From forest to pasture: the perception of Costa Rica as a great grassland

Scholars have been analysing land concentration in Costa Rica since the 1970s. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, the literature explored the dualism of the latifundia-minifundia land tenure structure as well as the framework and intensification of land conflicts (Barahona, Reference Barahona1980; Boza, Reference Boza1978; Churnside, Reference Churnside1981; Edelman and Seligson, Reference Edelman and Seligson1994; Edelman, Reference Edelman1992; González, Reference González1987; Mora, Reference Mora1990; Ramírez, Reference Ramírez1981; Rodríguez, Reference Rodríguez1988; Villarreal, Reference Villarreal1992). By and large, these studies demonstrated land concentration in large properties since the Second World War in Costa Rica. These scholars questioned the idea of Costa Rica as the ‘country of the minufundio’, as certain official mythology claimed (for instance Gudmundson, Reference Gudmundson2011; Molina, Reference Molina1986; Hill, Reference Hill1964; Rojas and Escoto, Reference Rojas and Escoto1960). Many of these studies identified latifundia as the unit causing land concentration and deforestation in Costa Rica. In both cases, grasslands were symbolically regarded as the basic component of an old social structure surviving postwar capitalist modernisation, associated with latifundia and the power of landowners. At the same time, from an ecological perspective, grassland was associated with the depredation of natural resources caused by livestock and meat demands from developed countries.

During the 1970s, the process of deforestation in Costa Rica attracted the attention of national and international scholars.Footnote ⁷ Among them, M. E. Bozzoli, J. J. Parsons and J. A. Tosi warned about the ‘potrerización’ of the national territory.Footnote ⁸ Bozzoli demonstrated that pastures constituted the dominant land use in almost the entire national territory (Bozzoli, Reference Bozzoli1977, based on agricultural census data). Bozzoli (Reference Bozzoli1977: 571) also pointed out that ‘the conversion of Costa Rica into a pasture’ was a process that was developed over a period of about twenty years. Unless adequate measures were taken, if this trend was maintained ‘the whole forest will have disappeared’ within fifteen years. This anthropological analysis went further than territorial or ecological matters and indicated that livestock expansion had a clear social impact, consisting in the displacement and migration of rural populations, as well as the concentration of land in few hands. According to Bozzoli (Reference Bozzoli1977: 571–2), this expansion strengthened a rural elite linked to meat exports and limited other production opportunities for peasants, tenants and family farmers.

Although Parsons (Reference Parsons1976) and Tosi (Reference Tosi1976) focused on the ecological dimension, they also revealed the contradictions of grasslands expansion. Parsons (Reference Parsons1976) stressed that this process was associated in Central America with the increasing use of cultivated pastures that were in many cases related to plants brought from Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. According to Parsons (Reference Parsons1976), potrerización was so deeply enrooted in the region that the agricultural frontier was only a transitory stage between forest elimination and the opening of pastures for livestock. From a social perspective this process was evidently contradictory. Whereas the area of pastures and cattle herd in Costa Rica doubled from 1959 to 1972, the same period witnessed a decline in meat consumption per capita (Parsons, Reference Parsons1976: 124–5; Kaimowitz, Reference Kaimowitz1996: 30–1). Parsons (Reference Parsons1976) further stressed that the ecological consequences of transforming forests into grasslands were poorly understood. The spread of African-native grassland improved the availability of fodder for livestock. However, this process resulted from the colonisation of aggressive species such as Jaragua (hyparrhenia rufa – nees – stapf), which became known as the ‘Africanisation’ of Central America’s tropical landscape (Parsons, Reference Parsons1976: 130–1).

Tosi (Reference Tosi1976: 139–41) also focused on the forest problem and stated that: ‘Our concern with the scope, severity and rates of unfavourable ecological changes in our environment can be largely attributed, directly or indirectly, to the senseless and unbridled expansion of traditional livestock to lands less suitable for this activity’ (Tosi, Reference Tosi1976: 139). Tosi was especially concerned about the waste of wood generated by pastures; a waste in terms of size and quality that would be difficult to recover in the future (Tosi, Reference Tosi1976: 140). He further claimed that a significant part of the felled forests formed part of ‘advanced successional stages’, with a high content of woods in large trunks. These species did not adapt easily to reproduction on degraded or ancient grazing soils.

