged around environmental services, partic-
ularly regarding large-scale arboreal monoculture. Rapid reforestation
designed for international markets does not produce a forest. There was
discussion around whether a tree area should remain under wooded
coverage for a longer period in order to be considered as a reforested
area. Also the methods of reforestation using high levels of agrochemi-
cals were contentious.
Article No. 2 of the forestry law, on expropriation, ignores the mate-
rial reality that peasants are annual cash croppers, their only source of
income and livelihood. As a result of expropriation, thousands of peas-
ants were dispossessed from their land and left without money. The
individual peasant, a responsible entrepreneur in a neoliberal age, as
a provider of environmental services, is seen as personally responsible
for his or her life. Costa Rica’s state participation in selling carbon cred-
its is pushing peasants into a situation of desperate survival, compel-
ling to them to participate in transferring control of their self-sufficient
lifestyle.
As is shown in Chapter 6, the same push for so-called sustainable
development that set a portion of the land for carbon credits also
manages the landscapes and scenery for ecotourism and recreational
potential.
6 Ecotourism and Social Development

Chapter 6 discusses the profound economic, social, and political

transformations visited upon Costa Rica and its inhabitants, particu-
larly Costa Rican women and children, since the 1992 Earth Sum-
mit in Rio de Janeiro. Mainstream environmentalism, organized by
white males in Costa Rica, has been dominated by a patriarchal male
hierarchy that aims to enclose “wild areas” (nature and women) for
recreation. Critics see ecotourism as an extension of the commodifica-
tion of modern life and an integral part of modern consumer culture.
Ecotourism sells the whole country, including its biodiversity, cul-
ture, and identity, and involves the high-volume movement of people
over long distances, which can have a violent impact on vulnerable
people or communities, or on species and their habitats (Pleumaron,
1999). Ecotourism also results in the sale of women and children,
offering Costa Rica to tourists as a paradise destination. This chapter
presents the crisis of nature and the crises of women and children in
this context.
Following the new connections made between development and the
environment, new areas of global intervention opened up, and nature
entered the domain of politics. Among these new areas of interven-
tion was the connection between tourism and nature, or ecotourism.
Ecotourism is promoted as an activity that contributes to economic
growth and generates income for local communities while purport-
edly protecting the environment. It is endorsed as an environmentally
friendly, sustainable, and nature-based activity that promotes visits to
relatively undisturbed natural areas to study, admire, and appreciate
the scenery, wild plants and animals, and other cultural aspects such as
medicinal plants (Ulloa, 1996a). It offers rainforests, parks, sun, beaches,
 Ecotourism and Social Development  115

Figure 6.1  Arenal Volcano National Park (Photo courtesy the author)

mountains, and Indigenous knowledge. Ecotourism promoters prom-

ise aesthetic and recreational benefits that will restore visitors’ physi-
cal, emotional, and spiritual health, in a world of leisure, freedom, and
good taste, risk free for those with money to spend, while simultane-
ously politically empowering and economically advancing some of the
most disadvantaged groups in society: peasants, rural women, and
Indigenous peoples. Although there are various destinations for tour-
ism, ecotourism becomes even more serious issue since it is explicitly
linked with conservation.
For national governments and international lenders, ecotourism
means a generally positive reputation in the nature conservation indus-
try, as well as foreign exchange to pay debts. Ecotourism is classified
as an export industry, since international markets are typically tapped
to generate foreign exchange and investments. By the early 1990s,
under pressure from the IMF, the World Bank, and ECODES (see Chap-
ter 2), indebted Costa Rica had become the most important ecotourism
destination in Latin America. Since then, Costa Rica has become the
first country to adopt travel and ecotourism as a strategic economic
116 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

development and employment priority in the hope that it would bring

foreign exchange and investment to repay its foreign debt. In 1992, this
hope evolved into exemptions and tax incentives to the tourism indus-
try. By 1996, the government announced plans to increase private sector
participation in road construction and the management of ports and
airports. By 1999, San José’s Tobias Bolaños International Airport was
rebuilt to welcome ecotourists from around the globe. By 2004, tourism
was the leading sector of the Costa Rican economy, worth US$1.4 bil-
lion (Solano, 2006). In reality, what matters for the IMF and the World
Bank vis-à-vis sustainable development is how natural capital is man-
aged and whether the profits from the natural capital endowment are
invested in paying down debt.

Ecotourism in ACA-Tilaran

In Costa Rica, ecotourism has converted nature into expensive

resorts where only tourists are welcome. La Fortuna is the prin-
cipal tourist destination in ACA-Tilaran. Since 1994, using a debt-
for-nature fund, WWF-C has provided the expertise and invest-
ment required to turn the La Fortuna rainforest into an ecotourism
business venture. MINAE, in turn, passed the legislation necessary
to allow the formation of public-private partnerships essential to
ecotourism as a form of sustainable development. The enclosure
of common lands in Costa Rica for the purpose of ecotourism has
remade rainforest ecosystems and converted rainforest inhabitants
into service providers. Internal boundaries have been built, sepa-
rating local people from volcanoes, waterfalls, rivers, hot springs,
howler monkeys, and turtle spawning havens, but the country is
open to eco-adventurers with money to spend. Local people have
access to rainforest areas only as workers supporting ecotourism;
otherwise, they have to pay for access.
Villagers have acknowledged that there were some improvements
in the ACA-Tilaran conservation area. More villagers have planted
flowers surrounding their properties. More streetlights were installed,
along with improved water reservoirs and more efficient garbage col-
lection. The most important accomplishment was better and more fre-
quent transportation between towns. Until 1998, a daily bus connected
La Fortuna with the capital of San José. Since then, several alternative
roads have been built, many buses travel the routes, and the taxi busi-
ness has boomed.
 Ecotourism and Social Development  117

Before Ecotourism

Villagers remembered that before the establishment of the conservation

area, recreational activities in natural settings were free for everyone to
enjoy. Families would spend leisure hours walking in the countryside,
climbing hills, swimming, and fishing. Close to nature, families and
neighbours were brought together. Ines Rios, who was born in Z-Trece,
said that before ecotourism, “Families built the community and this
community permeated every aspect of our lives. In this community liv-
ing, the forest was used in a shared way, which provided material and
cultural wealth.” She described Z-Trece in this way:

When I was growing up, my town cultivated everything and we had

plenty of food. The trees produced more than enough mangoes, sour sop
(Annona muricata), rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum), and other varieties of
fruits. We used trees to build our houses. The forest was our supermarket
where we had corn and beans, meat and fish. Because we had plenty of
food, we lived happily. Every morning my father used to say, “Put the ket-
tle on the fire. I will go get a paca (tepezcuintle, a small animal of the tropi-
cal rainforest). In ten minutes he was back with the meat he had promised.
My mother was always feeding the trees with ashes. The forest was our
pharmacy. My mother took care of our health with medicinal plants and
we never had anemia (an illness common in other parts of the country).
I believe that my good health is the result of the healthy fruits and veg-
etables that the forest used to produce. Every part of our lives seemed
healthy. In my house and the neighbours’, the aroma of the flowers
attracted butterflies that surrounded the field. What a pleasure it was to
live in trust with our neighbours. As the forest disappeared, the food and
the confidence have gone. Z-Trece was a cattle-raising place, without elec-
tricity and highways, but with plenty of harvests, deer, pacas, coati, mon-
keys, parrots. (I. Rios, personal communication, August 2001)

According to Ines, the forest provided subsistence livelihoods for the

majority of Costa Ricans. Subsistence hunting and fishing were integral
elements in their relationship with nature. These communities used their
ecosystem (i.e., biological diversity) as part of their daily lives. They did
not understand life outside of nature. This situation started to change in
the 1970s, with the introduction of the Green Revolution in Costa Rica.
The Green Revolution subverted the system of the commons in
Z-Trece and La Fortuna, and it began to eliminate common access to
118 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

the land for such rural activities as hunting, fishing, and gathering as
well as sustainable farming. Ines explains how she could no longer sur-
vive on her subsistence activities and was forced into the market to earn
money:

As the poison (veneno) – as agrochemicals are called – poured into the land,
the trees stopped producing, the rivers became contaminated, our wildlife
and fishing grounds disappeared. When we were living from nature we
were considered poor people (pobrecitos) because we didn’t know about
money, we didn’t have walking paths or highways, radio or TV. But we
had never seen ourselves as poor because we had plenty of food for every
member of the town.
I believe that the poorest in those years lived better than today’s wealthy
in terms of money, because in Costa Rica now we all eat veneno. Our food sys-
tem requires veneno, which then destroys our health and ways of life. I work
in ecotourism now and earn some money, which vanishes on a few things,
and my money in the market only buys veneno in the shape of fruits and veg-
etables. I wish we had the opportunity to return to our past when we still had
an abundance of food, when fruits and vegetables had flavour, and when
neighbours were trusted (I. Rios, personal communication, August 2001).

Vandana Shiva (1989) uncovered an important Western cultural bias

in the myth of subsistence provision as poverty: “Subsistence econo-
mies which satisfy basic needs through self-provisioning are not poor
in the sense of being deprived” (p. 10). Recognition of this other kind
of wealth and support for the work and knowledge required to ensure
subsistence and survival could transform the nature of society and the
economy, including the existing sexual division of labour. One conse-
quence of such recognition would be to give women autonomy over
their bodies and lives.
ACA-Tilaran developed an enclave tourist model for the Arenal
Volcano. By 2009, I counted more than fifty hotels or tourist enter-
prises in the La Fortuna and Z-Trece areas, selling ecotourist packages
to individuals or groups.

The Arenal Volcano

In ACA-Tilaran, ecotourism is concentrated around the Arenal Volcano,

which is an active cone with an elevation of 1,633 metres, close to the
city of La Fortuna and the town of Z-Trece. The volcano is a spectacular
 Ecotourism and Social Development  119

natural show that erupts twenty-four hours a day. The Arenal Volcano
has become the central attraction for ecotourism but, as is briefly pre-
sented in Chapter 5, to make that happen, ACA-Tilaran changed its
category from a five-hectare protected forestry reserve in 1969 (gov-
erned by Law No. 4380) to Arenal Volcano National Park in 1994, with
an area of 12,010 hectares (through Decree No. 23774-MINAE). In 1996,
the daily number of tourists in La Fortuna was five hundred during the
low season, and fifteen hundred to two thousand during the high sea-
son (Ulloa, 1996a). By 2007, the Arenal Volcano National Park received
a total of 83,532 visitors (Barquero, 2008), approximately 229 visitors
per day.
The marketing of the Arenal National Park as an ecotourist centre
was a joint project between MINAE and WWF-C, hotel chains, and
restaurant owners. The park has been featured in tourist promotion
programs, as well as hotel and Internet advertisements, to exploit the
image of the Arenal Volcano. Private tourism agencies organized bird-
watching excursions and other tours to the hot springs around the
volcano. Nature in and around the city of La Fortuna has been rede-
fined as a recreational product, e.g., canoe trips to see chameleons and
river birds are organized in the nearby wild areas of Caño Negro, for
which there are charges and fees. In 1998, the director of Arenal Volcano
National Park, Rogelio Jimenez, described the rationalization of the fees
at ACA-Tilaran:

In February 1995, the Park began to charge fees. In the beginning, nobody
wanted to pay fees. To make them pay fees, we closed the volcano’s four
entrances, leaving open and controlling one entrance. The entrance fees
provided washrooms, garbage collection and walking paths for tourists.
When the area was not controlled, people used to take advantage of the
area’s resources, resources they did not pay for. ACA-Tilaran made the
people wake up to see that they have a resource that belongs to them and
that these resources need conservation. ACA-Tilaran told the people that
they should press for payment for the use of its resources (R. Jimenez,
personal communication, July 1998).

Later, to justify increases in park fees, a lookout point was built, new walk-
ing paths were opened up, and better water and electrical services were
provided. A visitors’ centre and administrator’s house have also been built.
The director regretted that the park’s success might be at risk because
the fumes and lava released daily from the active volcano, around
120 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

which ecotourism is organized, have been progressively decreasing. As

a result, there was a proposal to expand ecotourism to Arenal Lake. Park
management, therefore, dug a ditch to stop community recreational use
of the lake and developed a camping trail, fishing programs, and bird-
watching tours. Fees were extended to the lake and to the Rio Fortuna
Waterfall.
Over time, the building of hotels, cabins, bed and breakfasts, and
ecotourist lodges has meant that volcanoes, mountains, rivers, forests,
and woodlands have taken on new value. Nature has been packaged,
branded, marketed, and ultimately sold as recreation products. The res-
ident community has simultaneously also been turned into a branded
product for sale to tourist as customers in a variety of forms. Some com-
munity members have become ecotourism specialists in bird-watching
and guided adventure tourism; others have become employed in res-
taurants, hotels, and resorts that serve tourists, as servants making beds.

Commodification of Nature and Wildlife

The area is completely economically dependent on tourism. The vol-

cano’s ball of flame, ecotourism advertisements, scientific publications
on taxonomy, ecology, plants, and animal behaviour help to orient tour-
ists and attract wealthy Costa Rican and foreign businesspeople, who
develop tourist resorts. These high-end hotels employ foreign manag-
ers who speak several languages, for their tourist guests from around
the world. Visitors have access to amenities such as bars, discos, swim-
ming pools, whirlpool baths, golf courses, health spas, and entertain-
ment. For example, in Z-Trece the most expensive resort is La Cata-
rata, owned by a French Canadian, which was built in 2000 and has a
minigolf course and several bars. During the high season, this hotel is
an overcrowded destination.
The volcano’s hot springs (39º Celsius), previously accessible to the
public without cost, have been privatized since 1992. This area used
to be visited by locals, who believe that water from the volcano’s hot
springs improves the health of those suffering from arthritis, stress, and
other illnesses. From the hot springs they used to watch the volcano’s
activities. However, with the advent of ecotourism, the hot springs have
been completely walled off by hotel construction.
One of the first hotels built in the area was Tabacon Resort, owned
by a Costa Rican politician. The resort used to have several hot spring
pools on both sides of the highway where it is situated. On one side of
 Ecotourism and Social Development  121

the highway, the fee to use the shallow pools was US$1, while on the
other side the fee was US$20. The first pool was built for the use of the
locals to avoid criticism for enclosing the common hot spring. By 2004
it had disappeared.
The resort on the side of the volcano now boasts eleven hot spring
pools and restaurants facing the volcano, so that guests can watch the
volcano erupt. By 2009, there was only one price: US$90 for access to the
hot spring, plus dinner in the hotel restaurant. From the restaurant, on
clear nights, one can watch a cascade of red lava from the volcano. Hun-
dreds of tourists each day observe fireballs flying from the volcano to
within five hundred metres of the hotel. It is a very impressive and pos-
sibly risky spectacle. For instance, on 29 July 1968, the Arenal volcano
erupted, devastating twelve square kilometres on its west side, and kill-
ing eighty-seven people, along with hundreds of cows and wildlife. The
eruption buried the villages of San Luis, Tabacon, and Pueblo Nuevo,
and it formed three new active craters.
Since 1995, the forests surrounding the volcano have been converted
into resorts, endangering wildlife habitats, and contributing to biotic
impoverishment and the forced migration of species. As nesting sites
have been invaded by ecotourists, species reduction has become a
significant problem. A Tabacon Resort worker who wished to remain
anonymous said: “Before building the swimming pools, we carried
hundreds of frogs out of the area. After five years of activity, the frogs
disappeared and the toucans do not stand in the trees any longer. Mas-
sive use of chemicals to clean hot spring swimming pools, washrooms,
etc. left chemical residues that forced the animals to leave the surround-
ing areas” (Tabacon Resort worker, personal communication, July 1999).
Once-abundant golden toads have disappeared from the area. Costa
Rican scientists and experts from the International Union for the Con-
servation of Nature (IUCN) believe: “that habitat reduction and climate
change are the principal factors responsible for the species’ extinction.
Most specifically, a chytrid fungus has been attacking Central America’s
frog species, which essentially suffocates frogs with its growth. Frog
populations have dwindled dangerously, and many species have all but
disappeared from Costa Rica’s rain forests. Among them, the harlequin
toad and the golden toad, two species now believed to be extinct” (Raub,
2008). They do not mention the poisoning resulting from the Green
Revolution or ecotourism infrastructure in frog disappearance.
Ecotourists want to experience solitude, so ecotourist packages
are manufactured to take them to distant, unspoiled areas. However,
122 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

according to villagers, the plastic and paper garbage generated by tour-

ist resorts in isolated areas increases levels of water contamination in
rivers and lakes. Ecotourism in La Fortuna is a form of consumption:
ecotourists consume beautiful scenery, bathe in hot springs, or watch
bird species and other wildlife. Ecotourism has opened opportunities
for an entire range of investors and businesspeople to gain access to local
land, culture, forests, and ecosystems. The ecosystem surrounding the
Arenal Volcano has become overcrowded with hotels and resorts that
have negatively altered the local environment. Ecotourism harms rural
and local people because it exacerbates the same economic inequalities,
social injustices, and ecological problems associated with conventional
tourism. Consequently, ecotourism as a form of sustainable develop-
ment suppresses the human rights of local communities in favour of the
rights of those with money to spend.

