Mexico’s ejidos are finding greater sustainability by involving youth and women

Most ejidos employ an outside technician to mark trees for harvest, but Nuevo Bécal has Luis Alfonso Guzmán Sanchez, the 26-year-old son of an ejidatario and the community’s own forestry technician. He told Mongabay that he learned how to do the job by working his whole life in Nuevo Bécal’s forests and by taking classes through a program subsidized by Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. Since he is not one of the community’s 84 ejidatarios, Guzmán Sanchez doesn’t get to vote in the ejidatario assembly, but as the community’s forest technician, he says his opinions carry weight nonetheless.

Luis Armando Tamay Yah, the president of Ejido Nuevo Bécal, told Mongabay that three other children of ejidatarios are currently studying forestry while simultaneously working in the ejido. But forestry is not the only option Nuevo Bécal makes available to its youth. Harvesting and selling mahogany and other tree species may be the community’s main for-profit venture, but Nuevo Bécal also sells chicle (the sap of the chicozapote tree, which is used as a natural chewing gum), has two apiaries, and makes charcoal from waste wood leftover from its forestry operations.

Charcoal is the community’s main non-timber product; young people are employed to dig the earthen ovens and women to pull the charcoal out of them when it’s ready. “There’s something for everyone to do if they want to work,” Tamay Yah says. He notes that the charcoal business has helped create opportunities that keep Ejido Nuevo Bécal’s kids from leaving the community and that an ejidataria named Emma is the community “champion” of the charcoal-making enterprise.

Bridging the generational divide

Before launching the forestry workshop in partnership with Carmelina Martinez’s high school in Zoh Laguna, Rainforest Alliance (RA) studied the causes of youth outmigration in three ejidos in the Calakmul region. The group discovered that there seemed to be a profound misunderstanding between community leaders and youth:

“[A]dult leaders felt that there were abundant opportunities for youth involvement in local governance, but that youth lacked interest and motivation to participate,” according to a report summarizing the results of RA’s study. “Meanwhile, youth expressed sincere interest, but perceived a lack of opportunities and support from elders.”

There are many benefits to bridging this generational divide, as the report states: “The older generation brings an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the local environment, forestry trends, and traditional practices while the younger generation has greater experience with technology, climate-based science, and marketing strategies. With more specialized skills, youth can help propel their community forward to a more successful future.”

Edgar Gonzalez Godoy, RA’s Director General in Mexico, started working with ejidos 15 years ago, when he was with Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. He says that the ejidos and communities of the Yucatán Peninsula have been particularly successful at preserving forests, noting that the three big Yucatán Peninsula states — Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán — have rates of deforestation well below the national average due, in part, to the new “climate-smart” models of production they’ve adopted, often under the guidance of younger community members who left the ejido to get an education and then returned to apply what they learned.

Mexico’s national deforestation rate is about 50,000 hectares a year, Godoy says, but only two or three percent of that occurs in the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula, which are part of the second-largest contiguous forest in the Americas after the Amazon.

The conservation success in the region is due to “all the history that ejidos and communities have on managing their landscapes, managing their forests,” Godoy explains. He also gives much of the credit to ejidos’ move away from conventional agricultural and ranching practices: “By implementing climate-smart production models on their landscapes, they are not letting the agricultural frontier to grow, but instead they are recovering forest coverage.”

That change has developed over the course of the past decade, Godoy says, as youth have become more involved in managing the natural resources of ejidos. But they were not always afforded the opportunity to participate in such a meaningful way: “Many years ago, ejidatarios were not very convinced [about] including youth and women into their ejidatarios assemblies.”

Add in the fact that many young, rural residents of the Yucatán Peninsula, like rural populations in many parts of the world, did not have sufficient access to higher education, and it’s easy to see why youth were often unable to see how they might contribute to their community’s future. But a number of programs administered by the Mexican government, NGOs like RA, and international sustainable development bodies like the World Bank’s Forest Investment Program have helped them get the education and skills-training they need.