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Hello, my name is Adrianna Carrion and I am currently a senior at the School for Advanced Studies (SAS), which allows me to do dual enrollment classes at Miami Dade. My future plans are to become a psychiatrist. I want to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville after I graduate from SAS and receive my Associate's degree from Miami Dade College. I am planning on majoring in neuroscience for my bachelor's degree and then go to the University of Florida's medical school to become a psychiatrist. I have always been intrigued by the human brain, so majoring in neuroscience allows me the opportunity to learn more about it. Additionally, becoming a psychiatrist allows me to study the brain in my everyday job and help others better understand their brains.

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Deforestation and Land Use Change in Peru

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Deforestation and Land Use Change in Peru

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Finding sustainable land-use practices to protect Andean forests and ecosystems

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I decided to do my project on finding sustainable land use practices to protect Andean forests and ecosystems in Peru because more than 26,000 sq. km. of the country's forest has been destroyed in the last 20 years. This is concerning because deforestation leads to different species of animals losing their homes, in turn becoming endangered. The lack of biodiversity not only harms the country of Peru ,but the entire world. Additionally, the lack of biodiversity leads to an increase in carbon emissions, which harms the ozone layer of the Earth. The world works in harmony with the many different ecosystems around the world, and the endangerment of one leads to consequences that the whole world will suffer.

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Two decades of accelerated deforestation in Peruvian forests: a national and regional analysis (2000–2020) - Regional Environmental Change

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The global tree cover has kept reducing in the last two decades, mainly in tropical forests, despite the global efforts to conserve biodiversity and the ecosystem services that provides. Considering South America is the region that had the highest rate of net forest loss (2000–2020), it is crucial to understand the deforestation dynamics of each country and their regions for the evaluation of effective national conservation actions. Here, we carried out a spatiotemporal analysis of the deforestation rates from 2000 to 2020 on a national and regional scale, including the forest loss inside protected areas, in Peru. It was found that Peru lost 3.4 million ha of forest between 2000 and 2020, mainly in the Not Flooded Rainforest region. National deforestation rates accelerated, while within protected areas rates showed a very small increase. Regional deforestation rates followed the national pattern with one exception—the Coast region. Our results evidence the success of the national conservation strategy based on protected areas to avoid deforestation in all regions, except in the Andean. Moreover, the increment in deforestation rates is aligned with the growth in road infrastructure; increments in anthropic activities; and the more frequent and intense natural extreme events that vary according to the region. Therefore, it is urgent to differentiate the drivers of deforestation that operate at the national versus the regional scale, consider the inclusion of all forest types in the monitoring system, and the strengthening of policies related to land use change at all scales.

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Emissions from deforestation and land use change make up the majority of Peru' contributions to global warming. In 2015, it is estimated that deforestation and land use change in Peru contributed 53 million tonnes of carbon emissions to the global atmosphere, and cut down 118,000 hectares of carbon-absorbing trees in the Peruvian Amazon.

If left to continue without interruption, the climate impacts could be catastrophic. According to WWF studies to be published later this year on carbon stocks in protected areas of the Peruvian Amazon and its buffer zones, these forests store approximately 6,700 million tonnes of carbon emissions, an amount greater than six times the size of the emissions from the energy sector of the European Union.

To tackle this problem and prevent future emissions, the governments of Peru, Norway, and Germany signed a cooperation agreement in September 2014 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation through 2020. Like their ratification of the Paris Agreement, the Joint Declaration of Intent represents Peru's commitment to reducing their emissions and protecting their forests while cultivating sustainable livelihoods.

The goal of the Declaration is to achieve zero net emissions from land-use change and forestry in Peru by 2020, while contributing to the global goal of keeping temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius. Reducing deforestation by 50% and promoting the transition to sustainability in the agricultural, forestry, and mining sectors are the tasks set out by the Declaration to limit temperature from rising further above pre-industrial levels.

With funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), WWF-Peru has been working to support the implementation of the Declaration, in partnership with the National Program for the Conservation of Forests and Mitigation of Climate Change (PNCBMCC, per its Spanish acronym), and the Ministry of Culture, among other organizations. This support project used five strategies: foster active participation of civil society and indigenous peoples to increase commitments to prevent deforestation, develop low-carbon and production-protection agricultural policies that can be adopted by regional governments, monitor deforestation across three Amazon regions, improve land tenure of indigenous communities and strengthen the protection of four territorial reserves.
Legal recognition for Indigenous Peoples
A key element of WWF-Peru's mission is increasing the recognition of the work silently carried out for centuries by the people who inhabit the Amazon. With deep respect for nature and ecological knowledge, they are exemplary stewards of its forests and ecosystems. That's why WWF-Peru has worked with them as conservation partners, helping to strengthen their institutional capacities, secure greater protection of their territories, and increase gender equality and respect of both their culture and customs.

In July 2016, the Regional Government of Loreto began the process of titling 35 indigenous communities, as part of a strategy that recognizes the territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples and guarantees the conservation of 175,000 hectares of forests within its territory, containing approximately 71.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

This process has involved close coordination with regional indigenous organizations and the Regional Government, and has produced a methodological guide for the titling process of native communities. This guide has become an essential tool for officials in the field, as it details the enumeration, boundary establishment, georeferencing, and procedures of soil analysis necessary for a community to successfully receive legal titles to their land. As a result, 780 families from 4 different ethnic groups have become legal owners of their territories.

Strengthening the capacities of indigenous leaders to sustainably manage their territories is a priority for WWF, and we have been providing them with tools to implement subprojects for the recognition and titling of their land and the management of their natural resources.

More than 80 managers from 18 local and regional indigenous organizations were brought together in a first-of-its-kind intensive workshop to build on their communication, administrative, and management skills to allow them access to additional funds for the successful execution of natural resource management projects. Participants described a variety of planned projects that would benefit from the funds and facilitate the protection of forests in their territories, either through more sustainable practices like improving cocoa production, agroforestry systems, or through alternative revenue streams like Amazonian-fish breeding and tourism.
Amazonian Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact
The Amazon is one of the few places in the world that still has Indigenous Populations in Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACIs). They live in remote and extensive places, maintaining a close relationship of dependence with the forest. To protect the rights of these communities, the government has established Indigenous Reserves as a category of protected area to define strict areas of protection and intervention with neighbouring populations.

Existing Indigenous Reserves in the country are in a good state of preservation, but given that PIACIs live in remote areas abundant in natural resources, their territories are permanently at risk of being invaded and deforested by illegal logging and drug trafficking, and face the constant pressure of a disorderly migratory agriculture and the growing market demands of forest goods, palm oil, and cocoa.

WWF-Peru has worked on strengthening alliances with government sectors to promote greater commitments to guarantee PIACI survival and protection. Meetings and training sessions with representatives of the Ministries of Culture, Health, Defence, and Education have generated solid results. For the first time, state officials from different sectors and levels of government have participated in patrols in the regions of Madre de Dios and Ucayali, visiting remote areas which had previously never received any form of government presence and learning first-hand the reality and needs of these communities. Working groups were formed to deal with illegal logging and patrols were carried out in three Indigenous Reserves and one Territorial Reserve, which confirmed development of illicit activities within the protected areas, allowing for better protection of their territories.

This close participation between different actors has also favoured the construction of protection plans for the three Indigenous Reserves: the Isconahua, Mashco Piro, and Murunahua. These plans represent the ultimate management tool for these territories, determining the roles and mechanisms for their protection by both public officials and civil society.
Development in harmony with the forest
Madre de Dios, located in Southeast Peru, is one of the regions most affected by deforestation. Between 2007 and 2015, the region lost approximately 12,700 hectares of forest each year to deforestation. Taking a long-term view in their approach, WWF-Peru has worked alongside a diverse set of stakeholders in the region - local and regional authorities, Indigenous Peoples, farmers - to establish a development vision that is inclusive, sustainable, and reduces deforestation.

Such is the case of the municipalities of Tahuamanu and Tambopata, the two territories in Madre de Dios most affected by forest loss, mainly due to the increase of low intensity agricultural activities. Both local governments have begun the process of updating their Concerted Development Plan, a management tool to promote development and improve the quality of life in the area.