Rural Tourism in Albergue La Catarata

The development and expansion of the Arenal Volcano as a National

Park was influential in the transformation of people’s livelihoods. Until
1990, the majority of rural communities in the area worked in agricul-
ture, although a few cattle ranchers controlled more land than the thou-
sands of small-scale peasants who worked the land. Soil is very rich due
to the Arenal Volcano, which produces lava covered land rich in miner-
als and nutrients, making La Fortuna and its surrounding area, such as
Z-Trece, one of the most fertile areas in Costa Rica (Van Der Laat, 2008).
However, the deregulation of the traditional instruments that protected
agriculture caused a decline in agricultural production in the area, as it
did in the rest of Costa Rica.
Rural tourism, as an instrument of local development and conserva-
tion, was thought of as a way to help build a constituency and political
support for the protected areas (Guereña, 2006). Community rural tour-
ism was developed as a way of involving rural people in ecotourism
projects in zones surrounding national parks, so-called buffer zones,
and biological corridors1 designed to control animal behaviour, where
animals are able to walk, fly, run, and so forth. To organize rural tour-
ism, in 1994 ACA-Tilaran carried out an economic management study of
tourism possibilities and identified some commodities and communi-
ties with commercial value (Ulloa, 1996a). The study recommended the
establishment of microenterprise albergues or ecotourist lodges around
sites of particular beauty in the rainforest. Albergues were defined as
 Ecotourism and Social Development  123

rural tourism installations because they were located in rural spaces

surrounded by natural, cultural, or agricultural attractions. They would
supposedly expand internal development by creating and strengthen-
ing small community microenterprises, while tourists would have a
place for a satisfying, relaxing, and enriching vacation.
In 1996, in ACA-Tilaran, three albergues in rural areas were set up:
Albergue Eco-turistico Las Heliconias, in Bijagua, surrounding the Vol-
can Tenorio National Park; Albergue Eco-turistico Montes de los Olivos,
in Río Aranjuez, around the Monteverde rainforest; and Albergue Eco-
turistico La Catarata, in Z-Trece, bordering the Arenal Volcano National
Park. By 2000, the first two albergues had vanished, owing to fierce
competition between foreign companies who had opened large hotels
to accommodate growing numbers of tourists demanding world-class
amenities. Albergue La Catarata (hereafter the Albergue) survived for
a few more years.
To develop the Albergue, ACA-Tilaran initially made contact with
some of the members of the Z-Trece community by hosting workshops
to discuss the objectives of the microenterprise model. It informed com-
munity members that FUNDACA would provide the loan for any proj-
ect the community might wish to pursue (Ulloa, 1996b). Since all of
the participants were agricultural producers, the Z-Trece group’s first
project, in 1995, was an organic agricultural microenterprise. In 1996, it
evolved into an ecotourism project that resulted in the creation of the
Albergue.
The Albergue appeared to be beneficial to some of the peasants. For
example, Rosita maintained that it offered eco-friendly, economic oppor-
tunities: “ACA-Tilaran made two revolutions in the life of the partici-
pants of this project: First, the project persuaded us and our neighbours
to learn new ways for using our lands, such as working with organic
agriculture; second, we educated ourselves in gender terms. Learning
to work organically and to work in a common project, as a group, in
an individualist society is revolutionary. In addition, changing the role
of women and men in our project was another revolution” (R. Rios,
personal communication, August 1998). However, her views were dis-
puted by Miguel Zamora, who owns a tourist resort in Z-Trece:

ACA-Tilaran selected only a few families to receive a loan. These individu-

als or families are removed from the community, because they become the
focal point of help from different sources such as NGOs and government.
This separation divides community members. ACA-Tilaran then does
124 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

not benefit the community, but only individuals who decide to go along
with the vision of the project. Community problems such as water treat-
ment, the flooding of roads during rainy season, labour rights of Nicara-
gua migrants in packing factories, etc., are invisible. (M. Zamora, personal
communication, August 1998)

Zamora added that the Albergue was the only project that had full sup-
port from ACA-Tilaran and from the government. Therefore, the ben-
efits of loans and donations from different sources at different stages of
the project were concentrated on this one group. The rest of the com-
munity members were forgotten.
Albergue La Catarata was a microenterprise project originally man-
aged by five Z-Trece families. Built on less than two hectares, it had eight
bungalows with thirty-two beds, a butterfly house, a variety of orchids,
a small zoo, an organic vegetable garden to be used by its restaurant,
and an area cultivated for the production of medicinal plants. It was
also used as a centre for community activities and as an artisan shop-
ping area. Its medicinal plant project was publicized as the gender com-
ponent of the sustainable development agenda of the Arenal-Tilaran
Conservation Area, as women were incorporated into the market. At
first, the Albergue benefited from government incentive measures. It
received microcredit loans from FUNDACA, the ACA-Tilaran organi-
zation that provides loans with reduced interest rates (14% instead of
the 23% from the banking system), and in-kind donations from the gov-
ernment were made available.
From 1996 to 1998, while the Albergue appeared to be successful, it
nonetheless ran into many obstacles. First, tourist activities in Z-Trece
are seasonal; high season (the dry season) is from December to April and
low season (the rainy season) is from May to November. During the rainy
season, the Albergue is unable to attract tourists because Z-Trece has
three inadequate bridges that are prone to flooding and deter agencies
that want to take tourists to the Albergue. Small vans or buses with fifty
seats are barely able to go across the badly constructed bridges. Some
agencies stopped dealing with the Albergue because of this concern. In a
1999 interview, Julio, the administrator of the Albergue, stated that since
the government was not fixing the roads and the Albergue did not have
the means to fix the public bridges and roads itself, it was impossible to
make a business profitable (Julio, personal communication, July 1999).
Second, given how local needs for income and employment are
defined at international gatherings, it is clear that low wages are an
 Ecotourism and Social Development  125

important determinant in the microenterprise model. From the begin-

ning, the Albergue counted on a common practice wherein women’s
labour was poorly paid or not paid at all. The microenterprise is defined
as a small family business alternative within a globalization framework
that will foster community economic welfare and gender equality in
a sustainable environment (Ulloa, 1996a). This project was considered
dependent on the entire family’s work, but in the main this meant
women and their children. In conducting 1998 fieldwork, my percep-
tion was that no worker on this project was benefiting as a proprietor;
each merely had a job. Three out of every four members received a sal-
ary for five working days. The only worker at the restaurant, who was
the chef during the day and the security guard at night, worked seven
days a week but received a salary for only two days. The argument not
to pay for her labour was that she was the wife of the administrator, that
is, she was not entitled to a wage because her husband was considered
the main earner. The couple’s day started at 5:30 a.m. and sometimes
ended at midnight.
In 1998, at the Albergue, the monthly salary was equivalent to
US$250.00. It did not provide the means of survival for an average
campesino family of 4.5 persons. Therefore, one by one, members of the
project started looking outside for ways to supplement their wages. By
2000, some of the Albergue members had left the project to return to
agricultural production in order to survive. The first member to depart
was a woman who was presented as the women’s voice in the sustain-
able development model of ACA-Tilaran, to the extent that pictures of
her work with medicinal plants illustrated many documents produced
by the conservation authority. In 2001, I observed that just two women
were the last working members running the Albergue and that they
were being supported by their own children. By 2002, the Albergue
microenterprise reverted to the creditor, FUNDACA, and in 2005 it was
sold and became a private hotel.

Employment and Food Crises

Ecotourism in the Arenal Volcano National Park and its hot springs
changed the area’s economic and employment structure. Table 6.1,
gathered from La Fortuna office of Presupuesto y Programación Oper-
ativa (Financial and Operational Programming) of Caja Costarricense
de Seguro Social, Dirección Regional Sucursales Huetar Norte, shows
that by 1999, the tourism sector, which includes hotels, rental cabins,
126 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Table 6.1 The Economic Production Structure in La Fortuna, December 1999

Activity Owners Workers Salaries (in colones) Average Salary

Cattle Ranching 78 218 10,134,271 46,487

Hotel/cabins 11 57 2,672,070 45,801
Comm/rest/tourism 40 183 9,237,418 49,384
Agriculture 13 42 1,602,651 38,158
Industry 6 36 1,538,511 42,736
Packing/factory 11 126 4,096,909 32,515
Construction 7 23 1,835,947 53,737
Other/services 24 49 2,171,860 44,329
Domestic/service 2 2 36,144 18,072
Total 192 736 3,636,197 41,245

Source: Presupuesto y Programacion Operativa. Ano 1999. Sucursal Fortuna.

Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, Direccion Regional Sucursales Huetar Norte

commerce, restaurants, and tourist attractions, had become the chief

activity in La Fortuna. The average salary was higher, and the number
of workers totalled 240, more than in any other sector, including cattle
ranching. Agricultural production had been reduced, and agricultural
workers who used to produce for their own subsistence had become
ecotourist service workers.
As the agriculture production structure changed, small farmers’
production was devalued. The main government office in La Fortuna,
occupied by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (Conservation),
was replaced by Consejo Nacional de Producción (CNP) (the National
Production Council) and given authority over the promotion of non-
traditional products, such as medicinal plants (see Chapter 7), consid-
ered the icing on the cake of ecotourism.
Government policies undermined the food security of rural peas-
ant communities. Beans and rice are staple food for Costa Ricans, and
the national dish is gallo pinto – rice and beans. As agricultural produc-
tion for local consumption at the national level decreased, the export
of food products (bananas, pineapples, melons, oranges) and services
(ecotourism, carbon credits, biopiracy) with high environmental and
social impact increased. According to CNP, 21,450 peasants produced
beans in 1994, compared to only 9,475 in 2000. In 1990, Costa Rica
 Ecotourism and Social Development  127

produced 34,265 metric tons of beans, while in 2000 it produced only

19,674 tons (CNP, 2000). Between January and April 1998, Costa Rica
imported 3,962 metric tons of beans (Ministerio de Economia, 1998).
In 2008 and 2009, Costa Rica produced 9,582 metric tons of beans. It
imported 34,677 metric tons of beans out of 45,600 of the total national
consumption, which represents almost 75% of the total consumption
(CNP, 2009). In 2010, Costa Rica imported 42,897 metric tons of beans
(FAO, n.d.). Even though more than thirty-five varieties of beans have
been identified under cultivation in the frijol tapado system in the south-
ern part of Costa Rica, the varieties of beans under cultivation have
been greatly reduced (Jimenez et al., 1998). In this way, biodiversity and
soil fertility have also been reduced, with a direct effect on food produc-
tion and consumption.
Journalism students Natalie Cheng and Marie French (2013) talked to
Eric Villalobos, head of production at the Arroz Sabanero plant outside
Liberia, who said that “the lower cost of importing rice from the United
States has already caused five of twelve Costa Rican rice companies to
collapse” (p. 2). Cheng and French argue that the government of Costa
Rica has traditionally supported domestic rice producers. However, in
2001, as a signatory of a WTO agreement on agriculture, “Costa Rica
agreed to limit its support of the domestic rice industry to $15.95 mil-
lion” (p. 3). Moreover, ”in 2010, the price in US dollars paid to rice pro-
ducers per ton was 629 in Costa Rica, compared with 273 in the United
States” (p. 2); in other words, Costa Ricans paid three times more for
rice than their US counterparts. “Imports of rice increased from 43,451
tons in 2000 to 66,055 in 2010” (p. 2); imported rice is largely sourced
from the United States (FEWS NET, 2013). Costa Rica now imports most
of its main staple crops, rice and beans, which it used to produce on its
own. Since rice is imported mainly from the United States, peasants are
compelled to purchase their foodstuffs at prices set according to the
vagaries of the international market.
Food prices have increased, and families not associated with tour-
ism can no longer afford to buy the basics. This leaves people increas-
ingly dependent on the monetary relations of the market economy
for their survival. Yet the money they receive cannot compensate
for loss of domestic production and the commons for hunting, fish-
ing, and gathering grounds they formerly relied upon to secure their
livelihood. In La Fortuna City, where ecotourism has been concen-
trated, local people are confronted by a new reality. Miguel Cifuentes
explained that “we pay for the products of this country with dollars,
128 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

like tourists, but we do not earn dollars” (M. Cifuentes, personal com-
munication, August, 1999).
The ecotourism boom has produced land concentration. Many of the
original owners who received land from the Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario
(IDA) sold their properties to the companies constructing hotels and cabins
because they were desperate for money. Peasant land was sold at bargain
prices. Paradise disappeared, though some peasants continue to live there
on smaller plots, sometimes with ownership of only their small house.
Many tourist centres and resorts have been and continue to be built in
the area, and the price of land has risen many times. Ecotourism creates
waged employment, often at the expense of subsistence activity. Local
populations become increasingly dependent on the monetary relations
of a service economy for their survival, with no guarantee of access to an
adequate income. When nature was redefined as a recreational product,
then volcanoes, mountains, rivers, forests, and woodlands suddenly took
on non-traditional values as these landmarks were packaged, branded,
marketed, and ultimately sold for profit. Moreover, people themselves
were turned into branded products for paying customers.

Crises of Women and Children

As Costa Rica becomes increasingly impoverished by foreign debt, and

the enclosure of the commons expands, the mark of international power
relations is stamped on their bodies. For rural women, the expropria-
tion of forests is a survival issue, forcing them to migrate to San José,
the capital of Costa Rica, and to ecotourist areas in the hope of earning
an income for themselves and their dispossessed families. As an ecosys-
tem disintegrates, it has a powerful effect on the degree of oppression
that women and children endure. As they are introduced into the cash
economy, some impoverished women have little option but to earn all
or part of their living as prostitutes. They are women at work, support-
ing children and other loved ones.
Costa Rica is the main destination in Central America for sex tourism,
which is recognized as an industry. It entertains large numbers of tour-
ists from Canada, the United States, and Europe. Men in their forties,
fifties, sixties, and older from industrial countries, from all classes, cross
borders for ethnicized sex tourism.
Prostitution is a social issue that asserts the domination and objecti-
fication of women and children. The sex trade in Costa Rica entangles
the domination of creditors over debtors (the indebted periphery) with
a psychology of patriarchy, in which men develop their masculation
 Ecotourism and Social Development  129

(G. Vaughan, 2007). Masculation is the exploitive masculine identity

created by the alienated world of patriarchal capitalism through com-
pliant bodies (p. 16). By complying with the desires of men, children
and women contribute to the global tourism industry, to the wealth of
businesses, and to state coffers.
In Costa Rica, sexual exploitation is arranged in several different ways
(O’Connell & Sanchez, 1996). At a certain age prostitution is legal, but the
act of pimping is not. Likewise, most of the men who profit from orga-
nized sex tourism are from patriarchal, industrial countries – the United
States, Canada, and Spain, among others. O’Connell and Sanchez argue
that sex tourists and expatriates come mainly from societies with strong
internalized prohibitions against adult-child sex. Jacobo Schifter (2007),
in writing about Costa Rica’s tourism industry, asserts that women are
being consumed as entertainment for men. He estimates that there were
twenty thousand sex workers in the country, and fifty thousand sex
tourists who visit each year (T. Rogers, 2009). Sadly, Schifter concludes:
“Obviously, globalization has linked us to an international economy in
which each country finds their specialization … In the case of Costa Rica,
whether we like it or not, sex tourism is a strong component of our Gross
National Product” (p. 265).
As Costa Rica slid into a subordinated position internationally,
the country developed an established child pornography industry.
Although child prostitution is illegal in Costa Rica, there is minimal
enforcement of the law. Law enforcement mechanisms offer an impu-
nity and anonymity that sex tourists seek. Further, a CTV documentary
by journalist Victor Malarek for the program W-5 reported that when
young girls are arrested, the victims are sometimes punished by police,
who also have made demands for sex (Malarek, 2004).
Since 2001, international human rights groups have put the Costa
Rican government under intense scrutiny for lack of action against the
sexual abusers of children, most of them tourists. The official attitude is
one of government indifference. In 2001, the ex-president of Costa Rica,
Miguel Angel Rodriguez, said on ABC’s 20/20 news program that there
were only “20 or 30” children being sexually exploited in Costa Rica,
even though the US Department of State had estimated three thousand
children to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation in Costa Rica
(Casa Alianza, 2001). In 2010, the US State Department offered chill-
ing statistics on the extent of child sexual abuse in Costa Rica: “For
2008 the judicial branch’s statistics office reported 692 cases of sexual
abuse of minors, with 337 perpetrators convicted. Additionally, 10 cases
involved sex with minors, seven involved cases of sex with minors with
130 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

payment involved, and seven involved the sexual corruption of minors.

From January 1 to June 30, the autonomous National Institute for Chil-
dren (PANI) assisted 2,145 children and adolescents, including 1,410
cases of physical abuse and 409 cases of intrafamily sexual abuse” (US
Department of State, 2010, Children section).
These problems affecting women and children in Costa Rica are also
the concern of foreign NGOs. Since 2004, World Vision, an NGO, has
been launching campaigns in Costa Rica to deter potential child-sex
tourists (World Vision, 2006). In 2006, the NGO AYUDA, of the Inter-
American Development Bank (IADB), and the Ricky Martin Founda-
tion, established an antitrafficking campaign, entitled “Llama y Vive”
(Call and Be Alive). (Martin, 2008). Costa Rica’s government also has
been taking steps to address problems of trafficking in women and chil-
dren. In 2008, officials from Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic met
to resolve some of these problems (Costa Rica y República Dominicana,
2008).

Conclusion

We have seen how two Costa Rican agricultural communities, La For-

tuna City and Z-Trece, were moved inexorably towards revised roles
as ecotourism service areas. The major marketing achievement in La
Fortuna was the linking of tourism with the Arenal Volcano and wild-
life areas. With the volcano as the main attraction, WWF-C provided
debt-for-nature money to build infrastructure needed for tourism in La
Fortuna.
Ecotourism has been promoted as a service activity that will contrib-
ute to economic growth and generate income for local communities
while protecting the environment. As a result, ecotourism is classified
as an export industry (since international markets are typically tapped
to generate foreign exchange and investment) that politically empowers
and economically advances some of the most disadvantaged groups of
society, such as peasants, rural women, and Indigenous people.
However, profound social and political contradictions and criticisms
challenge the ethics of the concept. In the neoliberal era, private prop-
erty is sacrosanct. However, in tourism areas, land violations take place
as hotel or cabin owners construct without permits that destroy the
country’s natural scenic splendour. Parallel to the construction of large
hotels are the ecotourist lodges or rural tourism development activities
at sites of particular beauty in the rainforest, which endanger wildlife
 Ecotourism and Social Development  131

habitat by provoking mudslides, biotic impoverishment, and the forced

migration of species.
The development and expansion of the Arenal Volcano as a national
park was also influential in transforming people’s livelihoods. Com-
munities have lost their recreation areas, and agriculture workers have
become ecotourism service workers engaged in low-wage employment
at the expense of agriculture and subsistence activities. When forest
dwellers are evicted from their lands and move to urban areas, dispos-
sessed women and children are usually the most vulnerable, becoming
victims of predatory industries and individuals. In this neoliberal era,
government’s social responsibility to its citizens has been eliminated.
Individuals are solely responsible for themselves and prostitution is
considered to be the same as any other work. This frame ignores the
violence and domination in which women and children are immersed
and allows the leaders to blame the dispossessed for predatory prac-
tices that abuse them. Once again, women are alienated from their bod-
ies and their sexualities. As a result of these changes, creditors’ power
relations that encourage ecotourism are written on the bodies of the
life forms of volcanos, and on the bodies of women and children in an
indebted Costa Rica.
7 Women’s Microenterprises and
Social Development

This chapter demonstrates how NGOs use the microenterprise model

of sustainable development to incorporate rural women’s knowledge
and labour into international markets.
Under neoliberalism, microenterprises first strengthen NGOs with
access to international donors, in order to achieve the dismantling of
the state’s responsibility to uphold the rights of citizens; and second,
the preference of northern consumers for organically produced medici-
nal plants and vegetables was considered a growing market expected
to benefit rural areas economically. Medicinal plants production has
been promoted as a sustainable development activity as well as a source
of income for many women, who have been encouraged to develop
microenterprises to grow and market them.
The concept of sustainable development promoted the production of
organic medicinal plants and agriculture, a system that uses regional
components and avoids the use of agrochemicals and growth regula-
tors, as socially and ecologically sound. However, Anja Nygren (1995)
has questioned this assumption: “Organic agriculture is not a policy that
should be associated with correcting structural and environmental prob-
lems produced by the Green Revolution: land degradation and growing
inequality in the distribution of productive resources. Land degrada-
tion was achieved by the massive use of agrochemicals for monocul-
ture production. Inequality was increased because small landowners
[such as peasants and Indigenous peoples] did not receive the support
they needed from the state” (p. 124). Further, the microenterprise model
ignores the reality that, in a primarily agricultural economy, the family-
based household is a site of production as well as of reproduction.
Within this context, the sexual division of labour conventionally allocates
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 133

different roles to men and women in terms of productive activities as

well as parenting. Moreover, the greater share of responsibilities falls
on women rather than on men. These inequalities are further reflected
in women’s exclusion from land ownership. Men hold the power for
decision-making, and they control assets, resources, and leadership. The
lives of women become terribly constrained by hierarchical and authori-
tarian social forms arising from the authoritarian structure of society.
Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in Costa Rica every
project of international cooperation has included both sustainable devel-
opment and Women in Development (WID) components. The concept of
WID, promoted by the World Bank, sees women as active agents of devel-
opment (see Chapter 2). The stated objective of the World Bank in this
regard is the reduction of disparities for women and the enhancement of
women’s participation in their countries’ economic development. But in
Costa Rica women’s programs have no government support, and NGOs
have used debt-for-nature swaps as a credit source to initiate income-
generating activities in the women’s sector of the economy. Proponents
of sustainable development recognized gender relations as a central issue
if women were to be incorporated into business and financial markets
successfully.
In the process of income generation, medicinal plants become com-
modities, and the women who grow them become commodity pro-
ducers. Medicinal plants, as commodities, belong to the marketplace.
There, medicinal plants lose their cultural, and even their biological
power, because the removal from their natural surroundings and dif-
ferent exposure to sunlight changes their chemical properties. Accord-
ing to the biologist Celso Alvarado, the best biodiversity management
is done by nature, in situ:

Regarding medicinal plants, the Indigenous populations do not domesti-

cate many plants. When plants are domesticated and planted in monocul-
ture crops, they are deprived of species association and the destruction of
their inherent properties starts. A plant in its natural ecosystem is interact-
ing with other plants and its abiotic resource (soil, water, light); therefore,
the plant conserves its properties as a natural defence. Its genetic strength
is more active and dynamic against its predators. Furthermore, when
medicinal plants are sown in prepared beds land pests proliferate. These
are the reasons why Indigenous populations obtain the species and its
properties directly from the ecosystem for healing purposes. (C. Alvarado,
personal communication, August 1999)
134 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Figure 7.1 Owner of a medicinal plant organic farm in Abanico (Courtesy

the author)
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 135

Thus, producing medicinal plants as monoculture crops fosters genetic

erosion and decreases plants’ fertility. Further, when medicinal plants
are used in organic agriculture for the market, they shift from being
a source of women’s power, as healers, to being a source of women’s
exploitation, as surplus producers.
Until the end of the 1980s, medicinal plants had no market value,
but they were used by rural populations whose health depended
on the ecosystems where they lived. Through centuries of growing
medicinal plants, women in Costa Rica’s rural areas acquired the
necessary skills and the knowledge of seeds, soil preparation, and
optimum growing seasons. For example, these women are able to
identify several dozen wild medicinal plants and herbs.1 They also
have the know-how to make cocimientos, or combinations of plants
used in healing practices.
Now that medicinal plants and organic agriculture have been main-
streamed as ecologically sound, women have returned to their ances-
tral knowledge. Initially, with the help of Centro Nacional de Acción
Pastoral (CENAP) (the National Centre for Pastoral Action), rural
women began to grow medicinal plants organically, as commodities.
They learned the techniques of organic production through workshops
and plant exchanges organized by CENAP. This knowledge was cen-
tral in developing organic medicinal plant microenterprises. As a result,
exploitation and surplus value are located in the bioproductive aspect
of this knowledge, that is, in the privatization and monopolization of
the results.

