by John Burnett
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica, Oct. 13, 1997 - Ricardo Rodriguez sits at a picnic
table inside the national park he manages and watches the blue Pacific
pounding the sickle-shaped beach. Nearby, a white-faced monkey searches
for food scraps, while an iguana lolls in the sun.
Visitors awed by the natural beauty of Manuel Antonio National Park and
Costa Rica's other spectacular wilderness areas don't understand how much
trouble they're in. But Ricardo Rodriguez does.
"They knock on our door everyday and say, 'Hey guys, we need the money,
because that's our land,'" he says.
Twenty-five years after Manuel Antonio was created, it is still only half
paid for. Moreover, 17 percent of Costa Rica's national parks still
belong to private landowners, who legally have the right to cut timber on
their inholdings, though few do.
"They try to tell us, 'We need land for our cattle. We're going to cut
it down if you don't pay,'" Rodriguez says. "We say, 'Okay, we don't have
money, we're looking for money. Take it easy.'"
Internal economic problems and critics say government indifference have
put the parks in peril. Costa Rica's national debt is devouring 25 cents
of every dollar in the treasury. And foreign donations have begun to dry
up as international donors are taking their projects elsewhere.
Interviews with more than two dozen conservationists, biologists and
government officials reveal serious concerns that this nation is not
living up to its own environmental rhetoric - either in supporting its
famous park system or in halting deforestation.
"The government talks a lot about protected areas, biodiversity,
sustainable development, but the practice of that is not so true," says
Mario Boza, who is considered the father of the Costa Rican parks system
after he helped create it in the 1970s.
"I think politicians have overestimated what we are doing in
conservation," says Julio Calvo, director of the respected Tropical
Science Center in San Jose. "It's true we're preserving natural forest,
but it's also true that we have not been able to stop deforestation, or
the pollution of our rivers."
Even the nation's chief administrator of the protected areas system
complains that most of the time he feels like just another special
interest begging for attention from the Costa Rica congress.
"The politicians have recognized that national parks have attracted a lot
of foreign currency because of ecotourism," says Carlos Manuel Rodriguez,
who oversees the nation's 1.5 million acres of nature reserves, "and they
use the environmental issue in every political campaign. But there is not
the political will to really work to resolve our problems."
Conservationists inside Costa Rica say that the lack of funding of
national parks has reached crisis levels.
"In some areas in those parks we find what we call empty forest. You see
the forest, but there are no animals. They were hunted. We cannot protect
the area," says Mario Boza.
A few examples:
"In Tortuguero, maybe one percent of the coastline is guarded," says
Leslie du Tout, a South African sea turtle activist who lives in Costa
Rica. "We walked about a mile and a half of the beach and found seven
(endangered) leatherback (sea turtle) nests, and all of them had been
robbed."
It's not that the parks can't pay for themselves: they earned four
million dollars last year in entrance and research fees. But Costa Rica's
cash-poor central government has to raid these earnings in order to pay
for other urgent national needs.
"There's not enough money for the roads, so the roads have potholes,"
says Amos Bien, director of the Association of Costa Rican Private Nature
Preserves. "Everybody's protesting, so the government takes money from
some things and puts it into potholes. The schools are having problems,
so the government makes a big effort. But the hospitals are having
problems. Well, some of national parks haven't been paid for. You can pay
for the parks, but you have to take it from something else. And it goes
around and around and around."
Costa Rica - a country smaller than West Virginia - has more bird species
than the United States and Canada combined. To its credit, this nation
has taken advantage of this extraordinary biodiversity by creating one of
the most extensive protected areas systems in the world. Eleven percent
of its territory has been set aside for national parks; that's the
equivalent of the United States declaring all of Texas and Oklahoma as
nature preserves. Costa Rica accomplished this in the 1970s and 80s, when
coffee and cattle prices were good, international aid was generous, and
the country could afford to buy up undeveloped wilderness.
The environmental record of a small Central American republic might not
seem important, but Costa Rica is held to a higher standard. It is looked
to as a model by the rest of Latin America. Its stable democracy, strong
middle class, high literacy and its brain trust of skilled biologists
have earned it tens of millions of dollars in international environmental
aid. If conservation is going to work anywhere, experts say, it's
supposed to work in Costa Rica - which has dubbed itself a "laboratory
for sustainable development."
"We've done, in a lot of ways, as much as we can," says Katrina Brandon,
a conservation biologist at the University of Maryland and an expert in
sustainable development in Central America. "What's required now is an
extraordinary demonstration of political will. And unless that political
will is forthcoming, then you're not going to get effective conservation
in the country. People know what needs to be done. But it's just not
happening."
Nature tourism has now become Costa Rica's richest industry, earning $700
million last year, even surpassing bananas and coffee exports.
Costa Rican conservationists hope the country realizes it will have to
take better care of its renowned wilderness areas if it wants the
tourists to keep coming.