Mayors Alain Gallegos Moreno and Alfonso Cardozo Mouzully, of Tambopata and Tahuamanu respectively, applied a participatory approach in the development of their Plans to implement national and regional strategies in ways that respond to their local development needs and expectations. As a result, Tambopata is seeking to convert 80,265 deforested hectares into productive areas, making use of already affected lands and preventing the destruction of untouched, natural areas within their jurisdiction. Similarly, Tahuamanu wants to turn degraded areas into productive land for agriculture and agroforestry to reduce pressure on their forests and promote semi-confined livestock for more efficient land use. Their Plan includes applying new technologies and timber production with added value to enhance permanent production forests.

While previous development approaches responded to political interests and demands, they did not account for the future of their municipality's environment, especially in indigenous territories, where many live in Isolation and Initial Contact. Integrating a focus on reducing deforestation has allowed the technical teams of the municipalities to better recognize how their local actions contribute to the achievement of national conservation goals.

Coffee production is the main economic activity in the region of San Martín, located in Peru's northern Amazon. The Coffee Network of Roque is composed of more than 180 producers grouped in 11 committees. It has an average coffee production of 5 hectares per producer but many of them hold no legal rights to the land. This area, like many in the Peruvian Amazon, is undergoing a process of deforestation due to the expansion of small and medium-sized agriculture, the largest cause of deforestation in the country.

The Network has among its leaders a woman who stands out for her entrepreneurship and boldness. Leonor López Mondragón has fostered active participation in her organization, and motivated a strong presence of young leaders, abreast of the latest agricultural technologies, successfully increasing their productivity using what's known as the production-protection approach.

This approach ties more efficient land use, through technologies to improve both the quantity and quality of yields, to public policies that promote forest conservation. When combined, these processes make expansion through deforestation less attractive, preventing emissions from forest destruction and supporting sustainable development and improved livelihoods.

With the support of Earth Innovation Institute, Forest Trends and Alternative Development Mechanisms (MDA, for its Spanish Acronym), and financed by WWF, they have successfully increased their productivity and reduced pressure on the forests by applying new agricultural techniques, including better plant management of coffee plantations, production of organic fertilizer using efficient microorganisms, and more selective harvesting.

Thanks to these efforts and Leonor López Mondragón's leadership, they have been able to install - through their own efforts and funds - two hectares of technical irrigation, after which they obtained financing from a public program for eight of their other hectares, improving the quality of their crops whilst reducing production costs and hectare needs.

With this access to affordable credit and leverage to create economies of scale, reduced costs, and transaction risks, Roque's Network is now eligible to become a sustainable agroforestry concession. This will provide them legal use of the land, opening access to new markets that privilege the sustainable origin of their products. Leonor López Mondragón's vision has demonstrated that it is possible to increase productivity, income, and conservation; living better while looking after the forests.
Technology that detects deforestation
What if an alarm went off whenever illegal deforestation happened in the Amazon? While not quite that responsive, National Program for the Conservation of Forests and Mitigation of Climate Change, (PNCBMCC, per its Spanish acronym) has a tool to generate an "early warning" for forest loss in the Peruvian Amazon. This technology reports on forest cover at least every 7 days and facilitates speedy interventions in illegal deforesting activities.

PNCBMCC has worked in coordination with the Regional Environmental Authority of the governments of Ucayali, Loreto, and San Martin to train technicians to process the information and identify potential illegal deforestation. Public presentations and training sessions were carried out to show the accuracy of the data during the registration of satellite information. This information was shared among state actors and civil society to take action to prevent the advance of the degradation of their forests.

In the indigenous community of Nuevo Saposa, Ucayali, a field check with the residents exposed an area of wood extraction and agricultural expansion carried out by people from outside the community. This confirmed what the environmental authorities had recently observed in the satellite images. Immediately, the team documented the deforestation and transferred the complaint to the Specialized Public Prosecutor's Office for sanctioning, which can include jail time and high fines.

In the case of the Reserved Zone of Sierra del Divisor, reports utilizing this technology established that the extent of affected forests amounted to 25 hectares, mainly due to the advance of subsistence agriculture and illegal logging. This information was later verified by an overflight carried out by the members of the Ministry of the Environment and Ucayali's Public Prosecutor's Office, who witnessed the existence of roads, collection points and the presence of vehicles for the transportation of cargo.

With access to this kind of technology, environmental authorities can have a much more realistic understanding of the state Amazonian forests. Being able to regularly monitor the changes in forest cover, and to determine the causes of deforestation - be it new illicit roads, grazing areas, or monoculture - they can better plan their actions and strategies to prevent further deforestation.