Microenterprise in Abanico

A major Women in Development (WID) initiative was the Abanico Proj-

ect, a medicinal plant and organic agriculture program that was one
of the thirty cooperation agreements signed by FUNDACA, the debt-
for-nature loan provider of ACA-Tilaran and ANDAR of Costa Rica.
ANDAR became responsible for developing and managing microenter-
prises as WID projects. In the microenterprise model, credit is given to
a group, which manages the money and within which individuals can
borrow and repay small amounts that they use to set up a small busi-
ness or microenterprise.
Liddiette Madden, ANDAR’s director, explained her understanding
of sustainable development:
136 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Sustainable development is a definition that originated in the interna-

tional cooperation community, where Costa Rica’s governments are not
clear in what the sustainable development strategy will achieve. We, as
an NGO, don’t know either, because there are so many actors involved.
Whatever it is, it is a long-term process that implies the change of struc-
tures of the country, the change of culture patterns, and access to technol-
ogy. As a country we need to work harder because we do not have the
technology needed to change from raw material producers to industrial
producers. The state has no resources and no guidelines to embark on a
sustainable development direction. Right now we have the program of
productive reconversion [moving from subsistence production to export-
oriented production] but that is not enough. (L. Madden, August 1999)

Clearly, the director’s concept of sustainable development actu-

ally sounds like old-fashioned modernization development. However,
ANDAR’s gender analysis in two communities in the area, in Z-Trece, an
agriculture and tourism program, and a livestock and cheese production
program in El Castillo, was more to the point:

• Household work was mainly assumed by women, despite the work

they do in agriculture or livestock. The household activity done by
men was occasional and they were assumed to be merely helpers.
• Women’s community work was quiet and hidden. Women, like the
men in the household, presumed themselves to be merely helpers
because they were not included at the decision-making level.
• The income obtained by the family, earned by women, children,
and men through agriculture and livestock, was perceived as men’s
income. Therefore, neither women nor children took part in the
decision-making process on what to produce.
• Only when women worked outside of the house, particularly in the
service sector such as restaurants and hotels, were they considered
to be wage earners. (Asociación ANDAR, 1996)

Following this assessment of the situation of rural women, ANDAR

recommended setting up microenterprises as a means of income gener-
ation. The main barrier to women’s equality was seen as a lack of finan-
cial access. Because of women’s difficulty in accessing loans, ANDAR
would also provide small amounts of capital from debt-for-nature
swaps with the Netherlands.
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 137

A microenterprise, named Abanico Project, was set up in Abanico.

ANDAR (1996) defined the Abanico Project as a peasant family busi-
ness to foster community economic welfare and gender equality in a
sustainable development environment. In other words, the women’s
project had to be supported by the work of the whole family. The foun-
dation of this microenterprise design was the nuclear family and its
patriarchal structure. When the town of Abanico was organized in 1961
(see Chapter 3), each family, headed by a man or a woman, obtained ten
hectares of land. Single men over eighteen years of age also received
seven hectares, but no single women received land.
ANDAR organized the project in conjunction with Grupo Ecologico
de Mujeres de Abanico (GEMA) (the Women’s Ecological Group of
Abanico), a group of nine local women organized specifically for this
activity. The women were between twenty-eight and fifty years old;
seven were married, and two were single. Each set up an individual
microenterprise project for the cultivation of organic medicinal plants
on her parents’ or husband’s land. The women planted what ANDAR
was interested in buying. Each of these women set up to grow lemon-
grass, oregano, juanilama, linden tea, mint, spearmint, basil, aloe vera,
and saragundi.
The landholdings of the women’s families varied from two to ten
hectares. In 2000, Consejo Nacional de Producción (CNP) (the National
Production Council), a government agency in charge of nontradi-
tional production and Women in Development programs, measured
the amount of land used by women for their projects, which varied
from five hundred to fifteen hundred square metres. GEMA members
grew organic crops on these small plots situated in the middle of the
agrochemical-based farms of their fathers, husbands, and in-laws. Pre-
viously, the women had used these small plots to produce the food
needed for themselves and their children.

Participatory Action Research

In 1998, the GEMA group and the author participated in a Feminist

Participatory Action Research (FPAR) project. The results showed that
although they had experienced some increased status and sense of
agency in the community, the Abanico Project members had suffered
serious negative consequences from their involvement with the project.
To protect their identities, the women who agreed to speak on the record
to the author were given pseudonyms like “Oregano,” or “Basil,” that
138 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

were the names of the medicinal plants they were growing. Six key
issues were identified.
First, as already noted, the women recognized that the Abanico Proj-
ect allowed them to renegotiate their situation in the community. Here
are two comments from the members:

ANDAR gave us opportunities for education and training (capacitación) in

organizations, marketing, organic identification, organic fertilizers, credit,
exchange of experience (Oregano, personal communication, August 1998).
People in the community started to value our work. One day I heard a
comment: “These ladies are working hard and making money.” This com-
ment was made by people outside our families because our families know
that we work hard, but we do not make money. However, that comment
made me proud. (Basil, personal communication, August 1998)

Second, each stage of the Abanico Project was built on loans from
NGOs acting as banks. A microcredit from FUNDACA for ACA-Tilaran,
using the Canada–Costa Rica debt-for-nature swap, provided a loan of
Can$4,480 (colones 700,000) at an annual interest rate of 20%. Each mem-
ber received Can$497. In addition, ANDAR, using a Netherlands–Costa
Rica debt-for-nature swap, lent the group Can$6,400 (colones 1 million) at
an annual interest rate of 33% to buy an old house, which was expected
to be turned into a processing plant, as well as a site to sell the prod-
ucts. According to the NGOs, since the 1990s, neoliberal policies dictate
that credits must be sustainable, that is, credits to microenterprises must
cover operation costs.
Third, to develop a microenterprise, families had to convert a sub-
stantial part of their land from food production to the production of
medicinal plants. Yet the financial return to the women proved to be
so small that it was not sufficient to buy food for the family’s sub-
sistence needs, because they no longer owned plots of land for their
personal use. The research showed that women involved in the project
earned on average eleven cents an hour in 1998, well below the Costa
Rican minimum agricultural wage of US$2.00 an hour (1999 prices)
(Gindling & Terrell, 2007).
Fourth, ANDAR monopolizes the marketing of their products. This
agency controlled the collection, transportation, and market deliveries
of the group’s products. It collected and weighed the dry leaves once a
month at the women’s plot of land. ANDAR typically paid these women
a month after they collected the dry leaves. It was always possible
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 139

for ANDAR to claim that they had experienced a loss and to pay the
women less than they had promised, because after the drying process
leaves weigh less. This marketing activity led to a high degree of pres-
sure and social control over the women’s groups because ANDAR was
the only buyer.
Fifth, the women’s working time expanded, decreasing the time they
could spend on activities important to the community and their fami-
lies. On average, they spent nine hours a day weeding, seeding, or har-
vesting. Their work was time-intensive and labour-intensive. The most
time-consuming task was weeding, which was done with machetes
rather than with the use of herbicides. A typical day on the plot started
around 5:30 a.m., with cutting, selecting, and cleaning the leaves. From
8:30 to 9:00 a.m., before it became too hot to work, they spread the leaves
in a solar drier inside the drying house.
When they were not cutting plants or weeds, the women were pre-
paring natural pesticides from gavilana (Neurolaena lobata), garlic, and
onions; or applying fruit fertilizers with guava, papaya, sweet potato; or
preparing seed beds. Despite working nine hours in the medicinal plant
plots, the women also worked many more hours at home, engaged in
cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, caring for their elders and rearing
children, and doing community work. The women were active mem-
bers of the Abanico Development Association’s board of directors, and
of their churches, schools, and ANDAR’s credit committee. In 1999, on
Friday afternoons, these women spent additional working time prepar-
ing food to sell in la feria (the local market) in order to pay their debts
to the NGOs. Every week, two members of the group were in charge
of preparing cold food such as tamales (rice and yucca with slices of
meat) the night before and collecting supplies among the members for a
vegetable soup that was prepared in the local market. This activity was
short-lived, because of difficulties getting to the market location. Wom-
en’s working time also increased after the health centre closed and one
elementary school eliminated a teaching position as a result of struc-
tural adjustment policies and programs imposed by the IMF and the
World Bank. The women’s increased workload was destined to lead to
an intergenerational transference of poverty, as household duties were
passed to daughters, which limited their educational opportunities.
Sixth, in the face of daily inflation and devaluation imposed by the
IMF and the World Bank, wages were inadequate. Working for less than
the minimum wage led these women to eventual physical collapse,
exhausted by a never-ending competitive spiral of reduced real wages.
140 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

In sum, the Abanico women’s participation in microenterprises had

several results:

• Women enhanced their status as community participants, giving

them slightly more influence and decision-making involvement, but
with disproportionate increases in responsibility and commitments
of time and energy. The process did more to advance the commodi-
fication of women’s work and the availability of local produce, local
biomass, and free labour to the market than to enhance women’s
status and independence.
• Women became indebted to FUNDACA and indebted and con-
trolled within the dependency structure of ANDAR, while paying
interest rates so excessive that, in effect, they became indentured
labourers preyed on by loan sharks. Women’s work was being used
as the most effective source of capital accumulation, because women
brought into the accumulation process their own and their family’s
free labour.
• Women’s autonomous subsistence work was eliminated in favour
of poorly paid work that exploited their labour. This process is
part of what Mies (1986) and Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies (1999)
have called the “housewifization of labour” (see Introduction).
This transformation of labour is promoted by the view that women
engaged in microenterprises are not really workers. Their work in
microenterprises is seen as a continuation of their work at home and
therefore it is poorly paid, as was the case in the Abanico Project.

Economic Pressures

The group’s research captured the attention of the Consejo Nacional

de Produccion (CNP). Aware of their worsening conditions, the GEMA
group of women growers appealed to the agency. As a result, in 1999, the
CNP held a meeting with all the women’s groups around the country
working with ANDAR in medicinal plants and organic agriculture. The
groups included Las Malinches de Pocosi; Mujeres Unidas de Sarapiqui
(MUSA); Grupo Asmuca; Grupo de Giras “Alfonso Quiroz de Acosta”;
GEMA; and Asociación Regional de Agricultores Orgánicos (ARAO).
The space provided by CNP permitted the women to reflect on
their situation. The Abanico group used the results of their research
to speak about their low earnings, high interest rates, long working
hours for the microenterprise, at home, and for the community, and
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 141

to refute the notion that women’s work is complementary to men’s.

In the name of gender equality, NGOs had ensured women’s com-
pliance with working for meagre wages in microenterprises, earn-
ing less than the minimum peasant wage. Women resisted the high
interest rates the NGOs charged and the consequent downgrading of
their labour within the government’s structures. During this meeting,
the agency tried to prevent Costa Rica’s medicinal plant producers
from being forced out of international competition by NGOs in other
Latin American countries that were also engaging women in organic
medicinal-plant production.
In 2000, CNP measured the land used by the Abanico women in their
microenterprises and made a direct appeal to Manzate, a tea-producing
company. They secured a contract in which Manzate promised to buy
the total production of tilo tea the group produced. With an assured
buyer, the group pulled out all the other medicinal plants they had
been growing and focused on tilo. In 2000, an area of 52,317 square
metres produced medicinal plants; tilo was grown on 80% of the land,
while other varieties represented the other 20%. The group sold tilo
to Manzate according to the contract arranged by CNP. But in April
2001, the group received a letter from Manzate invalidating the initial
agreement and reducing its purchase to eight hundred kilograms every
two months instead of the two thousand kilograms it was supposed to
purchase.
With the reduction in sales of tilo, a new crisis was introduced.
Members complained that the new arrangement imposed by Manzate
forced them to take care of the plants longer, extending their poorly
paid work, or expropriating other people’s work to reduce production
costs. For example, one of the growers, Juanilama, employed two Nica-
raguan men to help her maintain the tilo production. She explained
that the only reason she could afford salaried workers was because she
barely paid them and they brought their families to work to help weed
the fields. To cope with the new arrangements, the group assigned an
amount of tilo that each member was allowed to sell every two months,
based on members’ level of indebtedness. This arrangement created dif-
ficulties, however, because one beneficiary, Juanilama, who had more
land and more debts, was allowed to grow more tilo. Consequently,
disputes arose.
The difficulties created by the reduced sales also produced disagree-
ments, distance, and antagonism among the members. Members who
were sisters, mothers, or friends were not speaking to each other when I
142 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

returned in 2001. A dispute, which included violence, broke out among

members of a family involved in the group. Two were accused of cheat-
ing. According to the association, one of them stated in May 2001 that
she had no tilo to sell, so the members were allowed to produce an addi-
tional fifty kilograms. But when Manzate’s agents collected the herbs,
she added her extra kilograms without informing the others; conse-
quently, members who had increased their production in that particular
month were left with their additional parcel unsold.
In July 2001, I had several conversations with the group. One conver-
sation about the exchange value, or price, of the medicinal plants was
tense. Most members were not talking to the two members accused of
cheating. To break the tension, one of them brought up the dispute and
asked for forgiveness. She explained the discouragement the group was
experiencing because of the reduction in sales: “Deciding how many
kilos each member could sell has produced a crisis in the group. Many
of us are not talking to each other, although we are sharing the same
misfortune. Because we have in common the need to improve the eco-
nomic situation of our families, we needed to find support. We accepted
the CNP initiative to discuss our problems with a psychologist. Our
betterment will help our children and our community” (Yerbabuena,
personal communication, August 2001).
The group was scheduled to participate in group counseling. CNP-
San José proposed a psychologist to mediate the crisis because, in the
words of one official, “The group was not tough enough to survive the
globalization project” (Yerbabuena, personal communication, August
2001). Instead of seeing the structure of society as a problem, CNP’s
message was that the women needed to alter their psyches to be able to
participate in and profit from the globalized market. Pushing women
to discuss their personal problems with a psychologist displayed the
tendency to see women as pathologized. CNP did not recognize that
the women’s lagging economic performance resulted not from their
feminine nature but rather from the reality of their working conditions
(performing triple work shifts and having no land of their own) and
market mechanisms (the liberalization of interest rates and the dis-
mantling of the agricultural and the food systems).
The economics of the medicinal plants project had produced griev-
ances among the members. As Juanilama said: “At the beginning, Man-
zate told us to sow more and more. We removed whatever plants we
had in order to sow tilo. But when we all had been reduced to planting
tilo, the enterprise told us, ‘I will buy only 800 kg every two months’”
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 143

(Juanilama, personal communication, August 2001). Yerbabuena added:

“I believe that Manzate has new sources of supply. When there were
just a few of us in the market, we had a good arrangement, and then
we were promoted on TV and radio as great medicinal plant sellers.
Now there are many women organized around medicinal plants. We
were crushed by our promotion” (Yerbabuena, personal communica-
tion, August 2001).
The expansion of the medicinal plants microenterprises as a poverty
alleviation program has had the effect of organizing women’s groups
all over the world to produce for the international market, and they
are producing the same products for the same customers in North
America and the European Union. NGOs and industry profit from this
arrangement; the former receive high interest rates for their loans while
the latter, almost for free, acquire products that will sell in the interna-
tional market. The WID program, supposedly designed to contribute
to women’s empowerment, ends up complementing the stabilization
and structural adjustment programs that creditors forcibly imposed on
indebted countries, to reduce labour costs and commodity prices.
In the 2001 conversation, the group talked about their incomes. Dur-
ing July and August 2001, Juanilama sold 160 kg (the most in the group)
and received US$393, while other members sold less than 50 kg and
received US$98. The minimum wage in San José in 2001 was US$240
per month. With the exception of one member, these women were not
earning even half the minimum wage. Comparing their incomes with
the time spent on the production and maintenance of the medicinal
plants (nine hours daily), it can readily be seen that a microenterprise
that was supposed to alleviate poverty was, on the contrary, making
subsistence producers destitute. Moreover, because they were produc-
ing for an international market, their land could not be used for their
family’s needs. Therefore, the production of medicinal plants produced
deprivation and hunger.
Juanilama declared that she wished to plant food for her family but
could not afford to do so because of her indebtedness to the NGOs. She
stated, “I want to plant what I can eat. If I do not sell the product, at
least I can eat. I cannot eat medicinal plants” (Juanilama, personal com-
munication, August 2001). Menta remarked, “I am discouraged from
producing tilo. Right now I am thinking about leaving the medicinal
plant production to produce what I use in my daily life, because this
job does not pay even my own labour” (Menta, personal communica-
tion, August 2001). They observed that when they used to work the
144 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

farms of their fathers and husbands, the land fed their families and built
relationships throughout their communities. With the microenterprise,
their families were hungry because the market did not return their
labour investments; in addition, relationships with friends and families
were damaged.
When the conversation turned to the use value of medicinal plants,
it became clear that the plants embodied their relationships. Nam-
ing the benefits the medicinal plants brought to their lives connected
the women, generating a lively exchange and great communication.
Members of the group who had not spoken previously entered the
conversation. It brought memories of family members, grandmothers
and mothers, times of sickness and happiness, scents and pleasures.
The women recognized how their individual lives had been enriched
because of their regular use of the plants and their ever-increasing
knowledge. As Yerbabuena said: “Menta has been turned into the medi-
cine plant doctor in the town. She has medicinal plants not only to sell
them, but to alleviate and cure the ailments of the members of this com-
munity” (Yerbabuena, personal communication, August 2001).
Menta recounted her experience:

I turned the medicinal plant into a health issue because I was always sick. I
had daily headaches. To cure myself, I began experimenting with my own
health following the knowledge of the ancestors – and it worked. Since
then, people call to ask for my advice when they or their children are sick.
I get satisfaction when people feel well. For my wisdom sometimes I get
paid. I would like to know more about natural medicine. [Laughing] My
husband believes that the medicinal plants are making me crazy because
now I want to be a nurse; he says that soon I may want to become a doc-
tor.” (Menta, personal communication, August 2001)

The women laughed and, one by one, started to relate their accomplish-
ments with medicinal plants. Most of them were using medicinal plants
again, because they revaluated their knowledge system on a daily basis
in their households, with their children and ill family members. These
women knew that every plant was infused with unique properties that
they used for healing. Speaking about the medicinal plant knowledge of
their mothers and elders, they realized they possessed an entire knowl-
edge system that had been made invisible and undesirable by a world-
view that sees as backward rural women work’s to protect and conserve
nature, work that sustains human life and ensures self-provision.
 The Medicinal Plants Industry 145

When asked about their hopes for the group, Yerbabuena allowed
that they might be living on illusions. But they had just learned about
an offer from CNP that sparked their hopes for success with sustain-
able development: “Finally, we are going to use the old house, bought
with ANDAR’s loan, paying 33% annual interest, as a processing plant
to make tea, soap and shampoo. CNP has negotiated a donation from
Fonde-Cooperación [funds from the Netherlands] to help the group
build a feedback centre, and learn marketing techniques” (Yerbabuena,
personal communication, August 2001).
They were once again hanging their dreams on the idea that the
wealth they were helping to produce would trickle down to them, in
what Mies (Mies & Shiva, 1993) called “catching-up development”
(p. 55). Development is upheld by the promise that women and all the
colonized people at the bottom of the social pyramid will eventually
reach the level of those on the top.
The pressure for Costa Rica to increase its foreign-currency reserves
in order to pay its external debt implies augmenting productivity or
enlarging exports. Only by destroying nature and intensifying the
exploitation of workers, however, are both of these goals achieved.
Thus, the Abanico Project connected vulnerable local nature and local
women to the international markets. But instead of improving their
lives by helping them to develop true income-generating enterprises,
these women were made even poorer. The project transferred their food
production to the production of medicinal plants, greatly extended their
hours of work, and paid them about one-tenth of the minimum wage.
Lacking enough money to buy the food for their family’s subsistence,
they became impoverished and indebted.

