Las Cruces, pt. 9: Environmental Services Payments

After visiting Don Roberto's farm and having learned about the Costa Rican system that provides monetary incentives to individual landowners for conservation and reforestation, we had the interesting experience of helping out with a survey of landowners regarding their knowledge of, participation in, and satisfaction with Environmental Services Payments. Some representatives from CATIE, a Costa Rican NGO that studies agricultural issues, came out to Las Cruces and presented us with a draft version of a survey they hope to launch in a few months. All Tuesday morning we went through the survey to edit it and practiced asking the questions in Spanish. After lunch we broke up into small groups and went out to interview people. My group and two other groups took the OTS car into San Vito, since we each had a pre-arranged interview with one of three brothers that owned a farm together just outside of the town. Despite the fact that it's the dry season, it started POURING as soon as we got to San Vito. All 15 or so of us got stuck under a bus stop and had to wait about an hour for the rain to stop before we could head over to the farmers' house. 

Hiding from the rain under the bus stop.

 The surveys went relatively well, although the version we were using was still definitely a rough draft and it was a little awkward tag-teaming one farmer with a group of six interviewers that didn't speak Spanish very well. The whole event wasn't organized very well, but it really was cool to go out and hear people's real experiences with the ESP program. Marvin, the farmer we interviewed, was receiving payments for conserving forest, and overall seemed satisfied with the program. A lot of landowners that other groups interviewed had contracts to be paid for their conservation efforts but didn't receive the money they were promised. Some landowners had never heard of the ESP programs, and others knew about them but didn't have contracts because they didn't want to or didn't get approved. When we got back, we typed up our results, debriefed as a group, and talked about our experiences with the farmers and suggestions about the survey in general.

While out doing surveys, we also saw this cool tree that has red sap! Supposedly in the old days, people used it as toothpaste.