These different paths show how many tools we can use to reduce deforestation, without putting forest protection at odds with sustainable development. In support of the Joint Declaration of Intent, WWF-Peru and its partners have used multiple tools, fostering active participation from all levels of government to reduce the progress of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon.

We all have worked alongside local governments in the most deforested regions to promote more sustainable development in their jurisdictions, converting degraded areas of pasture into productive ones and protecting forests from agricultural expansion. This has involved the two national indigenous organizations to ensure the respect of their rights - including the right to be Indigenous Populations in Isolation and Initial Contact - and initiated processes with government authorities to grant them legal tenure to their ancestral territories.

Technology also plays a role in the prevention of forest loss, along with the human capacity to use it. Local farmers have been introduced to new forms of production, and shifted to modern practices with higher crop yields, improving their income and preserving existing forests. Environmental regional authorities have been trained and granted access to new satellite information tools to help them visualize illegal activities that reduce forests, and plan timely interventions to prevent illicit mining and logging activities.

There is no silver bullet; we need to use our whole toolkit to reduce deforestation and forest degradation and the carbon emissions caused by those processes. Dialogue and collaboration with all sectors of the Peruvian government, civil society, and the corporate sector are essential pieces of that kit. Only together can we protect both the future of our climate, our forests, and the livelihoods of those who depend on them.

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The paths to reducing deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon

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Emissions from deforestation and land use change make up the majority of Peru' contributions to global warming

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With almost 70 million hectares of forest, the Peruvian Amazon covers more than half of the country's territory. The region extends from north to south across the departments of Loreto, Amazonas, San Martín, Ucayali and Madre de Dios. Another ten departments overlap with the Amazon region: Cajamarca, Huancavelica, La Libertad, Pasco, Piura, Puno, Ayacucho, Junín, Cusco and Huánuco.

As a resource-rich forest, the Peruvian Amazon is being plundered at an accelerated rate. In 2020, Peru reached the highest levels of deforestation in the country's history, with a total of 203,272 hectares razed, almost 40 percent more than in 2019.

Prior to this surge, from 2017 to 2019, the country exhibited constant deforestation rates of around 150,000 hectares per year, which is equivalent to an annual tree-cover loss of 19 percent.

Today, Peru ranks as the country with the fifth highest rate of deforestation in the world and the third highest in the Amazon, behind Brazil and Bolivia. In all, Peru has lost more than 26,000 square-kilometers of forest since 2001, an area greater than the size of El Salvador.

The areas most affected by deforestation fall within the Amazon basin and are concentrated in Indigenous communities in the departments of Ucayali, Pasco, Junín and Huánuco, in the center of the country; in Loreto, in the north; and Madre de Dios, in southeastern Peru.The high levels of deforestation have many causes, not least of which is the near chronic political crisis and power vacuum that have assailed Peru in recent years. The political chaos has undercut the fight against deforestation and environmental crimes, pushing these issues down the agenda.

The pandemic has also been a key factor in the record deforestation, turning government attention away from environmental protection and inviting rampant environmental crime.

"COVID-19 pushed people from urban areas into the jungle," says former Interior Minister Carlos Basombrío.

However, the ugly truth is that ecological destruction in the Amazon is part of a larger battle that dates back decades. Countries like Peru struggle to balance the need to promote economic growth with the need to protect the fragile ecosystems increasingly responsible for that growth.

"There [in the Amazon], many have taken up activities that cause deforestation, such as agriculture or mining," Basombrío adds.

Cattle and Agricultural Activities in the Peruvian Amazon

Land in the Peruvian Amazon is divided among private property holders, Indigenous communities and the public domain. A cross-section of national and local government agencies administer these lands. At the national level, the Ministry of Agriculture sells or grants land for logging and agribusiness. At the local level, Regional Agricultural Directorates (Direcciones Regionales Agrarias - DRAs) administer lands within their jurisdictions. The DRAs grant land-ownership certificates via what are known as Directorates for the Physical and Legal Regularization of Agricultural Property (Direcciones de Saneamiento Físico Legal de la Propiedad Agraria). The directorates provide the documents that allow settlers to acquire land in the Amazon on which they can develop agricultural activities, and then, having worked on said land, they may obtain a property title.