Conclusion

The Abanico Project case study indicates that sustainable development

and Women in Development (WID) programs that purportedly promote
equality by including women in the international market system have
mixed results. When women integrated into the so-called sustainable
development system, they became indebted and overworked, trans-
ferred their biomass and food production to the production of inedible
export crops, and worked for less than the minimum wage. In sum, the
exploitation of rural women’s working capacity increases exponentially,
because competitiveness in poorly developed and indebted countries
has become increasingly dependent on low-cost production. Moreover,
146 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

the Abanico Project also shows that women’s botanical knowledge has
been valued through this “green” WID project, but in highly selective
and commodified ways. As their knowledge and labour are translated
from the social to the commodified sphere, women’s work is being
accorded a very low monetary value, which neither compensates for
the loss of subsistence production nor leads to unmitigated improve-
ment of women’s position in society and the economy, since they must
rely so heavily on their families for support, thus returning to patriar-
chal relations.
The evidence therefore shows that women-oriented micro-credit
projects fall short of goals for gender empowerment and instead they
have become another instrument for the “greening” of Costa Rica.
8 Mining and the Dispossession
of Resources and Livelihoods

Over time the concept of globalization was established as a kind of level

playing field whereby corporations were allowed to operate beyond
various legal, social, ecological, cultural, or national barriers. The focus
of the discussion here is people’s resistance to mining in that context.
Rural women, peasants, and Indigenous communities in Costa Rica
have had little success in their efforts to get Canadian mining corpora-
tions to address basic concerns about the potential impact of mining
projects and to recognize the right of such citizens to reject such proj-
ects. Therefore, these communities believe that civil unrest is the only
option left to those who do not want mining in their areas. The conse-
quent costs for local communities are high; they have to contend with
national governments and international supporters, such as the World
Bank, NGOs, federal laws, tribunals, and political parties.
Since the 1992 Earth Summit, mining corporations have been unwav-
eringly supported by the United Nations, the UN Economic Commis-
sion for Latin America and the Caribbean, the World Bank, the Global
Mining Initiative, the Toronto Declaration (ICMM, 2005), and the IUCN
and ICMM (IUCN & ICMM, 2003). But it was during the 2002 Johannes-
burg Earth Summit (Rio + Ten) that mining was officially deemed sus-
tainable development, despite its fossil fuel-centred industrial model,
which greatly contributes to global warming.
Since colonial times, the natural concentration of mineral resources
throughout the world has diminished in both quantity and quality. What
remains are dispersed particles of low concentration, in areas that are
rocky, icy, forested, and mountainous, making it difficult to extract using
traditional mining methods and technologies. Open-pit mining is an
inexpensive method for collecting what remains. Open-pit mining may
148 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

kill surface matter (e.g., forests, mountains, glacier covers) through the
use of dynamite to remove surface soil, which increases soil erosion. This
results in desertification, while the rivers and streams suffer increased
sedimentation, which multiplies the possibility of floods. Open-pit min-
ing also eliminates biological diversity (e.g., in flora, fauna, and micro-
organisms) and scars the landscape with giant craters.
In fact, mining is a fundamentally unsustainable activity. It is based
on the extraction of non-renewable concentrations of minerals formed
over millions of years. Once extracted, the destruction is permanent. Use
of the cyanide lixiviation technique in gold mining, in which the shat-
tered rocks are combined with cyanide, poisons water resources, con-
taminates ecosystems, and pollutes the atmosphere, thereby affecting
all life. This central part of the mining process has a shattering impact
on communities close to mining operations; contaminated runoff con-
tinues to seep into the water, land, and air long after a mine closure. The
devastation brought by the chemical cocktail is never the concern of
governments and mining corporations. Environmental justice groups
note that with the use of cyanide, open-pit gold mines have become the
near equivalent of nuclear waste dumps that must be monitored and
tended in perpetuity.

Costa Rica’s Gold Belt

Costa Rica has been portrayed by NGOs and governments in northern

countries as a “poster child” for economic growth and environmen-
talism, in promotions for sustainable development presented to the
indebted and maldeveloped world. However, inside the country this
image is considered deceptive. Mining has pitted municipalities and
communities against a national government that allows mining the
industry to operate in its territory, despite its rhetoric of rejection.
ACA-Tilaran, where WWF-C has headquarters, is called Costa
Rica’s “gold belt,” owing to fairly large deposits of gold found there.
The gold belt includes the towns of Montes de Aguacate, Cordillera de
Tilaran, Libano, and Miramar in the district of Abangares. According
to a former Canadian director of the WWF, Claude Tremblay, the ACA-
Tilaran Land Plan was based on the characteristics of the territory and its
biophysical potential. The land plan provided some information about
the area’s geological material and identified the limits of acceptable
human intervention for the sustainability and the qualitative improve-
ment of its natural resources (C. Tremblay, personal communication,
 Earth Summit 149

July 1998). Thus, mining potential was part of the plan but agriculture
was not. However, for generations, the livelihoods of women and men
in the Miramar community have been based on agriculture. Forest and
mountains provided rural communities with access to water, agricul-
ture, and wildlife.
Since WWF-C established its conservation project in ACA-Tilaran,
several legal reforms opened the mining market under the direction
of MINAE. By August 1996, MINAE had issued sixty-six mining per-
mits that encroached on thirteen protected areas within ACA-Tilaran,
including fourteen exploration permits expedited in two national
parks (Arenal Volcano and Tenorio Volcano); fourteen exploration
permits and one mining permit in four protected zones (Arenal-
Monteverde, Montes de Oro, Miravalles, and Las Tablas); twenty-four
mining explorations in two Wildlife Refuges (Laguna de las Cam-
elias and Corredor Fronterizo); three mines reopened in the wildlife
refuges of Gandoca-Manzanillo; eight mining exploration permits in
two Forestry Reserves (La Curena-Curenita and Cerro El Jardin); and
two mining permits subsequently canceled in the Indigenous reserve of
Guatuso (Torres, 2000).
Since 1998, Canadian mining companies have been operating on the
Pacific coast of Costa Rica:

• Las Lilas Mining Project in Quebrada Grande de Liberia, the owner

of Tierra Colorada S.A., a subsidiary of Barrick Gold
• Mina Rio Chiquito de Tilaran, owned by Corporation Minerals
Mallon S.A, a subsidiary of Canadian Mallon Minerals. Newmont
Mining was also involved in exploring the property
• Mina La Union, in La Union de Montes de Oro, owned by Minerales
La Union S.A, a Canadian subsidiary
• Mina Beta Vargas in La Pita de Chomes, Puntarenas and San Juan
de Abangares-Guanacaste, owned by the subsidary Novontar S.A.
of Lyon Lake Mines of Canada
• Ariel Resources Ltd., in La Junta de Abangares. Ariel has a long
history in Costa Rica and extracts gold through three subsidiar-
ies: Mina Tres Hermanos, operated by el Valiente Ascari; Mina San
Martin, operated by Mining of Sierra Alta S.A.; and Mina El Recio,
operated by Minera Silencio S.A.
• Crucitas Project Mining, located in Alajuela Province, Canton San
Carlos, District of Cutris, 95 km north of Ciudad Quesada, owned
by Vanessa Ventures Ltd., and operated by Industrias Infinito S.A.
150 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

As mining expanded to new areas in Puntarenas, Guanacaste, and Ala-

juela, women and men became alarmed and organized as a civil society
on three fronts to defend themselves and their life support systems: the
Pacific Regional Front of Opposition to Gold Mining, the Northern Front
in Opposition to Open Pit Mining, and Miramar Front in Opposition to
Mining. They identified mining as responsible for significant damage to
the environment and health of local communities. Mining demands the
deforestation of thousands of hectares and the removal of small farm-
ers living off the land. In 1999, for instance, women and men in ACA-
Tilaran wrote a position paper in which they highlighted their concern
with the inadequacies of MINAE and their distress with mining and the
problems it had created. Their grievances included displacement from
traditional ways of life and livelihood to give space to mining: “We were
expelled from Rio Chiquito in Tilaran to make room for mining because
they claimed that we were causing damage to flora and fauna, water and
soil.” Also noted was the suffering of women, men, and children when
water contamination forces them to migrate; grief and hardship from the
opening of hollows in the soil where cattle fall and die; and disruption to
their relationship with nature by the eliminationof recreation spaces, and
the consequent growth in drug addiction, alcoholism, and prostitution.
The position paper concluded by expressing incredulity about the
promise of job creation and doubts that MINAE and its partner (WWF-
C) would be able to confront the ecological crisis while simultaneously
supporting the mining industries. Their experiences had shown that the
only outcomes were destruction and illusory benefits that disappeared
immediately once the mine closed, they said.
Further, Freddy Vargas (1995, pp. 7–8), a Costa Rican environmental-
ist, identified the following negative consequences of open-pit mining:

• high levels of deforestation, as open-pit mining destroys the forest

cover and removes surface soil;
• loss of biological diversity (flora, fauna, and microorganisms);
• elimination of the forest cover, which increases soil erosion and
results in desertification, while sedimentation increases in the rivers
and streams. This all contributes to the risk of flooding;
• devastation of the scenery with the creation of giant craters;
• contamination of ecosystems due to the use of cyanide and mercury,
and poisoning of the water, thus of all life; and
• atmospheric contamination due to the discharge of poisonous
substances
 Earth Summit 151

Opposition to Mining

In August 2001, I interviewed sixteen members of Miramar Front in

Opposition to Mining (Miramar Front) in Miramar City (see Chapter 3).
Among them was Alexander Flores Aguero, a Costa Rican songwriter,
who won the country’s traditional popular culture National award, by
denouncing Wheaton River Minerals, and the government, in a widely
popular song, El Gran Remate (The Big Auction). He asked me to “tell
Canadians that here there is a town [Miramar] that struggles against
the big powers.”
Women and men from Miramar Front, a local organization, were at
the forefront of efforts to secure clean water and maintain economic
livelihoods. Sonia Torres, Marta Blanco, and Nuria Corrales were
among the organizers of the Miramar Front to oppose Rayrock Inc.,
the first Canadian company to operate Bellavista Mining. Bellavista
Mining is located two kilometres north of Miramar de Montes de Oro
(or Miramar City), in Canton 4 in the province of Puntarenas. Miramar
City is located beneath a mountain where the corporation had extensive
logging operations. The community was understandably frightened
about these activities and their impact. The project began with the cut-
ting of more than five hundred trees, with the authorization of MINAE.
Miramar Front, supported by other anti-mining groups, academics,
and NGOs, evaluated the use of cyanide in lixiviation tanks. The group
made public its concern on T-shirts produced by the Pacific Regional
Front of Opposition to Gold Mining and was able to demonstrate the
technical weaknesses of the project, that is, the technology and machin-
ery in use could,

• pollute with cyanide twelve springs used for drinking water;

• destroy 117 hectares of secondary forest (charral and tacotal) due to
gas and heavy metal toxins;
• spoil La Plata and Agua Buena mountain streams due to millions of
tons of soil removal;
• cause landslides that could deposit more than 35 million tons of
material;
• contaminate fish with heavy metals, causing cerebral damage and
malformation in humans; and
• cause an overflow of 1.2 million cubic litres of water contaminated
with cyanide. (Miramar Front, 1999)
152 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

The evaluation also revealed that this project would destroy mangrove
swamps around Gulf of Nicoya, which sustain more than fifty thousand
people working in small artisan fisheries. The Gulf of Nicoya was the
main source of sustenance and work for thousands of Costa Ricans, sup-
plying fish and seafood, the main source of protein (Torres, 1999b). Fur-
ther, because every resource would be polluted, these workers would be
unable to engage in other activities, such as agriculture, cattle ranching,
or tourism. Miramar Front reached far beyond the immediately affected
communities when it was realized that groundwater contamination
might destroy the Puntarenas Estuary and the Gulf of Nicoya.
Following public concern expressed about these problems, the Rayrock
Corporation sold the project in 1999 to another Canadian corporation,
Wheaton River Minerals Limited (Torres, 1999, p. 2). This Toronto-based
corporation was represented locally by two subsidiaries, Costa Rican Min-
ing/Rio Minerales S.A. and Metales Procesados S.A. The Toronto com-
pany was granted a contract for exploration by MINAE and also received
the approval of Secretaria Tecnica Nacional Ambiental (SETENA),1 a gov-
ernment body in charge of approving mining projects, which provides
environmental impact assessments and establishes monetary guarantees.
In addition, the corporation received special free zone status and was thus
exempt from taxes for imports and exports, including profit remittance.
According to Miramar Front, the government granted an even bigger area
to the new owner of Bellavista Mining and made this information pub-
lic: “The project covers an area of 172 hectares; 473 hectares are directly
affected, while an area of 6,172 hectares, which includes the (Basin) Cuenca
of Rio Ciruelas, is indirectly affected” (Torres, 1999, p. 2). The Wheaton
River water authority requested 4.2 million litres of the community’s water
monthly for the leaching operation; 30 cubic metres each hour for the mill;
50,000 cubic metres of treated water during construction and 30,000 cubic
metres daily for eleven estimated years of operation (Torres, 1999).
As Wheaton River Minerals initiated its operations in Bellavista
Gold Mining, a full-fledged water war was waged because the mining
operation forcibly disconnected local residents from the Montezuma I
and Montezuma II freshwater springs. Defending the water and liveli-
hood also united local communities and municipal governments for
the first time. Historically, national and municipal governments had
been committed to economic growth and capital accumulation and had
worked together against villages or towns protecting their land and
their livelihoods. Now a new kind of struggle was taking place, one in
which municipalities and local communities were lined up together.
 Earth Summit 153

For example, in October 1998, the Abangares municipality made an his-

torical decision to oppose open-pit mining in defiance of the national
government’s decision to expand mining (Resumenes de Actas, 1999).
In a press release, the Abangares Council stated that it

• opposed all mining – open-pit, tunnel, or gallery – in Abangares

and in the entire country;
• encouraged similar statements by other municipalities in Costa Rica;
• authorized communities and members of the National Front in
Opposition to Open-Pit Mining to release media communiqués;
• approved the initiative to stop mining operations and to distribute
it nationally and internationally; and
• promoted an action plan to transform Abangares. (Resumenes de
Actas, 1999)

The decision of the Abangares municipality to listen to and sup-

port community initiatives for the protection of natural resources was
extremely significant in that other local towns soon followed suit. One
by one, municipalities that had experienced devastating mining activi-
ties gained courage and rejected mining in their territories. Since 1995,
sixteen municipalities have fought fiercely against the destruction of
the communities and the ecology of Costa Rica’s gold belt.

Legal Intimidation and Court Struggles

Canadian corporations responsible for mining in the region resorted to

legal intimidation to stop the protests. In 1997, Sonia Torres was taken
to court by Galaxie S.A., a subsidiary of Rayrock, then owner of Bel-
lavista. Two of the corporation’s public relation workers accused Torres
of defamation, for calling the individuals working for the corporation
“bugs and microbes.” The case was deliberated in a Puntarenas court-
room. As the accusers were unable to prove any wrongdoing, the court
gave Sonia Torres the benefit of the doubt (in dubio pro reo).
In 2001, Wheaton River, through its subsidiary Rio Minerales,
accused Marta Blanco, a teacher and municipal councillor, of defama-
tion. In July 2001, she was brought to trial. Wheaton River, in alliance
with three MINAE officials who assisted the mining corporation as
witnesses, accused Marta Blanco of falsely claiming that thousands of
trees had been cut down for the Wheaton River project. They accused her
of making the claim publicly at an extraordinary municipal session on
154 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

18 September 2000. Blanco denied the accusations. Blanco stated that for
years, “The mining company has been sending contracted individuals
with tape recorders to every municipal meeting to intimidate the mem-
bers. They pressure the municipality to keep silent about the problems
they are creating. On the day of our meeting where garbage collection
was discussed, an individual from the company was there.” She added:

On one occasion, I said that huge open garbage collections are synonymous
with the total destruction of nature because they cut down thousands of trees.
For these words I was taken to court, despite the fact that I did not refer to the
Wheaton River Minerals project. The company claims that I lied that it had cut
down thousands of trees and, furthermore, that it operates with MINAE and
SETENA permits; therefore, I was making false statements, since the project is
operating legally. We went to an arbitration meeting at the Puntarenas Court.
At the court the lawyer for the company told me that reconciliation consisted
in my resignation from the municipal post. I made it explicit that my position
was not going to change and that I was not going to resign. Such a reconcilia-
tion would be seen as a warning to the municipal office to stop speaking about
their project. (M. Blanco, personal communication, August 2001)

Failing at court arbitration, the corporation took Marta Blanco to court.

In October 2001, the Puntarenas court, under Judge Antonio Rodriguez
Rescia, declared Marta responsible for defamation of the juridical person
of Rios Minerales S.A. and ordered the following sentence: payment of
50,000 colones (Can$240) (a fine of 1,000 colones a day for fifty days) and
publication of her sentence on a half-page of a daily newspaper (Can$250).
The president and general manager of the corporation requested
500,000 colones (Can$2,402) as payment for defamation and 75,000 colones
for legal and procedural fees (Can$360). The total request was Can$3,250.
Marta Blanco, with the support of the Miramar municipality, the
Miramar Front, and the Miramar Natural Resources Defence Group,
appealed to the Tribunal of Casacion Penal,2 Segundo Circuito Judicial,
in San José. On 1 March 2002, Judges Javier Llobet Rodríguez, Fernando
Cruz Castro, and Rafael Sanabria Rojas overturned the previous verdict.
The court found no evidence for the mining company’s accusation of
animus injuriandi. Instead, the judge stated:

This project of mining exploitation has aroused tensions in the Miramar

community, where some groups and civil organizations supported
Rio Minerales S.A. in Bellavista, while other important sectors of the
 Earth Summit 155

population opposed it. This confrontation has transcended Miramar and

has become public knowledge in Costa Rica through public discussions
in diverse newspapers and radio shows, such as Radioperiódicos Colombia,
[and the] newspapers El Heraldo, Al Día, Eco-Catolico, La Republica, the Uni-
versity, Radio Monumental, Radio Reloj, Telenoticias de Canal Siete, Radio Santa
Clara. (Marta Blanco v. Rios Minerales S.A., 2002)

The court determined there was a lack of grounds for the corpora-
tion to accuse Marta Blanco who, as a municipal councillor, was only
carrying out her responsibilities and exercising her right to defend the
environment. Consequently, the court quashed the sentence.
Between 2004 and 2005, despite the intense participation of community
members in protests to preserve the commons, the commoners’ rights
were violated. In 2005, Wheaton River Minerals, ignoring solid opposi-
tion, initiated operations. But this action fuelled continued struggle, and
Wheaton sold Bellavista Mining to Glencairn Gold Corporation, another
Canadian mining company. This corporation operated Bellavista Min-
ing for two years without interruption. In October 2006, Glencairn Gold
Corporation realized that the metal structure of the processing plant was
showing damage in an area of three square kilometres. In July 2007, the
corporation suspended its operations, and on 22 October 2007, at five in
the morning, the processing plant collapsed into the lixiviation lagoon
(Figure 8.1) (E. Ramirez, 2009; Torres, 2007).