To sum up, the projection of Costa Rica as ‘a great grassland’ was not far from becoming a reality (see Appendix 1). In 1978, the estimated linear rate of deforestation in the country was nearly 36,000 hectares per year (from 1950 to 1961), a figure that increased to 45,000 hectares from 1961 to 1977 (Pérez and Protti, Reference Pérez and Protti1978). Cross-referenced with data provided by Porras and Villarreal (Reference Porras and Villarreal1993), these figures show that most of this logging process was illegal. In 1977, the national total area legally exploited (through licences) was only 19,348 hectares (Porras and Villarreal, Reference Porras and Villarreal1993: 44). Increased logging also gave rise to the relocation of the forest frontier. Pérez and Protti (Reference Pérez and Protti1978) demonstrated that during the 1950s logging was concentrated in the Central and North Pacific regions, but it spread to the Caribbean and the northern and southern regions from 1961 to the 1970s. The shift in land uses that resulted from grassland expansion and logging activities clearly affected peasants in rural Costa Rica.

Identifying the causes of deforestation: the anti-ecological peasants

Whereas pastures increased their cover by about one-third during the period 1963–73, forests lost almost 400,000 hectares during the same period (Porras and Villarreal, Reference Porras and Villarreal1993: 16–17). Despite these trends, scholars have not reached a consensus regarding the quantification of the rate and causes of deforestation. Joyce’s data suggested an annual disappearance of about 50,000 hectares of forest, while González and Hatshorn indicated an average of between 25,000 and 60,000 hectares per year (cited by: Rodríguez and Vargas, Reference Rodríguez and Vargas1988: 17–19; Sader and Joyce, Reference Sader and Joyce1988; Joyce, Reference Joyce2006: 127–30). Within this context, the notion of deforestation associated with peasant pressures and land invaders prevailed among forest extraction companies and international organisations. However, other positions proposed an alternative reading, linking forest conversion into pastureland to the growth of meat demands from the United States and the so-called ‘Hamburger Connection’ (Myres, Reference Myres1981; Edelman, Reference Edelman1992).

Precaristas Footnote ⁹ and peasants on the agricultural frontier were generally singled out as the main contributors to forest logging. A 1983 report claimed that ‘precaristas continue to invade both public and private lands with impunity’, encompassing forest reserves and expanding their predatory occupation (cited by: Rodríguez and Vargas, Reference Rodríguez and Vargas1988: 33). At the beginning of the 1980s, an industrialist from the logging sector stated that ‘peasants not only commonly usurp land with traditional agricultural plantations, but they also specialise in irrationally destroying our forests’ (cited by: Rodríguez and Vargas, Reference Rodríguez and Vargas1988: 34). Ten years later, a renowned pioneer of Forest Conservation in Costa Rica maintained the same position: ‘Of course, peasants should not be blamed directly for this action, since they seek subsistence, but they are deforesting agents, which in many cases sell their plots to landowners when they lose their initial potential, migrate to new lands and continue with their activity’ (Fournier, Reference Fournier1991: 71).

The idea of the ‘anti-ecological’ peasantry was also patent in the founding history of Costa Rica’s national parks, which highlighted the role of the state as a preservationist agent coupled with the relevant role of officials and scientists (Boza, Reference Boza1978, Reference Boza1993, Reference Boza2015; Wallace, Reference Wallace1992; Allen, Reference Allen2001). This narrative labelled the peasant as an enemy of conservation.Footnote ¹⁰ It also described the peasant as an invader of haciendas and forests, as well as the broker between the interests of logging and cattle raisers. According to Ramírez and Maldonado (Reference Ramírez and Maldonado1988: 88), ‘the greatest threat to the integrity of wilderness areas are land invasions by a diverse group of actors …: “precaristas” or landless peasants, land speculators, loggers paying third parties to invade land in order to extract timber from farms, [and] cattle raisers attempting to expand the area of pastures …’.