While the Amazon basin has long been exploited, the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2009) opened the doors to small-, medium- and large-scale agriculture in the Peruvian Amazon. In the Amazon, Fujimori did not see the lungs of the planet but an area ripe for economic development. As such, he promoted foreign private investment in the region. He also changed the legislation regarding land ownership and the use of forest land to, as economists Roxana Barrantes and Manuel Glave describe it, "achieve the long-awaited development of the Peruvian Amazon" through agricultural and extractive activities.

"Fujimori had the belief the Amazon was an 'idle land' that should be exploited. One way to do so was through agricultural activities," explained Magaly Ávila, the director of the forest governance program for Proética, the Peruvian chapter of Transparency International.

Since then, the Peruvian Amazon has grappled with pressure from two fronts. On one front, small farmers invade areas of the Amazon and clear swaths of land to make way for cattle ranching and other agricultural activities. These settlers often start with small plots of up to ten hectares. However, these small settlements have a way of multiplying and are sometimes converted into large-scale agricultural farms.

"We have seen how those ten hectares multiply and become 2,000," says Julio Guzmán, an attorney for Peru's Ministry of the Environment. "This has had a devastating effect."

On the other front, agro-industrial companies have entered the region. These companies fill the surging international dema n d for commodities such as palm oil, which is used in cosmetics and food products. Palm oil plantations have grown by 95 percent during the last ten years in Peru. Large agribusiness has led to deforestation in Loreto and San Martín in the north; Ucayali, Huánuco and Pasco, in the central part of the country; and Madre de Dios, in southeastern Peru.

Land trafficking fuels the development of small- and large-scale agricultural activities. As happens throughout the region, land traffickers in Peru take advantage of existing legal loopholes or get help from regional government officials to buy and sell tracks of land. In most cases, these officials grant land titles to agro-industrial companies for parcels of land that historically belong to Indigenous communities. Despite inhabiting lands for years, Indigenous communities often do not have land titles, making them ripe targets for these officials and traffickers.

To cite just one example, Mongabay and Proética have reported on how, since 2012, the Indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya, in Ucayali, has been cornered by a company once known as Plantaciones Pucallpa. The company, which has since changed its name to the Ocho Sur P.S.A.C, is dedicated to the production of palm oil. Mongabay reported that this company bought land from land traffickers who invaded the community's territory, deforested it and then requested the land title from the DRA. Community leaders also reported being the target of threats from these land traffickers.

The results were devastating for the Santa Clara de Uchunya Indigenous community, which claimed a land area of 86,713 hectares. However, the Peruvian government recognized only around 2,000 hectares of their claim. Meanwhile, the rest was subdivided into hundreds of individual properties and sold to Ocho Sur. By the end of 2020, according to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the company had appropriated 6,845 hectares belonging to the community's ancestral territory. Between 2012 and 2015, the company cleared 7,000 hectares of forest. These accusations against agro-industrial companies will be discussed in greater detail later in this report.

Watchdog groups say the pattern has been repeated elsewhere in the Peruvian Amazon.

"When agro-industrial companies begin to enter Peru, particularly palm oil companies, communities begin to feel a strong pressure in their territories," says Proética's Magaly Ávila.

A Coca Producer

Peru has for centuries been a major producer of coca, the raw material for cocaine, and it has been an exporter of cocaine since the nineteenth century. The United States government outlawed cocaine in the early twentieth century and pressured the Amazon nation into doing so in 1948. Peru later became a signatory to the 1961 United Nations Single Convention, which first scheduled coca and cocaine on an international level.

An illegal drug trade emerged, which by 1975 was centered in the Huallaga Valley, in the north of the country. In the early 2000s, this trade shifted to the Valley of the Apurímac, Ene, and Mantaro Rivers. The VRAEM, as it is known for its Spanish acronym, is a region made up of 61 districts around the departments of Junín, Cusco, Ayacucho, Apurímac and Huancavelica, in the south of the country.

Today, Peru is the world's second largest producer of coca. Production has "spread across the Amazon," according to Peru's anti-drug prosecutor, Sonia Medina. The minimal state presence, forced eradication and constant counter-narcotics operations in the VRAEM are among the many reasons behind the reconfiguration of the drug production landscape.