Figure 8.1 Bellavista Mining processing plant collapsed over the lixiviation
lagoon in Miramar.
156 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Miramar women and their supporters were outraged because the

water system, the source of their livelihood, had become contami-
nated. They were even more furious when Glencairn Gold Corporation
avoided paying for the urgent actions needed to control the sliding of
the mining infrastructure into the mountain by changing its name to
Central Sun Mining Inc. (Glencairn Gold Corporation, 2007). The cur-
rent owner is B2Gold Corporation, a Vancouver gold producer.
In May 2009, the author visited the collapsed mining area with Sonia
Torres, Nuria Corrales, and Marta Blanco, members of Miramar Front
in Opposition to Mining. Torres said that “the corner where the [land-
slide] occurred shut down the gold recuperation plant area, a lab and
storage areas. But several other slides threaten the infrastructure. …
[The] mountain is moving downhill and we can observe holes and
cracks along the public street surrounding the west side of the slag heap
(escombrera)” (S. Torres, personal communication, August 2009).
The collapse at the mine site, with the building falling into the moun-
tain, was exactly what horrified communities had foreseen. Nuria Cor-
rales, a municipal councillor in Miramar, said, “The disaster demonstrated
the state’s inability to attend to an environmental crisis predicted by the
community. Further, the catastrophe shows how unprepared the state is to
confront impending health problems” (N. Corrales, personal communica-
tion, August 2009). Marta Blanco, the ex-municipal councillor, said, “If I
have to go back to the courts in order to confront these criminals, I will
be happy to do so” (M. Blanco, personal communication, August 2009).
In 2009, the Miramar community was struggling to get an independent
water analysis. The struggle for clean water and livelihood continued to
rage until mid-2009, and it has gained national and international attention
and sympathy. The anti-mining campaign reached across borders, involv-
ing democratic forces around the world in a truly globalized campaign
against the worst aspects of the transnational forces of globalization.

Mining and the Environment

Open-pit mining demolishes mountains, contaminates water systems,

reconfigures local subsistence economies, destroys local farming and
related activities, expropriates water, energy, and air, and intimidates and
harasses women. Resistance by communities affected by mining evolved
on the streets and in the courtroom. Mining companies operate in Costa
Rica with the support of the Canadian and Costa Rican governments,
and of the international community. Since mining projects are harmful
 Earth Summit 157

to nature and people, mining project approvals have been kept secret
from the local communities as well as from the international public.
Given the centralized decision-making that prevails in Costa Rica, the
mining companies and their supporters use the law and the public sec-
tor to expedite administrative processes and to intimidate or threaten
local community activists. This approach has angered the local commu-
nities and local municipalities that have been burdened with ill health
and degraded environments. Local women and men have shown that
sustainable development politics are not separate from subsistence and
everyday life. By confronting corporate harassment and court actions,
women and men opposed to mining have empowered and united citi-
zens and local municipalities against mining corporations. The number
of local anti-mining groups that emerged within the context of this con-
flict demonstrates the popularity of community opposition and resis-
tance. As a result of community activism, several mining projects have
been stalled and local opposition to mining won a case on the courts and
stopped Crucitas Mining. On 24 November, 2010, the Alajuela court can-
celled the contract of Industrias Infinito S.A. in Crucitas, and the decision
was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011. Confirmation of bringing the
dispute to the International Centre for Settlement and Investment Dis-
putes was issued by Vanessa Ventures Ltd. (Fornaguera, 2014).

Conclusion

This chapter has shown Canadian open-pit mining operations to be

some of the most violent neoliberal political ecology projects taking
place in Costa Rica. Supported by the “green” economics of sustainable
development, the Canadian mining industry expropriated nature and
destroyed the subsistence livelihoods in Miramar. In a neoliberal dereg-
ulated framework, there is no community right to reject mining invest-
ments. When rural communities refuse to become stakeholders in what
they perceive as the plunder of their Indigenous lands and resources,
mining establishments have used different strategies to harass local
community members opposed to mining. In Miramar, one of these
instruments has been the use of legal intimidation through the courts.
It also shows how resisters have successfully engendered a core
nucleus of opposition. Since 1996, several opposition fronts have emerged
and, as one example, initiated a campaign against Bellavista Mining
when rural women and men realized that the water and energy used
by mining corporations was the same water and energy expropriated
from their subsistence production, resulting in destroyed economies.
9 The “Greening” of Capitalism

The three linked UN Conferences on Environment and Development

proposed the sustainable development model of “green capitalism”
as a means to defuse the ecological (climate change) and social (pov-
erty) crises currently experienced throughout the world. This book has
examined the societal and economic consequences of this economic
development approach. Touted as a means to confront climate change
and eliminate poverty, policies based on this model have actually
destroyed the livelihoods of peasants and Indigenous peoples as well
as formulated a new kind of domination.
This section, first, reflects the broadening of the greening through the
implementation of sustainable development as conceived at the Earth
Summit in 1992 that developed Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) in Central
America and the Earth Summit in 2002 that prepared Iniciativa para la
Integración de la Infraestructura Regional Sudamericana (IIRSA) (The South
American Regional Infrastructure Integration Initiative). Second, it inte-
grates the Arenal Conservation Area-Tilaran (ACA-Tilaran), developed
in Costa Rica, when governments assumed responsibility for organiz-
ing sustainable development into the large agenda of Plan Puebla Pan-
ama (PPP), also called the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, regarded
as the principal initiative of sustainable development (World Bank,
2003). In documenting the practices of non-governmental organiza-
tions (NGOs), such as the World Wild Life Fund–Canada (WWF-C),
Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) (the Costa Rican National
Biodiversity Institute), and the ANDAR Association, this research chal-
lenges claims that debt-for-nature exchanges and sustainable develop-
ment reduce poverty, create equality, confront ecological destruction,
and combat climate change. Instead, market-based solutions for these
kinds of problems have been inadequate.
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 159

Sustainable Development

At the 1992 Rio Summit, development and environment were first

linked together in Agenda 21, a plan of action negotiated by govern-
ments. Sustainable development was equated with economic growth.
This growth was to be ensured by a globalization of the economy that
purportedly would rescue poor countries from their poverty, even in
the most remote areas of the world (Pearce & Warford, 1993). In Central
America, arising from Agenda 21, the PPP was regarded as the prin-
cipal initiative of sustainable development (World Bank, 2003). It was
proposed and accepted by the eight governments of Central America
(Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica, and Panama). PPP involves an area of 1,026,117 square kilome-
tres and 62,830,000 inhabitants, and it is supposedly aimed at poverty
reduction and environmental reparation. The World Bank presents the
PPP as an environmental project aimed at identifying and quantifying
the biodiversity of the area and organizing biological corridors. These
corridors are paths within countries where wildlife are expected to
remain confined. As a form of poverty reduction, Kristalina Georgieva,
Director of Environment, at the World Bank, declared that the PPP was
necessary as “there are over 45 million people in the region, of which
60% live on less than $2 a day” (World Bank, 2003). Poverty, defined
as the absence of western consumption patterns, cash incomes, and
industrialization (Mies & Shiva, 1993), was thus the excuse for the new
assault on Central Americans.
Since most of the resources that represent power and wealth for
industry are located in the rainforest of the South, the Earth Summits
promoted full corporate capture of them. PPP has had several policy
initiatives: road and highway integration, human development, hydro-
electric production, promotion of ecotourism, partnerships for sustain-
able development, prevention and mitigation of disasters, building of
functional customs houses, and development of a telecommunications
network.
As presented, the PPP complemented neoliberal programs for priva-
tizing public resources, such as water, energy, scenery, and public ser-
vices, coupled with the expansion of commercial markets, highways
and transport infrastructures, dams, direct investments in maquilado-
ras (sweatshops), and transnational businesses (Ornelas, 2003). Corpo-
rations found backers in indebted national governments to guarantee
free access to the local nature. For women and men who depend on
160 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

the local commons, this full bore assault on their surroundings means
the loss of dignity and independence, security, livelihood, health, and,
sometimes loss of life.
The Earth Summit Rio + Ten, held in Johannesburg in 2002, marked the
ten-year anniversary of the original Earth Summit in Rio. In Johannes-
burg, responsibility for sustainable development was transferred from
governments to corporations and their shareholders (UN Department
of Economic and Social Affairs Division for Sustainable Development,
2006). A preference for voluntary approaches instead of government reg-
ulation was an outcome of this Summit. This voluntary approach actually
furthers privatization under the umbrella of sustainable development.
The justification for this approach was that government actions during
the preceding ten years had been so inadequate that by encouraging
voluntary partnership initiatives that promote the inclusion of private
and civil actors in the management of sustainable development, Type II
outcomes1 might bring new impetus to the implementation of the vari-
ous commitments (Hale & Mauzerall, 2003). During the Johannesburg
gathering, mining qualified as sustainable development (World Conser-
vation Union, 2003), despite its fossil fuel-centred industrial model that
greatly contributes to global warming.
When responsibility for sustainable development was transferred to
corporations and their shareholders in South America, another set of
infrastructures for sustainable development was established before and
shortly after the Johannesburg Summit. Iniciativa para la Integración de
la Infraestructura Regional Sudamericana (IIRSA) (The South American
Regional Infrastructure Integration Initiative) is the sustainable devel-
opment program for South America. With the help of the Inter-American
Development Bank (IADB) and the International Bank for Reconstruc-
tion and Development (IBRD), the IIRSA was created in 2000. The IIRSA
project trapped Amazonia in the middle of multiple capitalist appetites.
It is an area of nearly 8.2 million square kilometres of natural resources,
distributed among eight countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador,
Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Twelve South American presi-
dents met in Brasilia under the auspices of Brazil and the protection of
the IADB, the Cooperación Andina de Fomento (CAF), the European
Investment Bank (EIB), the Banco Nacional de Desarrollo Económico
y Social de Brazil (BNDS), the Financial Fund for the Development of the
Plate Basin (FONPLATA), and other international financial institutions
(IFIs) to discuss credits for governments interested in the construction of
large sustainable development projects, such as infrastructure for ports,
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 161

airports, highways, hydroelectrical systems, railways, and gas pipe-

lines (Isla, 2013).
Moreover, Rio+20, held over three days in June 2012, saw full imple-
mentation of corporate capture of the Summit meeting. By replacing
nature’s commons with a privatized expansion of natural capital, so-
called green capitalism provides nothing more than support for contin-
ued economic growth at the expense of the ecology and peoples around
the world. In Rio 2012, the fictitious market, which has been organized for
a long time to issue commercial papers for speculation, was uncovered.
Green business proposed to save capitalism from its economic crisis by
pricing on the stock exchange the services that nature offers such as the
capacity of the forest to absorb CO2. These practices have already been
transforming the water we drink, the biodiversity we eat, and the air we
breathe, into paper money. The term green capitalism includes all the
present intensification of capitalism. Green capitalism prioritizes a model
of multinational corporations engaged in enormous projects, which are
beneficiaries of governments’ cheap credit, but with costs for the environ-
ment and people that are almost beyond calculation.
As governments and corporations seek to expand the economic
growth of globalized capitalist accumulation by appropriating the
everyday commons of women, households, Indigenous peoples and
peasants in Central and South America, new levels of poverty and
environmental crises are building in those regions. Nevertheless, a new
movement based on ecology, gender, class and ethnicity focused on the
use of ecological resources for livelihood, has been emerging.

PPP in Mexico and IIRSA in Peru

The future of the planet’s ecology is dependent on a change in how

humanity interacts with the natural systems that sustain us, but change
cannot occur when the same factors that have caused the crises in the
first place are repeatedly reproduced. As a result, resistance is building
among local communities, Indigenous people, peasants, and women
who wish to continue with the time-tested ways of life that depend on
keeping their land in coexistence with non-human life.
In Mexico, for example, an intensive militarization of southern Mex-
ico started with the Zapatista uprising. On January 1, 1994, the Ejercito
Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), declared war on the Mexi-
can federal government by occupying seven municipalities/cities in
Chiapas. Indigenous peoples know that they have no other recourse to
162 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

resist state and international development except through direct action.

For the Zapatistas, therefore, this declaration of war was a last resort
against misery, exploitation and racism. To break their courage, Indig-
enous communities that resist are confronted with paramilitary orga-
nizations in alliance with the regular army, rich landowners, and drug
lords (narcotraficos) (Perez, 2003).
Further, Salazar Perez (2003) argues that the Central America PPP
is connected first, to Plan Colombia, established in 2000 ostensibly to
curb drug smuggling and guerrilla insurgency, which has displaced
more than 500,000 rural people, mostly Afro-Colombians and Indig-
enous populations; and second, Plan Dignity in Chapare, Bolivia, ini-
tiated in 1998, apparently to eradicate coca production. Plan Dignity
involves the building of three new military bases with US assistance.
Local residents and many human rights groups are bitterly opposed
to it. The three plans (Plan Puebla Panama, Plan Colombia, and Plan
Dignity) declare the same objectives: strengthening democracy, poverty
reduction, anti-drug efforts, elimination of drug trafficking, sustainable
development, and assistance to the US anti-terrorism struggle. In sup-
port of PPP, some politicians and corporations have engaged in coun-
terinsurgency practices, stirring up paramilitaries to attack civilians.
The impact on the lives of rural women is significant. Women in the
south of Mexico, for example, because of the threat of rape by soldiers,
are unable to work and are forced to remain in their homes. In the north-
ern part of Mexico, women’s transition from farm women to indepen-
dent maquila workers continues to exact a high price. In Ciudad Juarez,
on the Mexico-US border, thousands of women working in maquiladoras
have been kidnapped, raped, and murdered, with seeming impunity
(Morfin Otero, 2009).
Mexico’s Indigenous communities are forging an international cam-
paign of hermanamiento (sisterhood and brotherhood). The goal is to
establish a permanent physical presence of individuals, organizations,
and universities in the areas threatened by sustainable development.
They believe that an international presence will force the democratiza-
tion of their societies and will support their collective rights to land
integrity.
On the other hand, Brazil’s IIRSA plans see Peru as a transit country
and a distribution centre for oil, biofuel monoculture, biotechnology
and ecotourism for multinational corporations. The Peruvian govern-
ment and elites are interested in developing monoculture and cattle
ranching projects along the railway lines promoted by the ideology of
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 163

sustainable development. Peru has seventy-eight projects in the pack-

age of infrastructure investments, which have increased its external
debt.
By reshaping the country to serve the demands of the world market,
IIRSA will threaten the subsistence economies, societies, and environ-
ment of Peru and the rest of South America. As forest land is seized,
unknown impacts are experienced and social conflicts increase. In
Peru’s Defensoría del Pueblo (a federal public defender agency), the
office of Prevention of Conflicts and Governability argued that eco-
nomic growth linked to resource exploitation near or within com-
munity common land has been producing struggles. It indicated
that in 2009 the absolute majority of conflicts (128 cases) were socio-
environmentally related to activities, such as mining, hydroelectric
generation, gas pipeline, oil production, and forest concessions (Peru,
Defensoría del Pueblo, 2010). Each month had seen between 10 and 15
new conflicts. In June 2009, there were 273 registered social conflicts,
226 active, 14 new cases, and only 2 were resolved (Mendoza, 2009). In
Bagua, in 2009, Indigenous people rose in defence of their territories
as common land and as eco-sufficient. Their subsistence perspective,
based on millennia-old simple and practical knowledge, has conserved
healthy forests, wildlife, biodiversity, and their society. Their Indig-
enous subsistence perspective has led to abundance, sufficiency, secu-
rity, a good life, preservation of the economic and ecological base, and
cultural and biological diversity. Resistance has come at great cost. The
Garcia administration shot them from helicopters and persecuted their
leaders (Isla, 2009).
In sum, to promote the global commons and global integration, the
Earth Summits have globalized the right of those in power to exploit
local communities, ecologies, bodies, and cultures. Plan Puebla Pan-
ama (PPP) in Central America, and IIRSA in South America, further
revealed the neocolonial relations of sustainable development. In both
cases, PPP and IIRSA made clear connection between global capitalism,
global patriarchy, and global nature and the fact that green capitalism
cannot be expanded without the direct intervention of the nation state.
This approach does nothing to stop poverty or climate change due to
the destruction of nature. Fortunately, local struggles in Central and
South America have reached across borders, involving activists around
the world in a truly globalized campaign against the worst aspects of
sustainable development and green capitalism. What follows are the
results of my findings, where I have shown that the political ecology
164 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

of sustainable development has revived and reinforced colonization,

dispossession, and patriarchy.

Debt and the Plan Puebla Panama

In the aftermath of the 1980s debt crisis, the Costa Rican state became
accountable to an ascending neoliberal political economy through the
international financial system, and legally bound to the World Bank
and the IMF through respective Stabilization and Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SSAPs). The debt crisis also made Costa Rica accountable
to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
and the WWF. These essentially political institutions have sold the ide-
ology that debt-for-nature exchange is a conservation instrument that
can be applied to all indebted ecologies in the world. To expand the
price system and control indebted countries resources, several of them
were included in debt-for-nature during the 1990s.
Table 9.1 tells the story of debt-for-nature exchanges in the indebted
Latin America countries. Pervaze Sheikh (2007) wrote a report for mem-
bers and committees of the US Congress on debt-for-nature swaps:

In the early 1990s, the United States restructured, and in one case sold,
debt equivalent to a face value of nearly $1 billion owed by Latin Ameri-
can countries; these transactions were authorized by Congress as part
of the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI), which broadened the
scope of debt swaps to include a number of social goals. … The model
for debt-for-nature initiatives, outlined in the EAI, was expanded in the
Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TFCA) to include countries around the
world with tropical forests. Under this program, debt can be restructured
in eligible countries, and funds generated from the transactions are used
to support programs to conserve tropical forests within the debtor coun-
try. Since 1998, $95.2 million has been used under the TFCA to restructure
loan agreements in 12 countries, and nearly $162.5 million in local cur-
rency will be generated in the next 12-26 years for tropical forest conserva-
tion projects. (Sheikh, 2007, p. 2)

The political ecology of sustainable development model priori-

tizes NGOs engaged in debt-for-nature swaps. With backing from
creditor governments, the IMF and the World Bank enforced debt-for-
nature swaps, which were put into practice by environmental non-
governmental organizations (ENGOs).
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 165

Table 9.1 US-Bilateral Debt-for-Nature Transactions under the Enterprise for the
Americas Initiative (US$, in 000s)

Face Value Face Value Funds Duration

Country Year Reduction of Debt Generated in Years

Bolivia 1991 30,700 38,400 21,800 15

El Salvador 1992 463,300 613,000 41,200 20
Uruguay 1992 3,700 34,400 7,030 15
Colombia 1992 31,000 310,000 41,600 10
Chile 1991&92 31,000 186,000 18,700 10
Jamaica 1991&93 311,000 406,000 21,500 19
Argentina 1993 3,800 38,100 3,100 14
Peru 1998 120,000 177,000 22,840 n/a
Total 993,998 1,803,300 177,770

Source: U.S. Department of Treasury, “The Operation of the Enterprise for the Americas
Facility and the Tropical Forest Conservation Act, Report to Congress,” March 2001, in
Sheikh, 2007, p. 11.

The Costa Rican example has been shown as a model to other coun-
tries in Central and South America. As noted in Chapter 2, the WWF-C
director said that ACA-Tilaran intended to establish a model of envi-
ronmental management that could be reproduced in other conserva-
tion areas and around the world (C. Tremblay, personal interview, July
1998). As a result, for example, Costa Rica’s ecology has been fully
coordinated with its economy, in the form of so-called green capital-
ism. In indebted countries, expansion of natural and human capital
through the financial market economy was offered as the highest
organizing principle for dealing with the economic (debt) and envi-
ronmental (nature) crises. Instead, the example of Costa Rica shows
that the debt-for-nature exchanges have created enormous capital
accumulation not only for the creditor countries but also for their
NGOs and agencies.