Meanwhile, other accounts portray the peasants on the agricultural frontier as the main agents of deforestation, blaming them for the endangerment of protected areas. In their view, the peasantry cut down the forest to demonstrate that improvements (‘Mejoras’)Footnote ¹¹ have been made to the property in order to claim its ownership. Peasants then sowed corn and other crops such as beans, which, as their yields dropped over the years, were replaced by pastures and livestock, facilitating soil degradation (Umaña, Reference Umaña1987: 32). This idea of land degradation prevailed until the 1990s. A study conducted in the 1990s stated that: ‘The pace of agricultural colonisation is unsustainable … Costa Rica has only 51,000 km², and practically the agricultural frontier has reached its boundaries.’ Land under forest cover was not suitable for productive activities other than the protection of water resources, scenery, or biodiversity. However, ‘the pressure to colonise new areas continues, without considering its high social, economic and environmental costs’ (Ministerio de Recursos Naturales, Energía y Minas, 1990).

The debate on deforestation addressed the problem of land tenure in Costa Rica in two ways. The logging industry, international organisation officials and the state associated forest logging with peasant agriculture. In their view, deforestation and peasant land tenure were intertwined, while opposing the conservationist and developmental state policies. However, different scholars suggested that the deforestation was related to livestock expansion and therefore had an evident impact on the land tenure structure, favouring the formation of pastures and large livestock properties, usually in the hands of well-off social groups. As Bozzoli (Reference Bozzoli1977) pointed out, behind the potrerización of the national territory there was both an ecological and social cost, stemming from land concentration and the expulsion of peasants from livestock regions, who headed towards urban or other areas of the country.

To sum up, both positions simplified the causes of deforestation. Neither the pasture nor the peasantry were the sole culprits of deforestation. On the one hand, deforestation and reforestation were developed as part of intense commercial activity, in both legal and illegal contexts, related to the presence of medium and large-scale farmers and businessmen. In the case of legal logging, most of the forest logging permits assigned in the 1970s and 1980s were concentrated in farms of over 100 hectares. Likewise, most of the area reforested through state incentives was concentrated in these types of properties (Rodríguez and Vargas, Reference Rodríguez and Vargas1988: 88–92). On the other hand, since the formation of the Instituto de Tierras y Colonización (hereafter ITCO)Footnote ¹² peasant settlement deforestation seemed to increase, as in 1986 the state had bought and accumulated 600,000 hectares for these settlements (Mora, Reference Mora1990: 97).

Bringing back the woodlands: the state, peasant settlements and national parks

In the early 1970s, one of the state’s main responses to potrerización and deforestation was the creation of protected areas such as national parks, as well as biological and forest reserves. Influenced by American conservationist tradition, the creation of these areas helped to contain accelerated deforestation (López and Granados, Reference López and Granados2016). At the same time, the state had to deal with the social effects of land concentration around livestock; particularly the impoverishment of the rural population and its proletarianisation. Increasing land demands, social unrest and rural conflicts arose among former peasants and landless workers.Footnote ¹³ These tensions forced the Costa Rican government to create a programme based on the distribution of plots for peasant settlements, administered by ITCO. From an analytical perspective, ecological and land tenure policies shared a common basis: the creation of sites of ecological and social restoration. On the one hand, the establishment of national parks sought to curb grassland expansion and to recover forests affected by logging. On the other hand, peasant settlements sought to contain social conflicts derived from the unequal land structure associated with grassland expansion. Thus, the state also attempted to localise and contain social conflicts in specific sectors of the country.

From 1970 to 1973, the protected areas covered an area of approximately 43,000 hectares. The increase was even more significant during the administration of President Daniel Oduber (1974–78), which incorporated into the National Park System new areas such as Chirripó and Corcovado (in the south of the country) as well as a significant number of forest reserves and wildlife refuges (Rodríguez and Vargas, Reference Rodríguez and Vargas1988: 168–72; Joyce, Reference Joyce2006: 160).Footnote ¹⁴ The governments of Carazo Odio (1978–82) and Monge Álvarez (1982–6) continued these trends and in 1986 almost half a million hectares were protected. These protected zones were consolidated during the 1990s and the early 2000s. By 2012, more than 1.3 million hectares had some form of protection, of which just over 600,000 were national parks, 200,000 national wildlife refuges and many forest reserves. The rest was distributed among wetlands, protected areas, biological reserves, or nature reserves.Footnote ¹⁵