To make space for coca fields, forests are being felled and burned in the departments of Ucayali, Loreto, Huánuco and Pasco, in addition to the Amazon Trapezoid where Peru borders Brazil and Colombia. Other parts of the cocaine process also contribute to deforestation. Laboratories have sprung up around the coca plantations in the Amazon to convert coca leaves into cocaine. And clandestine airstrips have been built to facilitate drug trafficking.

One proxy measure for this growth is to count illegal airstrips. To cite just one example, 46 illegal airstrips were officially detected in Ucayali in 2020, and security expert Pedro Yaranga said there could be more than 80 in that department alone. In 2020, meanwhile, 42,000 hectares of forest loss were reported throughout Ucayali.

According to Chris Fagan, director of the Upper Amazon Conservancy, an organization dedicated to protecting the Amazon rainforest, coca growers are also clearing forests in the Alto Purús and Manu national parks, in southeast Peru. The same has happened in other areas to the southeast of the country, like the Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, and in the areas between Madre de Dios and Puno.

The expansion of drug trafficking in the Amazon has also turned the Indigenous leaders and environmental defenders who oppose drug trafficking into targets. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 20 local leaders have been killed, and an untold number of them have been threatened.

The Timber Trade

The logging industry provides thousands of jobs and is a core part of the Peruvian Amazon economy. Much of the timber extracted in the region is used domestically for construction or for making furniture, while a small percentage feeds foreign markets, principally China. Authorized logging sites include concessions in the Peruvian Amazon, which are found in what are known as Permanent Production Forests (Bosques de Producción Permanente). These are lands in the public domain that are granted in concessions by the Ministry of Agriculture. The Technical Forestry and Wildlife Administrations (Administraciones Técnicas Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre - ATFFS), which are part of departmental governments, also grant harvesting permits to Indigenous communities or to others in what are called Local Forests (Bosques Locales).

However, most of the wood harvested in Peru may be illegally sourced. Indeed, some forestry experts estimate that as much as 80 percent of Peruvian timber is of illegal origin. And the Supervisory Agency for Forest Resources and Wildlife (Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre - OSINFOR), the entity that oversees and controls forestry and wildlife use, believes that close to 90 percent of illegal logging in Peru takes place in the Amazonian departments of Loreto, Madre de Dios and Ucayali. The remaining ten percent takes place in the departments of Amazonas and San Martín, in northern Peru.

The main wood species extracted in the Peruvian Amazon consist of cumala (Virola calophylla); tornillo (Cedrelinga catenaeformis); cumaru, also known as shihuahuaco (Dipteryx odorata); Lupuna (Chorisia integrifolia); and cachimbo (Cariniana decandra Ducke). While less valuable than cedar and mahogany, these are resistant hardwoods, which are used for the manufacture of luxury furniture that is mostly sold on the local market. Lighter woods - less valuable but still desirable in international markets - have also been targeted by timber traffickers. This is the case of balsa wood, a species increasingly extracted since 2020 due to high demand for the construction of wind turbine blades.

Some of this illegal logging is the result of other legal and illegal activities happening in the Amazon, namely coca cultivation, unauthorized colonization by small farmers and agricultural development. But some of it is part of an explicit plan to traffic timber. In either case, the timber production chain involves three steps: extraction, transport and processing. Illegal wood is laundered into the legal supply chain in each of these phases to cover up illicit origins.

During the extraction phase, authorized logging zones - concessions, Indigenous communities and Local Forests - must submit Annual Operating Plans (Planes Operativos Anuales - POAs). The POAs are supposed to act as controls. They include geo-referenced information and details about the timber species to be harvested, as well as the volume to be extracted. In practice, however, these POAs are used as cover for illegally logged timber in lands where no logging concessions exist or in protected natural reserves, where logging is prohibited.

The wood is then transported to transit and processing hubs, like Pucallpa, the capital of the Ucayali department, and Iquitos, the capital of Loreto. Wood transport must be supported by a timber transport permit (Guía de Transporte Forestal - GTF), a document issued by the regional forestry authorities containing information on the origins of the timber. However, the GTFs can be doctored or falsified by regional ATFFS.

In the processing hubs, the wood is transformed into boards, beams or furniture by legal - and clandestine - sawmills, which effectively fold the sawn wood into the legal supply chain. The sawmills use multiple means to camouflage their illegal activities, including falsifying the registries that show the amount of wood entering and leaving their facility. The forestry authorities are also corrupted in this part of the process.