Political Ecology: The Greening of Costa Rica

Costa Rica, as an indebted state, has been touted as the model for other
countries in Central and South America. Since 1992, it has been held
up worldwide as an example of conservation efforts, forcing Costa
166 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Rica’s governments, under presidents Calderon Fournier (1990–1994),

Figueres Olsen (1994–1998), Rodriguez Echevarría (1998–2002), Abel
Pacheco (2002–2006), Oscar Arias (2006–2010), and Laura Chinchilla
(2010–2014), to create manifold discourses that attempted to override
and hide the negative consequences for many Costa Ricans.
Internationally, these governments have been promoting Costa
Rica as

• a wild area: “More than 28 per cent of national territory is protected

as wild areas” (“Mas del 28 por ciento del territorio nacional son
areas silvestres protegidas”); they did not say protected for biopiracy
to expropriate peasants and Indigenous people’s knowledge;
• a “green country” (pais verde); they did not say that land was confis-
cated without payment to the peasants and is green with monoculture
plantations, so as to make forests into carbon sinks, that is, absorbers
of carbon dioxide and other hazardous gases;
• “without artificial ingredients” (sin ingredientes artificiales); they did
not say that women and children are sold for ecotourism;
• a country “at peace with nature” (paz con la naturaleza); they did not
mention environmental damage from open-pit mining

Costa Rica followed the “greening” of the political ecology designed

by its creditors to provide access to its resources by corporations, who
still depend on nation states and ruling elites. They cannot expand
their operations without the direct intervention of the nation state
over local inhabitants and their nature. The role of the Costa Rican
state has been to establish in the Third World the concept of conserva-
tion areas as a way to connect nature and labour to the international
power relations of creditors. The country’s ruling elites placed nature
and labour on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE): the heritage
of Costa Rica’s commons, biomass, and labour now depend on the
rise and fall of prices in the international market, in other words, on
speculation.
The 1992 Earth Summit gave the World Bank the power to advance
a set of prescriptions designed to manage corporate globalization in
which, among other things, ENGOs and corporations work in partner-
ship in indebted countries. In response, the Costa Rican state has:

• licensed the NGOs’ managerialism, which empowered international

functionaries to broker the indebted country’s resources with large
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 167

corporations involved in economic restructuring and globalization.

NGOs went from occupying one office with one officer to employing
hundreds, and were able to mobilize a significant arsenal of institu-
tional resources and economic clout in the political sphere to make
their countries of origin the godfathers (see Introduction) of captured
conservation areas;
• created MINAE to expand the parameters for economic growth and
impose a technically more intense mode of ecological dispossession
on its citizens. MINAE allowed land enclosure, and dismember-
ment of its territory through conservation areas via the enclosure
and preservation of 28% of the national territory for profit. This
resulted in Costa Rica’s loss of territorial control over biomass and
productive land;
• acceded to requests demands to enclose the people’s commons for
the sake of “conservation,” producing the following effects: the loss
of knowledge systems; the opening of recreation areas to those who
can pay; the surrendering of skills for agricultural production and
food security; the disengagement of livelihoods, biodiversity, and
women’s dignity; the theft of farmland and pollution of clean drink-
ing water; and a disregard for women’s work in subsistence and
community activities; and,
• created conditions to benefit business and the banking system, as
Costa Rica’s external debt increased.

As a result, Costa Rica’s territory and biomass have biologically

simplified and fragmented. The “greening” meant the transfer of
resources from the new nature, the opening of new markets in common
areas for the so-called service-oriented economy, the dispossession of
labour, and the loss of livelihood through resource destruction. Fur-
ther, A. Carstens maintains that in 2004, Costa Rica’s exports repre-
sented around 50% of GDP, compared to 30% in 1980; the service sec-
tor’s share of GDP increased by 50%; tourism accounted for one-sixth
of total exports, while agricultural production accounted for just over
8% of GDP (Carstens, 2004). According to the World Bank, employ-
ment in agriculture decreased from 15.2% in 2005 to 13.2% in 2007
(World Bank, 2012), and Costa Rica’s external debt grew from $2,744
billion in 1980 to nearly $10.3 billion in 2011 (World Bank, 2013). The
growing foreign debt is the best way to trap forested countries with
debt-for-nature transactions under Tropical Forest Conservation Act
(TFCA) (Sheikh, 2010, p. 14).
168 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

The Greening of Debt

Debt-for-nature as sustainable development was also a massive experi-

ment in revenue generation management that served to transfer wealth
from indebted Costa Rican land, biomass, and labour to NGOs. Neo-
liberal politics encourages large NGOs to think of themselves as share-
holders of globalized capital. This scheme assigns a particular role to
corporate ENGOs, the adoption of a political stance beyond class strug-
gle, gender oppression, colonialism, and imperialism.
The political ecology of the sustainable development model priori-
tizes big ENGOs with sponsored megaprojects that are the beneficia-
ries of agreements with governments. These projects, though, have high
costs for the environment and society. The role of ENGOs is to establish
the monetary values of genes, scenery, forests, mountains, and medici-
nal plants, and to export these values to the stock market. When envi-
ronmentalism is embedded into a neoliberal framework, it is directed
towards the process of linking nature with international markets.
My research has shown that the Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature
program has financially benefited three ENGOs. First, the World Wild-
life Fund-Canada, acting as co-manager of the Arenal-Tilaran Con-
servation Area (ACA-Tilaran) with MINAE, designed a Land Plan to
restructure the socio-economic-nature relations to allow the transfer of
territories, biomass, and labour to big capital, by splitting territories
and communities, enclosing peasants’and Indigenous people’s subsis-
tence ecologies and knowledge, which have the capacity to produce
and reproduce outside the market.
They also offered a rationalization to big capital by presenting bio-
technology as a science aimed at identifying and quantifying genes;
presented ecotourism as a world of leisure, freedom, good taste, and
risk-free for those with money to spend; and offered the rainforest as
the storage place for carbon sinks. Moreover, they opened the door to
mining and mineral corporations by supporting the mining industry as
sustainable development, despite the fact that it is based on the extrac-
tion of non-renewable concentrations created over millions of years.
Once extracted, the destruction is permanent; for instance, the cyanide
lixiviation technique contaminates permanently, as it continues to leach
onto land, water, and air. The costs are always borne by the locals.
The ENGOs also controlled popular dissent to delegitimize any resis-
tance, externally by nominating Costa Rica for international prizes as a
green state at the Rio Conference in 1992, and internally by empowering
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 169

park rangers to stop “intruders,” as community members have been

renamed, in the conservation areas.
Second, the National Biodiversity Institute’s (INBio’s) conservation
scheme transformed conservation areas into reservoirs of material
resources to be exploited and turned into profit through bioprospecting,
biotechnology, and intellectual property rights. INBio has become an
instrument of dispossession. It threatens the survival of rural women,
peasants, and Indigenous people who, in the past, have survived
because of the very expertise in biodiversity INBio seeks to appropriate.
Through INBio, Western science transformed nature’s bounty into com-
modities of global economic value. Bioprospectors enjoy jurisdiction
over the inventory, prospecting, and commercialization of biodiversity,
and the legal framework known as intellectual property rights has been
extended to mainstream researchers, mainly biologists, to encompass
the expropriation of genetic material and traditional knowledge. More-
over, INBio has received international awards, such as the Prince of
Asturias award from Spain, in 1995.
ANDAR de Costa Rica similarly benefited from the Netherlands-
Costa Rica debt-for-nature program. ANDAR developed a Woman in
Development (WID) program, which in Abanico carried out a micro-
credit program supposedly to reduce gender disparities and poverty
by increasing the participation of women in economic development.
Instead the microenterprise program remade medicinal plants and
women, as well as their products. Translated to the market, medici-
nal plants lost their biological power and became a source of women’s
exploitation. The program also resulted in women becoming indebted,
extending their working time, transferring their biomass and food pro-
duction to the production of medicinal plants, and working for much
less than the minimum wage, worsening their working and social
conditions. In addition, it connected vulnerable local nature and local
women to the international markets and the world economy for capital
accumulation.
These three ENGOs have quite successfully integrated Costa Rica’s
nature and labour with corporate globalization. As a result of the rev-
enue generation, ENGOs have increased their budgets, the number of
their workers, and their power in the political ecology of the political
economy.
Furthermore, debt-for-nature exchanges opened doors for new NGO
agreements. On 18 November 2009, the Costa Rica Forever Association,
organized by four US nonprofit private organizations – the Nature
170 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

Conservancy, the Linden Trust for Conservation, the Gordon & Betty
Moore Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, was set up
to administer trust and equity funds for conservation in Costa Rica,
such as debt-for-nature fund (http://costaricaporsiempre.org/en/the
-actors.aspx).
In July 2010, Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservacion (SINAC)
and the Costa Rica Forever Association signed a five-year coopera-
tion agreement (SINAC & Forever, 2009). It reads: “The objective of
this agreement is to establish the commitments of mutual cooperation
between SINAC and the Association [Forever Costa Rica] for the fulfil-
ment of the Global Goals of Conservation of Costa Rica in the frame of
the Program of Work of Protected Areas [of the United Nations Biologi-
cal Diversity Convention] by means of implementation and monitoring
the Annual Plans of Work” (p. 3).
A better reading of this agreement shows that SINAC drew up a con-
tract that facilitates delivery to the Costa Rica Forever Association of
the intellectual property rights on research and other studies to be car-
ried out in the protected wild areas, whether or not these are national
parks. Again, this agreement that is “meant to support SINAC’s activi-
ties” shifts costs to peasants, Indigenous people, future generations,
and other species. Therefore, it is a false solution to the climate crisis.
In addition, debt-for-nature funds gathered by the Costa Rica Forever
Association might accumulate yields on Wall Street. The current pres-
ident and chief executive officer of the Nature Conservancy and the
president of the Linden Trust for Conservation worked for Goldman
Sachs. But the principal amount of the debt-for-nature funds will be
used to accumulate wealth for the NGOs, consequently expanding the
number of associate creditors involved in the ecological indebtedness
owed by the North to the South already denounced at the Earth Summit
in 1992 by those who signed the Debt Treaty (Debt Treaty, 1992).

The “Global Commons”

An economy based on services opened new markets for trade based

on the knowledge of peasants and Indigenous people, specifically the
valorization process dominated by patents, as well as the immaterial
world, e.g., air and scenery. In the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area,
WWF-C disassembled the natural commons and enclosed 250,000 hect-
ares of land on which many people depended for their livelihood. To
serve a global market machine, the commons – genes, scenery, forests,
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 171

medicinal plants, and mountains – were renamed as natural capital and

transformed in paper money. Meanwhile, without access to their liveli-
hoods, the commoners became criminalized, objectified, and indebted.
My research in ACA-Tilaran has shown the following results of this
process
Privatization of biodiversity. The enclosure of genetic material for eco-
nomic prospecting has transformed biological organisms into resources
for scientific research and appropriated local knowledge of native plants
and animals. Privatized knowledge systems are supported by intellec-
tual property rights, controlling how that knowledge can be used, but
they ignore where peasant and Indigenous knowledge originates: in
holistic, renewing relationships with nature, and from visions, dreams,
and sacred beings. Such knowledge cannot be reduced to an assem-
blage of accumulated information.
Privatization of the forest. Forests of indebted countries have been
redefined as carbon sinks. At present, forests in Costa Rica have been
transformed into monoculture plantations. This situation has produced
a crisis of nature, because these trees need massive amounts of agro-
chemicals and do not reproduce. Since the industrial world is not held
responsible for mitigating its own levels of emissions, this type of solu-
tion allows the industrial world to continue polluting as long as it can
purchase carbon credits from indebted rainforest-dense countries.
Privatization of scenery. The consumption of scenery and culture, which
involves a high volume of movement of people over long distances, has
had a violent impact on vulnerable people, species, and their habitats
as the construction of hotels and cabins expands deforestation. It has
transformed sites of local agriculture into recreation areas and mutated
residents from agricultural workers into service providers. This service
industry established internal boundaries separating local people from
the volcanoes, waterfalls, rivers, hot springs, and havens for wildlife
they had shared, making the sex trade virtually the only way left for
women and children to earn a living.
Destruction of spaces and water resources by open-pit mining. Deep holes
in the soil have been opened sometimes to remove entire mountains,
with the aim of finding rocks containing gold, silver, and other miner-
als and metals. The shattered rocks, when combined with a cyanide
and water mixture to remove the gold, destroy ecological cycles and
contaminate ecosystems, poison hydro resources, pollute the atmo-
sphere through the release of poisonous substances, and thereby affect
all life. This activity destroys the conditions necessary for peasants’
172 The “Greening” of Costa Rica

subsistence survival because it eliminates the productivity of agricul-

tural land.
Creation of indebtedness. Women’s work in cultivating and caring for
medicinal plants has added to their impoverishment. Such work has
proven to be one more example of invisible, unpaid, and unrecognized
labour, such as child care, home care, elder care, and community care.
Women engaged in this project not only produce under high levels of
exploitation but also become indebted to NGOs. Further, the focus on
monoculture means they are losing the traditional wisdom of their heal-
ers and knowledge of the curative capacities of their ecosystems.

Conclusion

This book has shown concrete connections between political economy

and political ecology, the global and the local, people and nature, and
state and citizenship. It has uncovered the creation of a new form of
capital accumulation, which I call “greening.” This concept represents
a new form of exchange value based on biological forms and processes
such as genetics and medicinal plants (bio-products), air and scenery
(non-material commons), and water (material commons), which, when
facilitated by debt-for-nature, is inserted into many forms of interna-
tional market relations. It also represents the final step of dispossession
and privatization of the commons.
This “greening” results in the enclosure of collective knowledge and
public commons within conservation areas. The rise of reductionist sci-
ence of conservation areas can be equated with the instrumental prin-
ciples of the Earth Summits. Both reductionist science and the Summits’
principles share the pursuit of growth and development by exploiting
Indigenous ecologies and expropriating the subsistence economies
that are inseparable from these ecologies. Indeed, violent interventions
are carried out to destroy the very means of survival of unwaged and
poorly waged commoners. The expansion of this “greening” endangers
peasant and Indigenous way of life. In sum, this book uncovers that the
Earth Summits, the economists of the World Bank, and the biologists
of large ENGOs, using debt-for-nature swaps, have created a service
economy, centralized the accumulation process, and forced a shift of
products, biomaterials, and cheap or unwaged labour towards interna-
tional markets.
Understood within an ecofeminist framework, women, peasants,
and Indigenous people are authorized subject-knowers, with distinct
 The “Greening” of Capitalism 173

voices. They are the true experts, and many have spoken out about their
place and the new relations of domination developed as a by-product
of the environmental crisis. For peasants and Indigenous people, both
women and men, this form of “greening” is disastrous, as the biodiver-
sity, native agriculture, forests, and mountains are literally demolished.
Furthermore, when rural women and men are forced off the land, they
are coerced to join an urban population victimized by the stabilization
and the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank
that have been in force since the beginning of the debt crisis. Oppressed
by both the neoliberal political economy and political ecology, young
women and children have become objectified and violated as sex trade
workers. Once again, we see how the rural population and their envi-
ronment are exploited by those with power, those who also define
whose knowledge can be seen as authoritative.
Finally, this book advocates for an alternative ecofeminist perspective
that offers a liberation of women and men, nature, and the maldeveloped
world that does not rest on the continuation of exploitation, colonization,
catch-up development, and “greening” for capital accumulation.
This page intentionally left blank
Abbreviations

ACA-Tilaran Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area

ACOPE Asociación Costarricense de Productores de Energía
(Costa Rican Association of Producers of Energy)
AIFLD American Institute for Free Labor Development
ARAO Asociación Regional de Agricultores Orgánicos
BNDES Banco Nacional de Desarrollo Económico y Social de
Brazil
BOP balance of payments
CAF Cooperación Andina de Fomento
CDM clean development mechanism
CENAP Centro Nacional de Acción Pastoral (National Centre
for Pastoral Action)
CGIAR Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research
CI Conservation International
CIDA Canadian International Development Agency
CINDE Coalición Costarricense de Iniciativas para el Desarrollo
(Costa Rica Development Initiatives Coalition)
CNP Consejo Nacional de Producción (National Production
Council)
CONADEP Comisión Nacional de Desaparición de Personas
EAI Enterprise for the Americas Initiative
ECLAC United Nations Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean
176 Abbreviations

ECODES Estrategia de Conservación para el Desarrollo

Sustentable (Conservation Strategy for Sustainable
Development)
EIB European Investment Bank
ENGO environmental non-governmental organization
ERE Programa de Estabilización y Recuperación Económica
(Stabilization and Economic Recuperation Program)
EZLN Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FFI Fiscal Forestry Incentive
FONAFITO Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento Forestal (National
Forestry Financing Fund)
FONPLATA Financial Fund for the Development of the Plate Basin
FPAR Feminist Participatory Action Research
FUNDACA Fundación para el Desarrollo del Area de Conservación
Arenal (Development Foundation for the Arenal
Conservation Area)
FUNDECOR Fundación para el Desarrollo de la Cordillera Volcánica
Central
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GCA Guanacaste Conservation Area
GDFCF Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund
GEF Global Environmental Facility
GEMA Grupo Ecológico de Mujeres de Abanico (Women’s
Ecological Group of Abanico)
GNP gross national product
GRM global resource manager
IADB Inter-American Development Bank
IARC International Agricultural Resource Centers
IBRD International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development
ICE Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (Costa Rican
Institute of Electricity)
ICMM International Council on Mining and Metals
 Abbreviations 177

IDA Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario (Agrarian Development

Institute)
IFI international financial institution
IIRSA Iniciativa para la Integración de la Infraestructura
Regional Sudamericana
IMF International Monetary Fund
INBio Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (Costa Rican
National Biodiversity Institute)
ITCO Instituto de Tierras y Colonización (Land and
Colonization Institute)
IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature
IUCNR International Union for Conservation of Nature and
Natural Resources
MAG Costa Rica. Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería
MCFR Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve
MINAE Costa Rica. Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía (Ministry
of the Environment and Energy)
MINAET Costa Rica. Ministerio del Ambiente Energía y
Telecomunicaciones
MIRENEM Costa Rica. Ministerio de Recursos Naturales, Energía
y Minas (Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and
Mines)
MOVASA Molinos de Viento Arenal S.A.
NGO non-governmental organization
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
PEN Programa Estado de la Nación
PLN Partido Liberación Nacional (National Liberation
Party)
PPP Plan Puebla Panama
PRP Productive Reconversion Program
PWU Priority Working Unit
REDD Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation
SAP Structural Adjustment Program
SETENA Secretaría Técnica Nacional Ambiental
178 Abbreviations

SINAC Costa Rica. Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservación

(National System of Conservation Areas)
SSAP Stabilization and Structural Adjustment Program
TFC Tropical Forest Conservation
TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission
TSC Tropical Science Centre
UN United Nations
UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development
UNDP United Nations Development Program
UNEP United Nations Environment Program
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change
USAID United States Agency for International Development
USIA United States Information Agency
WID Women in Development
WTO World Trade Organization
Notes

Preface and Acknowledgments

1 According to Juan Figuerola (2005), a forestry engineer, “In tropical

countries such as Costa Rica extensive plantations of monocultures degrade
the soil and other ecological conditions, bringing among other things the
following consequences: (1) they generate favourable conditions for
the proliferation of pests and diseases, which entails the application of
chemicals that pollute and alter the atmosphere and life of organisms; (2)
they deplete soils: in tropical forests, soils maintain a balance between the
production and expenditure of elements and micro-chemical elements;
in these same soils, few-species plantations are concentrated in a few
elements and break the balance sheet; overexploited soils are transformed
into inert substrates that require chemical fertilizers to continue producing
and the environment becomes a large intensive-care room; (3) they erode
soils: extensive plantations of few species are generally peers [of the same
age], and at the time of the harvest forestry management apply the tala
rasa [when all trees are cut at once]. As a result fragile soils are exposed
to the sun and rain, washing and losing their nutrients in a short time,
and the erosion problems also move to great distances” [reaching marine
ecosystems] (p. 16).
2 According to the head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cattle Ranching
in La Fortuna (personal interview, August 1998), the use of an agrochemical
technological package [including chemicals such as tamaron, counter,
butamar, piton, quirol, all of which produce residues], results in new pest
infestations and sickness in the community. These chemicals are absorbed
by inhalation or simply through the skin. Workers (usually men) do
not use protection when they apply the toxic chemicals. The chemical
180  Notes to pages 13–122

containers are usually rusty and the liquid spreads over the workers’
clothes and skin. These men are fathers who carry their children without
washing their hands or changing their clothes. Moreover, heavy rains wash
agrochemicals into the rivers and roads contaminating community water
sources. Children in the area suffer high levels of sicknesses related to
agrochemicals.