However, these achievements took place during a period of rising conflicts between precaristas, landowners and the state due to the concentration of land and agricultural resources. The modernisation of rice farming on the Pacific Coast led to the concentration of land and capital by medium and large producers (Cartín and Piszk, Reference Cartín and Piszk1988; Matamoros, Reference Matamoros1985). With regard to coffee production, while the Green Revolution technology made family farming profitable, it also excluded producers who failed to modernise their farms (Raventós, Reference Raventós1986). The same trends intensified in other regions such as the Guanacaste province where capitalist modernisation and aggravating land concentration led to the disappearance of peasants who became hired workers, worsening the land problem (Rodríguez, Reference Rodríguez1988).

From 1963 to 1979, different groups of peasants invaded more than 700,000 hectares, while during the period 1980–5 invasions affected approximately 120,000 hectares (Villarreal, Reference Villarreal1992). In 1970, ITCO registered up to 817 occupied farms that covered about 400,000 hectares (Grupo Centroamericano de Tenencia de la Tierra y Desarrollo Rural, 1969; Barahona, Reference Barahona1980). In this context, state intervention was required as the ITCO coordinated the purchase of more than 4,000 hectares, for a total of 324 beneficiary families in 1963. In 1986, the accumulated area of land purchased by ITCO was approximately 663,000 hectares, for more than 32,000 beneficiary families (Mora, Reference Mora1990: 97). The territorial impact of forest conservation and land settlement policies was notorious. In 1986, peasant settlements and protected forests accounted for approximately 35 per cent of the national agricultural area according to the 1984 Agricultural Census. In other words, one third of Costa Rica’s effectively available land had been converted to other uses in the span of a decade, driven by both state ‘conservationism’ and social conflict in the countryside (see Appendix 2).

Is forest the new grassland? Towards a ‘second generation’ land tenure

As shown by studies, tropical forests are currently valued for their potential for carbon capture and sequestration. Developed in 2005, REDD+ is a global strategy for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through forest management in developing countries. REDD+ projects support policies that address the causes of deforestation, promote social and economic development, improve the conservation and sustainable management of natural resources, and increase carbon stocks as well.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite their environmental advantages, initiatives linked to the REDD+, such as the payment for environmental services, have been questioned by different experts. On the one hand, as stated by Fletcher et al. (Reference Fletcher, Dressler, Anderson and Büscher2019), these programmes encourage the preservation of forest by farmers through market-based instruments, as part of a ‘neoliberalisation’ trend in forest management. Thus, by failing to deliver sufficient revenue from the incentives, these initiatives led to the extraction of natural resources (Fletcher et al., Reference Fletcher, Dressler, Anderson and Büscher2019: 1069; Fletcher, Reference Fletcher, Roger, Held and Nag2013). On the other hand, given that land ownership is a determining condition to participate in payment for environmental services, these initiatives exclude landless farmers settled in regions with unclear land tenure rights (Greenleaf, Reference Greenleaf2020).

The first environmental incentives in Costa Rica were created in the 1970s, when the state established a tax incentive to promote reforestation projects, while in the early 1980s, it launched an income tax deduction mechanism with the same purpose (Rodríguez and Vargas, Reference Rodríguez and Vargas1988: 82–95; Segura, Reference Segura1992; Porras and Villarreal, Reference Porras and Villarreal1993: 79–99). The Certificado de Abono Forestal (CAF) was a credit certificate issued by the state in the 1980s and negotiable in the financial market. In the late 1980s, the Certificado de Abono Forestal para el Manejo de Bosques was issued and sought to improve the technical management of woodlands (Ortiz, Reference Ortiz2004). Similarly, a series of certificates for small-scale reforestation producers emerged, such as the Certificado de Abono Forestal por Adelantado (CAFA) and the Fondo de Desarrollo Forestal (FDF); the latter was funded by Netherlands, Sweden and Finland. In the 1990s, the first carbon sales were finally made with Nordic countries (Camacho and Solano, Reference Camacho and Solano2010). In 1995, the accumulated number of hectares covered by these incentives (and others not referred to here) was approximately 139,000 hectares (González and Lobo, Reference González, Lobo, Kleinn and Davis1999).