Introduction: The “Greening” of Costa Rica

1 All dollar figures refer to US currency, unless otherwise noted.

2.  The Political Economy of Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State

1 Between 1955 and 1979, thirteen areas in Costa Rica were declared forestry
reserves and national parks: Volcan Irazu (1955), Tortuguero (1970), Calmita
(1970), Volcan Poas (1970), Santa Rosa (1971), Manuel Antonio (1974), Barra
Honda (1974), Rincon de la Vieja (1974), Chirripo (1975), Braulio Carrillo
(1975), Corcovado (1978), Isla de Cocos (1978), and La Amistad (1979). In
addition, six biological reserves, one national monument, and one absolute
natural reserve represented 8.8% of protected areas, by 1988 (Quesada,
1990, p. 47).
2 The following laws govern SINAC and MINAE policies: Forestry Law No.
7575 (5 February 1996); Biodiversity Law No. 7788 (23 April 1998); National
Park Law No. 3763 (19 October 1966); and Wildlife Conservation Law No.
7317 (21 October 1992).

3.  Nature and People in the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area

1 A latifundio is a large land holding specializing in an agroindustry export.

Examples are banana plantations and cattle ranches.

6.  Ecotourism and Social Development

1 A biological corridor is “a continuous geographic extent of habitat

linking ecosystems, either spatially or functionally; such a link restores
or conserves the connection between habitats that are fragmented by
natural causes or human development. Such corridors are an important
aspect in the preservation of species richness and biodiversity” (Boyle &
Ervin, 2010).
 Notes to pages 135–52 181

7. Women’s Microenterprises and Social Development

1 During field trips to ACA-Tilaran I collected the uses and names of wild
medicinal plants and herbs. These included azul de mata (justicia tinctoria),
for wounds; albahaca verde and morada (ocimum basilicum) (basil), for
earaches and as a dressing; calendula (calendula officinalis), a natural
antibiotic; calzoncillo (passiflora biflora), for kidney functioning; carambola
(averrhoa carambola), for fibre and the kidneys; cipres (cupressus lusitanica),
for prostate; cucaracha (acanthus mollis), for treating diabetes; chinitas
(impatiens walleriana), for allergies; chilca (baccharis dracunculifolia), for
rheumatism; diente de leon (taraxacum officinale) (dandelion), for energy;
eucalypto (eucalyptus globulus labill), for sinusitis and asthma; gavilana
leaves (neurolaena lobata), as an insecticide and fungicide; ginger (zingiber
officinale), for influenza; gotukola (centella asiatica), for improved memory;
güitite (acnistus arborescens),for allergies; hierbabuena (mentha sativa), for
stomachache; hoja de sen (caesalpinia pulcherrima), for constipation; hoja
de guayaba (psidium guajava), as a toothpaste; flor de jamaica (hibiscus
sabdariffa), for the regulation of blood pressure; hombre grande (quassia
amara), for the liver; hoja del aire (kalanchoe pinnata), for headaches; incienso
(plectranthus madagascariensis), for relaxation; juanilama (lippia alba), for
rheumatism and arthritis; llantén (plantago lanceolata), for kidney and
cataracts; madero negro (gliricidia sepium), for allergies and gastro-intestinal
conditions; mastuerzo (tropaeolum majus), for inflammation; mint (mentha),
as a digestive aid; naranjo agrio (citrus aurantium), for depression; oregano
(origanum vulgare), for seasoning and for respiratory ailments; papaya
(carica papaya), for liver and digestion; reina de la noche (brugmansia
candida) flower, as an insect repellent; romero (rosmarinus officinalis), as an
anti-inflammatory medication; ruda (ruta graveolens), for headache and
other pain; sabila (aloe vera) for burns and gastric cancer; salvia virgen
(buddleja americana),for allergies; saragundi (senna reticulata), for arthritis
and rheumatism; sarzaparrilla (smilax aspera), for regulating blood pressure;
sauco (sambucus nigra), for asthma and bronchitis; tilo (tilia cordata), for
depression; and zacate limon (cymbopogon citratus), for the respiratory system.

8. Mining and the Dispossession of Resources and Livelihoods

1 SETENA (Secretaria Tecnica Nacional Ambiental) is a Costa Rican

government body in charge of approval of mining projects. It bases
its decisions on the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) presented
182 Notes to pages 154–60

by the corporation. Sonia Torres argues that this body is paid by the
interested mining body, which then approves the EIS without community
consultation. In cases where communities are consulted, they do not
have access to the technical documents or do not have adequate technical
support for analysis and interpretation. Further, “Our authorities do
not think about environmental disasters and the need for restoration or
compensation” (S. Torres, personal communication, August 2001).
2 The judges used Article 46, paragraph 4; Article 50 of the Political Constitution;
and Article. 70, paragraph d, and Article 75, paragraph 2, of Código Procesal
Penal to annul the sentence (see Rios Minerales v. Blanco Martinez).

9. The “Greening” of Capitalism

1 According to Third World Network, Type II outcomes are the voluntary

commitments to specific targets or objectives for the implementation of
sustainable development made by individual governments, non-governmental
actors or by partnerships of governmental or non-governmental actors.
Type IIs were not negotiated in the formal World Summit on Sustainable
Development preparatory process and do not require consensus agreement
between all UN member states. From the beginning many civil society groups,
including NGOs, Indigenous peoples, women’s organizations, and trade
unions, questioned the move to give official blessing to Type II partnerships at
a summit level, especially when it became clear that a major goal was to get big
business on board. (http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr145f.htm).
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Index
Abangares, 81–2, 84, 148–9, 153
Abanico, 4, 29, 64–5, 72–4, 79–81,
134–5, 137–41, 145–6, 169
Aboriginal. See Indigenous
abundance, 76, 78, 118, 121, 163
accumulation, 5–8, 11, 19, 24, 26, 37,
47–8, 50, 55, 61, 65–6, 112, 140, 152,
161, 165, 169, 172–3
activists, 157, 163
agencies, 4–5, 17, 30, 54, 57, 63–5,
80, 86, 103, 119, 124, 137–8, 140–1,
163–5
Agenda 21, 4, 6, 159
agrarian, 46, 69, 80
agricultural, 21, 28, 37, 40–1, 43–6,
57, 62, 65, 74, 77–8, 81–2, 86, 88, 92,
94, 104, 109, 122–3, 125–6, 130, 132,
138, 142, 167, 171–2
agriculture, 26, 28–30, 40–7, 56, 64–5,
72, 74, 77, 81, 88, 102, 122–3, 126–7,
131–2, 135–6, 140, 149, 152, 167,
171, 173
agrochemicals, 41–2, 71, 78, 80–8,
105–6, 113, 118, 132, 171
agroforestry, 72
agronomists, 42, 45
aid, 12, 15, 38–40, 56, 80, 88, 104
Amazonia, 160
American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), 17
ancestors, 69, 96, 144
anti-mining, 151, 156–7
aquifer stratum, 83
Arenal, 3, 5, 26, 50, 57, 59, 69–73,
75, 77–9, 81, 83, 85, 90–1, 96–7,
108–10, 115, 118–25, 130–1, 149, 158,
168, 170
Arenal Conservation Area–Tilaran
(ACA–Tilaran), 3–5, 26, 31, 50, 57,
59, 61, 69–73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85,
89–91, 97, 108–9, 116, 118–19, 122–5,
135, 138, 148–9, 158, 165, 168, 170–1
Argentina, 12–14, 17, 35, 165
assets, 20–2, 25, 56, 133
Asociación ANDAR de Costa Rica
(ANDAR), 4–5, 31, 64–5, 81,
135–40, 145, 158, 169
Asociación Costarricense de
Productores de Energía (ACOPE),
103
association, 4–5, 31, 51, 79, 90, 103–4,
133, 139, 142, 158, 169–170
authoritarianism, 13–14, 133
autonomy, 6, 7, 18, 37, 118, 130, 140
198 Index
balance of payments (BOP), 12, 16
banking, 12, 19–20, 38, 72, 81, 124, 167
beans, 43, 81, 88, 109–10, 117, 126–7
Belize, 159
biocatalysts, 95
biochemistry, 27; biochemical
properties, 86, 92
biodiversity, 4–6, 8, 22, 25, 27, 31, 45,
48–50, 55–7, 60–4, 71, 86, 88–92,
94–6, 98–9, 105–7, 114, 127, 133,
158–9, 161, 163, 167, 169, 171, 173
biogenetic, 88
biological, 7, 27, 29–30, 51, 62–3, 66,
84, 86–9, 90–3, 95, 97–9, 105–6,
117, 122, 133, 148, 150, 158–9, 163,
169–72
biomass, 47, 104, 106, 140, 145,
166–9
biophysical, 23, 89, 99, 148
biopiracy, 63, 88, 91–2, 99, 126, 166
bioprospecting, 61–3, 86, 88, 91–3,
99, 169
biosphere, 23
biotechnology, 5, 62–3, 70–1, 92, 94,
99, 162, 168–9
biotic, 121, 131
Bolivia, 5, 13–14, 88, 160, 162, 165
botanical, 64, 88, 146
Brazil, 4, 12–13, 53, 160, 162
Bretton Woods, 19
Brundtland Report, 20, 49, 85
Business Action for Sustainable
Development, 30
campesina/o, 81, 125
Canada, 3–5, 26, 40, 48, 54–8, 62,
73, 94, 96, 103, 128–9, 138, 149,
158, 168
Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA), 54, 57, 59, 89
Canadian mining, 73, 81–2, 147, 149,
155, 157
capitalism/capitalist, 7–12, 18, 20, 25,
31, 60–1, 65, 88, 129, 158–61, 163,
165, 167, 169, 171, 173
carbon dioxide, 100–1, 166
carbon sinks, 28, 100–2, 166, 168, 171
Caribbean, 17, 36, 38, 147
cash crops, 65, 81, 108
cattle, 28, 40–2, 46, 56, 74, 76–7, 83,
117, 122, 126, 150, 152, 162
Central America, 17, 30, 38, 59, 121,
128, 158–9, 162–3
Centro Nacional de Acción Pastoral
(CENAP), 135
Chiapas, 161
Chile, 12–14, 17, 165
Chipko Movement, 103
civil society, 53, 150
climate change, 28, 31, 100–3, 121,
158, 163
Coalición Costarricense de Iniciativas
para el Desarrollo (CINDE), 38, 102
Colombia, 12, 88, 155, 160, 162, 165
colonialism/colonialist, 7–8, 10, 15,
17, 24, 46, 69, 74, 80, 83, 88, 107,
145, 147, 164, 168, 173
commercialization, 63, 94, 169
commodification, 6, 114, 120, 140
commodity, 8, 23, 25, 91, 99, 113, 122,
133, 135, 143, 169
commons, 6–7, 10, 22–24, 31, 63, 76,
117, 127–8, 155, 160–1, 163, 166–7,
170, 172
communal, 17, 73
community, 14–15, 19, 23, 27, 30, 40,
57, 60, 73, 75, 77–8, 80, 82–84, 86,
89–91, 97, 104, 110, 117, 120, 122–5,
136–40, 142, 144, 149, 151–7, 163,
167, 169, 172

compensation, 7, 84, 98–9, 107–8
competition, 71, 89, 99, 123, 141
competitiveness, 45, 145
conditionalities, 35
Consejo Nacional de Producción
(CNP), 45, 126–7, 137, 140–2, 145
conservation, 3–6, 25–7, 29–30, 33, 42,
48–55, 57, 59–65, 69–73, 75, 77, 79,
81, 83, 85–6, 90, 92–9, 102–3, 105,
107–10, 113, 115–17, 119, 121–2,
124–6, 149, 158, 160, 164–70, 172
conservationist, 20, 50, 60, 97
Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), 88
consumption, 11, 29, 43–4, 46, 73, 81,
122, 126–7, 159, 171
contamination, 30, 70, 82–5, 106, 107,
118, 122, 148, 150–2, 156, 168, 171
conventions, international, 27–8,
86–7, 89, 91–3, 95, 97–101, 170
Coopelesca, 77
cordillera, 50, 81, 102, 148
corporate globalization, 166, 169
corporations, 20, 30, 36, 40, 42, 48,
53, 63, 83, 86, 88–9, 92, 94, 101, 104,
113, 147–9, 151–7, 159–62, 166–8
corridor, biological, 76, 122, 158–60
credit, 5, 12, 16, 19, 29, 35, 41–2,
47, 56, 78, 103–4, 133, 135, 138–9,
146, 161
creditors, 4, 12, 40, 54–5, 57, 107, 125,
128, 131, 143, 164–6, 170
credits, 5, 12, 28–9, 61, 71, 99–104,
106–10, 113, 126, 138, 160, 171
criminalization, 98, 171
crises, 4–7, 14–17, 20, 22, 25–8, 35,
37–8, 40, 42, 44, 48, 50, 54, 56, 61,
77, 99–100, 103–4, 109, 114, 125,
128, 141–2, 150, 156, 158, 161,
164–5, 170–1, 173
Index 199
crops, 40, 65, 80–81, 108, 127, 133, 135,
137, 145
Cuba, 37
cultivization, 42, 65, 74, 76, 78, 117,
124, 127, 137
culture, 9, 11, 18, 29, 59, 69, 106, 114,
122, 136, 151, 163, 171
cyanide, 30, 82–4, 148, 150–1,
168, 171
dam, 5, 59, 159
debt, 3–5, 12, 14–17, 19–20, 25–7, 31,
33, 35, 37–40, 42, 44, 46, 48–51,
53–8, 62, 64–5, 72–3, 77, 94, 96, 98,
101–2, 108–9, 115, 116, 128, 130, 133,
136, 138, 139, 141, 145, 158, 163–5,
167–70, 172–3
debt swaps, 25, 31, 39, 54–5, 98, 133,
136, 164, 172
debt-for-nature exchange, 3–5, 25
deficit, 12, 16, 40
deforestation, 26, 46–47, 49–50, 71,
75–6, 102, 104–5, 107, 110, 150, 171
democracy, 13, 14, 63, 156, 162
deregulation, 16, 35, 37, 44, 81,
122, 157
desertification, 148, 150
destabilization, 4
destitution, 28, 60, 143
devaluation, currency, 16, 37, 81, 139
devastation, environmental, 83,
148, 150
development, 3–7, 11–15, 17–27,
29–31, 36–8, 39, 40, 44, 46, 48–51,
53–7, 60–5, 69–74, 76–7, 80, 82,
86, 89, 95–6, 99–103, 106–7, 109,
113–17, 118–25, 127, 129–33, 135–7,
139, 145, 147–8, 157–60, 162–4,
168–9, 172–3
dictatorships, 12–15, 17, 47
200 Index
Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional
(DINA), 13
dispossessed, 7, 26, 29, 50, 86, 99, 107,
109, 113, 128, 131, 147, 164, 167,
169, 172
diversification, agricultural, 40, 77–78
diversity, biological, 30, 74, 84, 86–9,
91–3, 95, 97–9, 104–6, 117, 148, 150,
163, 170
dynamite, 30, 148
earth, 3–4, 6, 18, 21, 24, 30, 53–4,
60, 64, 86, 100, 114, 133, 147, 149,
151, 153, 155, 157–60, 163, 166,
170, 172
Earth Summit, 4, 6, 21, 24, 30, 53–4,
86, 100, 114, 133, 147, 149, 151, 153,
155, 157–8, 160, 166, 170
earthworms, 77
ecofeminism, 6–8, 10–11, 17, 24, 59,
85, 172–1
ecological concerns, 4, 7, 9, 17, 19–20,
22–27, 30–1, 45–8, 49, 54–5, 60–1,
64–5, 71, 93, 95–7, 102, 105, 107,
109, 120, 122, 132, 135, 137, 147,
150, 153, 157–8, 161, 163–6, 167–9,
170–3
Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean
(ECLAC/CEPAL), 17, 36–7, 44–4
economic growth, 6, 11–13, 21, 26–7,
31, 48, 50, 56, 60–1, 69, 85, 114, 130,
148, 152, 159, 161, 163, 167
economic policies, 35, 38
economists, 8, 12, 22–3, 172
ecosocialists, 22–3
ecosystems, 4, 8, 18, 22–3, 27, 30,
53, 59, 69, 85, 93–5, 99, 104–7, 112,
116–17, 122, 128, 133, 135, 148, 150,
171–2
ecotourism/ecotourists, 5, 27–8, 61,
63, 71, 113–23, 125–31, 159, 162,
166, 168
Ecuador, 14, 88, 160
education, 16, 21, 37, 54, 65, 71, 77,
138–9
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN), 161
El Salvador, 17, 35, 159, 165
electricity, 43, 77, 117
emissions, 28, 100–2, 109, 171
enclosure, 6, 27–30, 50–1, 89, 116, 128,
167, 171–2
endemism, 90
England, 6–7, 13, 80
enterprise, 16, 25–6, 29, 36, 39, 45,
48, 55, 60–1, 65, 102, 118, 142, 145,
164–5
entrepreneurs, 20, 35–6, 41, 63,
104, 113
entropy, 23
environment, 3–7, 19–23, 25, 27–8,
45–51, 53–7, 59, 61–3, 65, 70–1, 83–
4, 86, 89, 92–3, 96, 98–9, 102–105,
107–8, 112–14, 122, 125–6, 130, 132,
137, 148, 150, 152, 155–6, 158–9,
161, 163–6, 168, 173
Environmental Nongovernmental
Organizations (ENGOs), 3–5, 57,
164, 166, 168–169, 172
environmentalists, 22, 28, 105, 111, 150
epiphytes, 106
equality, 10, 31, 125, 136–7, 141,
145, 158
equity, 64–5, 170
erosion, 37, 76, 83, 106–7, 135,
148, 150
Estabilización y Recuperación
Económica (Programa de) (ERE),
38–9