In the early 2000s, Costa Rica also became one of the first countries to meet its international commitment to preserve lands and water sources through a funding initiative known as Forever Costa Rica (a debt-for-nature-swap brokered by the Costa Rican government and The Nature Conservancy with the US Treasury). This initiative has secured more than US $50 million to strengthen and expand the country’s network of national parks and protected areas.Footnote ¹⁷ Considering Costa Rica’s extensive support for forest and nature conservation, what have been the results in terms of forest land distribution/structure?

According to the 1963 Agricultural Census, of the total hectares covered by forests (1,171,663.2 hectares), 68 per cent was occupied by farms larger than 250 hectares, while only just over 1 per cent of the forests corresponded to farms smaller than 20 hectares. This distribution had barely changed two decades later. According to the 1984 Agricultural Census, whereas 59 per cent of forests were located within farms of more than 250 hectares, just over 3 per cent were located within properties smaller than 20 hectares (see Appendix 3). The 2014 Agricultural Census is especially useful for examining the changes that have occurred since 1963. The area covered by forests in 2014 experienced an increase after 1984, although the area is still lower than in 1963. Between 1984 and 2014, the forests increased their cover by approximately 244,000 hectares. However, this increase still does not reach the one million hectares of forest that existed in the early 1960s. The 2014 data also reveal the persistence of land concentration in forests (see Appendix 4). Farms of over 200 hectares comprise 58 per cent of the total land, while properties smaller than 50 hectares occupy only 15 per cent of the total. In comparison with 1984, farms of less than 50 hectares have doubled, but farms of more than 200 hectares have also increased by almost 70 per cent (INEC, 2015). Therefore, the forest recovery shown in the census data is the result of an increase in the number of small and medium scale farms as well as properties larger than 200 hectares. Thus, Costa Rican woodlands have been monopolised by protected areas and large forests in private hands.

Land concentration in forests also reveals a territorial transformation in Costa Rica that does not necessarily have positive social implications. It rather shows the appropriation of resources by different social groups.Footnote ¹⁸ As mentioned above, Costa Rica has developed a significant forest and environmental protection and incentives framework (institutionalised by REDD+ and also based on ‘debt-for-nature’ swaps), giving rise to a second level of land concentration; a ‘second-generation’ land tenure associated with the appropriation of such incentives by medium or large landowners (Ortiz, Reference Ortiz2004). These incentives were established through the Payment for Environmental Services Program, under Forest Law 7575 (1996) and coordinated by FONAFIFO (Sánchez and Navarrete, Reference Sánchez and Navarrete2017).Footnote ¹⁹ The goal of the programme is forest recovery and conservation in the country through financial incentives based on a four-goal framework: first, the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions; second, water protection for rural and urban or hydroelectric use; third, biodiversity conservation and fourth, natural landscape and scenic protection. PES are based on five-year contracts with private landowners, NGOs, women farm owners, and indigenous communities. FONAFIFO makes annual payments per hectare conserved or subject to other established schemes within the framework of a five-year contract.Footnote ²⁰ Rather than an incentive or a subsidy, the PES is a strategy of ‘economic recognition’ to landowners for forest conservation (or reforestation). Therefore, they constitute a practice of economic, social and ecological valuation of the forest (Sánchez and Navarrete, Reference Sánchez and Navarrete2017).Footnote ²¹

In summary, from 1997 to 2015, the area covered by PES ranged between 100,000 hectares in the first year and close to 69,000 hectares in 2015. Overall, in this period, the programme covered more than 1.1 million hectares.Footnote ²² In terms of the distribution of resources by type of protection, most of the resources were allocated to ‘Forest Protection’ which accounted for more than 80 per cent of the funds. Finally, data on the protected area within each farm indicate a phenomenon of payments concentration in properties between 100 and 300 hectares. Although just over half of the contracts are for areas of less than 50 hectares, most of the area covered by the payments is concentrated in projects of 100 to 300 hectares (46 per cent) and more than 300 hectares (18 per cent) (see Appendix 5).Footnote ²³