Estrategia de Conservación para el
Desarrollo Sustentable (ECODES),
26, 49–51, 53, 55, 65, 100, 102, 115
eucalyptus, 104, 113
eviction, 79, 110–11
exchange, 3–5, 22, 25, 29, 38, 40, 48,
54–6, 64, 69, 92, 105, 110, 115–16,
130, 138, 142, 144, 161, 164, 166, 172
exploitation, 7, 15, 17, 20, 24, 29, 53,
59, 62, 69–70, 88, 92, 94, 99, 129,
135, 145, 154, 162–3, 169, 172–3
export, 15, 38, 40–2, 44, 46–7, 49, 76,
78, 80–1, 104, 115, 126, 130, 145,
152, 167–8
expropriation, 8, 11, 28, 30, 86, 92, 99,
107–10, 113, 128, 141, 156–7, 166,
169, 172
extinction, 20, 50, 60, 71, 121
extraction, 4, 10, 24, 47, 62–3, 105,
148, 168
farming/farmers, 11, 28, 40, 45, 47,
60, 65, 76, 83, 108, 110, 118, 126, 134,
150, 156, 162
farmland, 43, 89, 110, 167
fauna, 30, 84, 89–90, 105–6, 148, 150
feminism, 13, 65, 137
feminist participatory action research
(FPAR), 137
fertility, 77, 105, 127, 135
fertilizer, 41–2, 46, 56, 78, 105, 138–9
FIDEICOMMISSA (Costa Rica/
Canada Trust Fund for
Biodiversity), 56–7
finca, 42, 60–1, 74, 81, 83, 108, 112–13
Fiscal Forestry Incentives (FFI),
104, 113
fisheries, 152
fishing, 28, 71, 76, 97, 117–18,
120, 127
Index 201
flooding, 46, 124, 150
flora, 30, 84, 89–91, 148, 150
Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento
Forestal (FONAFITO), 108
Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), 102, 127
food sovereignty, 27
food system, 118
foodstuffs, 11, 81, 127
forestry, 50, 71, 81, 90–1, 103–10, 113,
119, 149
Forestry Incentive Programs (FIP),
108–9, 113
Fortuna, La, 26–7, 29, 41, 64, 72–8, 96,
116–20, 122, 125–7, 130
fossil fuels, 60
free trade, 16, 20, 35, 86
frijol, 127
frogs, 121
Fundación para el Desarrollo de
la Cordillera Volcánica Central
(FUNDECOR), 102
Fundación para el Desarrollo del
Area de Conservación Arenal
(FUNDACA), 72–3, 81, 123–5, 135,
138, 140
fundamentalism, 19
fungicides, 41
gender, 4, 9, 11, 15, 18, 28–9, 63–5,
123–5, 133, 136–7, 141, 146, 161,
168–9
gender analysis, 136
General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), 19
genes/genetics, 6, 21–2, 27, 56–7, 59,
62, 86–90, 92, 94, 96, 98–9, 105, 133,
168–72
genetic engineering, 88
genocide, 15
202 Index
geopolitics, 38, 47–48
geothermal energy, 59, 84
global economy, 63, 94
Global Environmental Facility
(GEF), 5–6
Global Resource Managers (GRMs),
23–24
globalization, 11, 15, 19, 27, 60, 125,
129, 142, 147, 156, 159, 166–7, 169
gold, 30, 81–83, 148–153, 155–156, 171
government, 3–6, 11, 13–17, 20–1,
23–4, 27, 29–30, 36–40, 43, 47, 49,
54–57, 61–4, 73–5, 77–9, 81–3,
85–6, 88, 98–101, 103–4, 108–11,
113, 115–16, 123–4, 126–7, 129–31,
133, 136–7, 141, 147–8, 151–3, 156,
158–62, 164, 166, 168
grain, 81
grandmothers, 14–15, 75, 144
grassroots, 17
green business, 161
green capitalism, 31, 158, 161,
163, 165
Green Revolution, 40–41, 47, 76, 117,
121, 132
greenhouse gas emissions, 28,
100, 102
“greening,” 3–4, 24, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44,
46, 50, 52, 54, 56–8, 60, 62, 64, 66,
70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84–5, 88,
90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 102, 104, 106, 108,
110–12, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126,
128, 130, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142,
144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156,
158–73
gross domestic product (GDP), 27,
37, 167
gross national product (GNP), 18,
23, 129
groundwater, 152
Grupo Ecológico de Mujeres de
Abanico (GEMA), 137, 140
Guanacaste, 50, 54–5, 77, 80, 82, 97–8,
110, 149–50
Guanacaste Conservation Area
(GCA), 54, 98
Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation
Fund (GDFCF), 55
Guatemala, 17, 159
guerrillas, 39, 162
Guyana, 160
habitat, 50, 114, 121, 131, 171
harvest, 42–3, 78, 105, 117, 139
healers/healing, 133, 135, 144, 172
health, 16, 21, 23–4, 27, 37, 43, 77,
81–2, 84, 109, 115, 117–18, 120, 135,
139, 144, 150, 156–7, 160
hegemony, 92
herbicides, 41, 139
herbs, 135, 142
Holland, 64
Honduras, 159
household, 8, 14–15, 18, 25, 44, 46, 69,
132, 136, 139, 144, 161
housewifization, 6, 8, 15, 24, 45, 140
housework, 8
human rights, 17, 111, 122, 129, 162
hunters/hunting, 71, 76, 97–8,
117–18, 127
hydroelectric power, 5, 59, 71, 73, 108,
159, 161
imperialism, 168
imports, 41, 81, 127, 152
impoverishment, 27, 121, 131, 172
indebtedness, 3–5, 16, 19, 25–6, 28,
48, 67, 78, 81, 101–2, 115, 128, 131,
140–1, 143, 145, 148, 159, 164–6,
168–72

indentured labour, 81, 140
Indigenous peoples, 3, 5–6, 8,
13–14, 18–19, 24, 26–8, 56, 59,
62, 69, 76–7, 81, 86, 88, 92,
95–6, 99, 106, 109, 115, 130, 132–3,
147, 149, 157–8, 161–3,
166, 168–73
industry/industrialization, 5, 8,
11–12, 17–18, 20–1, 23–4, 28–9,
36–7, 61–2, 66, 88, 92, 94–5, 98,
100–3, 128–9, 136, 147, 159–60,
171
inequality, 44, 60–61, 71, 97, 122,
132–3
inflation, 16, 20, 37, 81, 139
informal economy, 18
Instituto Costarricense de
Electricidad (ICE), 77, 108–9
Instituto de Tierras y Colonización
(ITCO), 80
Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad
(INBio), 4–5, 31, 48, 55, 57, 61–5,
89–90, 92–6, 98–9, 158, 169
Integración de la Infraestructura
Regional Sudamericana (IIRSA),
31, 158, 160–3
intellectual property rights, 28, 86,
169–71
Inter-American Development Bank
(IADB), 13, 130, 160
International Agricultural Resource
Centers (IARCs), 88
International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development (IBRD), 160
International Chamber of Commerce, 30
international financial institutions
(IFIs), 160
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
4, 13, 15–17, 19, 26, 35, 37–42, 54,
65, 81, 115–16, 139, 164, 173
Index 203
International Union for Conservation
of Nature and Natural Resources
(IUCNR), 4, 49, 121, 147
Johannesburg, Earth Summit, 30,
147, 160
Kyoto Protocol, 100, 102–3, 108, 112
labour, 6–10, 15, 18–19, 24, 28–30, 43,
45, 61, 65, 74, 76, 95, 99, 111, 118,
124–5, 132, 139–41, 143–4, 146,
166–9, 172
labour-intensive activities, 76, 139
labourers, 4–5, 8, 18, 43, 140
land rights, 99
landholders, 107, 111
landlessness, 41, 74, 77, 79–80
landowners, 42, 47, 76, 78, 108, 110,
132, 162
landslides, 151
Latin America, 11–13, 15, 17, 36–7, 43,
56, 115, 147, 164
leaching of chemicals, 82–3, 152, 168
livelihood, 11, 25, 27, 30, 42–4, 71,
75–8, 98–9, 108, 113, 117, 122, 127,
131, 147, 149–52, 156–8, 160–1, 167,
170–1
livestock, 42, 126, 136
lixiviation, 30, 82, 148, 151, 155, 168
loans, 4, 12, 15–16, 37, 39, 42–3, 55, 72,
78, 81, 109, 124, 136, 138, 143
maldevelopment, 18, 59, 102, 148, 173
mangrove, 51, 83–4, 152
maquila/maquiladoras, 159, 162
market economy, 11, 127, 165
marketing, 21, 41, 48, 119–20, 128,
130, 133, 138–139, 145
marketplace, 21, 133
204 Index
Marx, Karl, 7–8, 24
mercury, 150
Mesoamerica, 158
metals, 30, 82, 151, 171
Mexico, 12–13, 15–16, 88, 103, 159,
161–2
microbiology, 94
microcredit, 124, 138, 169
microenterprise, 27, 29, 64,
71–3, 122–5, 132, 135–8, 140–1,
143–4, 169
microorganisms, 27, 30, 95, 148, 150
migrants/migration, 121, 124, 131
migration, 121, 131
militarization, 161
mines/mining, 5, 27, 30, 49–51,
73, 81–5, 147–57, 160, 163, 166,
168, 171
Ministerio de Agricultural y
Ganadería (MAG), 42, 45, 72, 74
Ministerio de Recursos Naturales,
Energía y Minas (MIRENEM),
49, 59
Ministerio del Ambiente y Energía
(MINAE), 5, 26, 51, 53–4, 57,
62–3, 69, 71, 73, 89–93, 97–9, 102–4,
107–11, 113, 116, 119, 149–54, 167–8
Ministerio del Ambiente, Energía y
Telecomunicaciones (MINAET), 51
Miramar, 30, 73, 81–2, 84, 148–52,
154–7
modernization, 5, 36–7, 45, 49, 136
monetarism, 12, 16, 21, 53, 96
monetary systems, 4, 13, 15, 19–20,
127–8, 146, 152, 168
monoculture, 28, 69, 78, 101, 104–8,
113, 132–3, 135, 162, 166, 171–2
Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve
(MCFR), 57, 59
mudslides, 131
Mujeres Unidas de Sarapiqui
(MUSA), 140
multinationals, 40, 42, 53, 63, 89, 92,
94, 161–2
National Front Against Gold
Mining, 81
native people, 10, 69
native plants, 27, 69, 104–7, 171, 173
natural capital, 6, 21–22, 47, 56, 103,
116, 161, 171
nature, 3–11, 17–31, 33, 39, 43, 48–49,
51, 53–62, 64–65, 67, 69, 72–5, 81–2,
84–6, 93–6, 98–100, 102–4, 107,
114–21, 128, 130, 133, 135–6, 138,
142, 144–5, 150, 154, 157–9, 161,
163–73
neoliberal/neoliberalism, 3–5, 7,
11–13, 15–16, 19–20, 24, 26, 35,
37, 39–43, 45, 47–48, 50, 53, 62–5,
109, 113, 130–2, 138, 157, 159, 164,
168, 173
Netherlands, 4, 54, 64–5, 80, 90, 103,
136, 138, 145
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE),
166
Nicaragua, 17, 35, 37–9, 47, 124, 159
nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), 3–6, 23, 27, 29–31, 48,
53–8, 61, 63–5, 73, 81, 86, 88–9,
98–99, 102, 123, 130, 132–3, 136,
138–9, 141, 143, 147–8, 151, 158,
164–70, 172
Norway, 103
Norwegian Agency for Development
(NORAD), 64
offsets, 103
open-pit mining, 5, 27, 30, 83, 147–8,
150, 153, 156–7, 166, 171

oppression, 10–11, 24, 128, 168
organic agriculture, 29, 45, 59, 64–5,
72, 123–4, 132, 134–5, 137–8, 140–1
Organisation for Economic Co–
operation and Development
(OECD), 19
organisms, 27, 57, 62, 95–6, 99, 171
otherization, 10
Our Common Future, 20
Panama, 30, 35, 158–9, 162–4
Paraguay, 13
paramilitary, 162
parataxonomists, 86, 91, 93, 96
Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN),
36, 38
partnership, 53–4, 62, 89–90, 92–3,
116, 159–60, 166
pastureland, 42, 110
patents, 92, 99, 170
patriarchy, 8–11, 15, 17–18, 60, 128–9,
137, 146, 163–4
peace, 39, 82, 166
peasants, 3, 5–6, 8, 11, 14, 18–19, 24,
26–8, 40, 42, 44–5, 47, 49, 56, 59, 69,
73–4, 77–81, 86, 88, 92, 96, 99–100,
103, 105, 107–11, 113, 115, 122–3,
126–8, 130, 132, 137, 141, 147, 158,
161, 166, 168–73
periphery, 19, 36, 54, 99, 128
Peru, 12–14, 16–17, 35, 88, 160–3, 165
pesticides, 41–2, 46, 78, 139
pimping, 129
pipeline, 77, 161, 163
Plan Colombia, 162
Plan Dignity, 162
Plan Puebla Panamá (PPP), 30, 158–9,
161–4
plantations, 40–2, 71, 74, 76, 101,
103–8, 113, 166, 171
Index 205
pollution, 21, 30, 83–4, 110, 167
pornography, 129
poverty, 16, 18, 20–1, 25–6, 31, 37,
44–5, 48, 50, 108, 110, 118, 139, 143,
158–9, 161–3, 169
power, 5, 7, 11–12, 15, 29, 42, 55–6, 61,
63, 94, 98–9, 128, 131, 133, 135, 159,
163, 166, 169, 173
priority working unit (PWU), 26,
72–3
privatization, 16, 22, 39, 61, 86, 94,
120, 135, 160–1, 171–2
production, 7–8, 18–19, 21, 23, 25,
29, 36, 40–47, 56, 61, 65, 71, 78,
81, 91–2, 96, 108–10, 122, 124–7,
132, 135–8, 141–3, 145–6, 157, 159,
162–3, 167, 169
Productive Reconversion Program/
Programa de Reconversion
Productiva (PRP), 45
profit, 12, 19–20, 38, 49, 53, 55, 57, 63,
92, 95, 103, 107, 116, 128–9, 142–3,
152, 167, 169
Programa de Investigación para el
Uso Racional de la Biodiversidad
en el Area de Conservación Arenal
(PROACA), 90
property rights, 6, 20, 28, 35, 60, 63,
86, 94, 169–71
prostitution, 128–9, 131, 150
Puntarenas, 30, 82–83, 149–54
racism, 11, 162
radicalization, 14
rainforest, 16, 27–8, 62, 76, 92, 94, 100,
102–4, 106, 109–11, 113–14, 116–17,
122–3, 130, 159, 168, 171
ranches/ranching, 28, 40, 46, 56, 74,
76–77, 122, 126, 152, 162
rape, 7, 16, 162
206 Index
raw material, 99, 136
Rayrock, 151–3
Reducing Emissions for Deforestation
and Degradation (REDD), 102
reforestation, 103–5, 107, 110, 113
reproduction, 8–9, 18–19, 23–24,
97, 132
reservoirs, 59, 77, 116, 169
restructuring, 24, 26, 40, 167
revolution, 35–7, 40–1, 47, 69, 76, 117,
121, 123, 132
Rio de Janeiro, 4, 6, 100, 114, 133
runoff, 46, 148
rural women, 5–6, 16, 29, 43, 56, 59,
63–4, 109, 115, 128, 130, 132, 135–6,
144–5, 147, 157, 162, 169, 173
Salvador, 12, 17, 35, 159, 165
sedimentation, 83, 148, 150
seeds, 78, 92, 139
self-sufficiency, 18
sex trade, 128, 171, 173
sexism, 10–11
sexual division of labour, 18, 29–30,
65, 118, 132
sexuality, 63
single women, 80, 137
Sistema Nacional de Areas de
Conservación (SINAC), 5, 50–2, 57,
90, 170
sisterhood, 162
slavery, 98
social justice, 14–15, 28
socialism, 13
soil, 47, 78, 81, 83, 91, 103, 105–7, 122,
127, 133, 135, 148, 150–1, 171
South America, 13, 31, 47, 160–1,
163, 165
speciesism, 11
stabilization, 15, 37–8, 143, 164, 173
stabilization and structural
adjustment programs (SSAPs),
15–16, 41, 164
structural adjustment, 15, 37, 139,
143, 164, 173
structural adjustment programs
(SAPs), 37
struggle, 12, 14, 79, 82, 98, 151–3,
155–6, 162–3, 168
subsistence, 6–7, 14, 17–18, 25,
27–8, 43–4, 65, 69, 76, 96, 98,
108–9, 117–18, 126, 128, 131, 136,
138, 140, 143, 145–6, 156–7, 163,
167–8, 172
Suriname, 160
sustainability, 24, 89, 104, 108, 148
sustainable development, 3–4, 6–7,
18–22, 24–7, 30–1, 48–51, 53–6, 60–1,
63–5, 69, 73, 96, 99–100, 102–3,
106–7, 109, 113, 116, 122, 124–5,
132–3, 135–7, 145, 147–8, 157–60,
162–4, 168
technology, 22, 26, 41, 45, 47, 65, 78,
91, 93, 95, 99, 103, 136, 151
tepezcuintle, 97, 117
third world countries (TWCs), 54
Tilaran, 3–5, 26, 31, 50, 57, 59, 61,
69–75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 89–91, 97,
108–9, 116, 118–19, 122–5, 135, 138,
148–50, 158, 165, 168, 170–1
Toronto, 147, 152
tourism, 28, 47, 60, 73, 78, 114–16,
118–30, 136, 152, 167
toxins, 83, 151
Trade-Related International Property
Rights (TRIPs), 119
trafficking: of women and children
130; drug, 162
Trinidad, 80

Tropical Forest Conservation Act
(TFCA), 164, 167
Tropical Science Centre (TSC), 57
unemployment, 37, 111–12
United Nations (UN), 3, 6, 17, 20,
27–8, 38, 54, 65, 96, 100–2, 147, 158,
160, 170
United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development
(UNCED), 6, 65
United Nations Development
Program (UNDP), 102
United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), 54
United Nations Environment
Program (UNEP), 27, 102
United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), 101
United Nations System of National
Accounts (UNSNA), 96
United States, 5, 12, 17–18, 25, 36–40,
42, 49, 56, 63–4, 75, 79, 91, 96–8,
104, 109, 111–12, 116, 121, 123, 125,
127, 129–30, 138, 142–3, 161–2,
164–5, 169
United States Agency for
International Development
(USAID), 5, 17, 26, 37–40, 47–8, 51,
54–6, 102, 164
unpaid labour, 6, 8, 24, 172
unsustainability, 27, 148
unwaged labour, 6, 8, 17–19, 24, 43,
48, 172
Uruguay, 13–14, 165
Vancouver, 156
Vanessa Ventures Ltd., 149, 157
Index 207
Venezuela, 160
volcanos, 3, 28, 42, 71, 73, 77–8, 91,
96, 108–9, 115–16, 118–23, 125, 128,
130–1, 149, 171
waged labour, 8, 17, 19, 24, 43, 45,
128, 152, 172
Wall Street, 19, 103, 107, 170
war, 11, 18, 35–7, 39, 47, 152, 161–2
Washington consensus, 19
watersheds, 46
wealth, 6, 13, 18, 22, 47, 50, 60, 66,
117–18, 129, 145, 159, 168, 170
wildlife, 5, 26–8, 48–51, 53, 57, 60, 71,
83, 86, 88, 90–1, 96–9, 105, 107, 118,
120–2, 130, 149, 159, 163, 168, 171
women, 3, 5–11, 13–16, 18–19, 24–6,
28–30, 43–5, 56, 59, 63–5, 69, 73,
75, 80, 84, 96, 109–11, 114–15, 118,
123–5, 128–33, 135–47, 149–51,
156–7, 159, 161–2, 166–7, 169,
171–3
women in development (WID), 5,
29–30, 64–5, 133, 135, 137, 143,
145–6, 169
Women's Legal, Education and
Action Fund (LEAF), 62, 106
work, 3–4, 6, 8, 14, 18–19, 26, 43–5,
47–48, 56, 64–5, 77–8, 93–4, 96, 99,
111, 118, 123, 125, 128, 131, 136–46,
152, 162, 166–7, 170, 172
workers, 6–7, 10, 15, 17–19, 24, 36,
43, 45, 63, 76, 83, 93, 96, 116, 121,
125–6, 129, 131, 140–1, 145, 152–3,
162, 169, 171, 173
working class, 35–6
World Bank, 3–6, 13, 15–17, 19, 21–2,
26, 30, 35, 37–8, 40–2, 49, 54–6,
64–6, 81, 88–9, 104, 107, 115–16, 133,
139, 147, 158–9, 164, 166–7, 172–3
208 Index
World Health Organization (WHO),
5, 8, 15, 18, 20, 22–3, 29, 42, 44, 47,
59, 69, 71, 74–82, 92–3, 96–8, 100,
103, 105, 108–9, 111, 113, 117, 120–9,
132–3, 137, 141–2, 144, 147, 151, 153,
155, 159, 161, 166–7, 169–70, 173
World Trade Organization (WTO),
19, 127
World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 4–5, 26,
31, 48–9, 51, 53, 56–7, 59–62, 65, 69,
71, 73, 89–90, 92, 99, 116, 119, 130,
148–9, 158, 164–5, 168, 170
World Wildlife Fund–Canada
(WWF–C), 4–5, 26, 31, 48, 57,
59–62, 65, 69, 71, 73, 89–90, 92,
99, 116, 119, 130, 148–9, 158, 165,
168, 170
Z–Trece, 73–4, 77–9, 81, 87, 117–18,
120, 122–4, 130, 136