As well as being another driver of deforestation, timber trafficking is one of the motors behind biodiversity loss, forest degradation and violence in the Peruvian Amazon. High value woods such as cedar and mahogany have been felled without control, almost to the point of extinction. What's more, the looting of the forests of Indigenous territories by timber traffickers who pursue the most valuable species has led to a violent hunt for Indigenous environmental leaders who oppose timber trafficking in the Amazon.

Actors: The Many Faces of Environmental Crime in Peru

There are many actors driving deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon through their involvement in agro-industrial farms and ranching, illegal logging and drug trafficking. Parsing out which ones are behind the bulk of the deforestation is difficult, but they can be divided into three main categories: big businesses, entrepreneurial criminal networks and cheap labor.

Some big businesses operating at the top of the timber supply chains or running agro-industrial farms are the major actors at the heart of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. These businesses are satisfying the demand, both domestic and international, for palm oil, cocoa and wood. They regularly maintain distance from the environmental crimes they promote, hiding behind shell companies, using falsified documentation and working with middlemen and complicit state authorities.

Cases of conglomerates such as the Melka Group (Grupo Melka), owned by Czech-American businessman Dennis Melka, and Romero Group (Grupo Romero) are good illustrations of this process. These companies have traditionally operated in Malaysia and Indonesia, countries with high levels of deforestation due to agro-industrial activities. They arrived in the Peruvian Amazon to harvest palm oil and cocoa. But an extensive investigation by journalists Milagros Salazar and Dánae Rivadeneyra reportedly showed how these companies have deforested thousands of hectares of forest in the departments of Loreto and Ucayali.

They first encroached upon Amazon communities by establishing contact via third parties with land invaders - entrepreneurial criminal networks who, often under the threat or outright use of violence, displace the local population from the territory. Masquerading as farmers, the invaders then seized and clear-cut the forest. These invaders then retroactively requested a certificate of land ownership from the DRA and sold the lands to companies such as the Melka Group, which then used it for agribusiness ventures. Indeed, according to Ojo Público, government officials sold plots of land obtained from different land trafficking schemes to companies like Ocho Sur SAC.

Still, it is difficult to say who is directly responsible for the deforestation. Subsidiaries of Melka Group, including Ocho Sur and Cacao Norte - now called Tamshi SAC - have been accused of deforesting more than 13,000 hectares in the departments of Loreto and Ucayali since 2013. And on July 25, 2019, a Loreto court sentenced Melka's company Cacao Norte to pay 15 million soles (more than $3 million) in restitution to the State for the deforestation caused by the company.

However, in a 2015 interview with Directors Talk Interviews, an organization dedicated to providing interviews with top executives in publicly-traded companies, Melka denied the accusations and said the area they purchased had already been deforested.

"By the time the plantation companies actually get to the land, that land has been logged or clear cut of all tropical hardwood. It's simply not a rainforest," Melka representatives said.

What's more, in December 2020, the Criminal Appeals Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice (La Sala Penal de Apelaciones de la Corte Superior de Justicia) of Loreto annulled the lower court's decision. Experts in environmental crime were furious after the high court's ruling.

"This is frustrating. We expected an exemplary sentence," Julio Guzmán, attorney for Peru's Ministry of the Environment, said to Mongabay. "It is a serious blow to the fight against deforestation."

Environmental watchdogs and media reports suggest that the Romero Group, which consists of the industrial businesses of Espino, Alicorp SA, Trading SA and Sociedad Industrial Yurimaguas SAC (today Industrias del Shanusi SA), has employed a similar strategy to the Melka Group. According to an investigation by the Forest Peoples Programme, an organization that supports Indigenous communities and forest management, Romero Group has invaded historically Indigenous territories such as Nueva Italia, in the department of Junín, and the Kechwa and Shawi Indigenous communities in San Martín, Ucayali, and Loreto.

Yacu Kallpa: Illegal Timber and Impunity in Peru

As in the Melka Group case, Peruvian authorities claimed some companies within the Romero Group, such as Palmas del Shanusi and Palmas-Barranquita, razed hundreds of hectares of forest in Loreto and San Martín. The case also followed the same pattern: Romero Group denied responsibility, and, after a series of public hearings, a local court acquitted them of the charges.

Other companies have also played an important role in timber trafficking by providing infrastructure, such as building roads that are not properly permitted for loggers. They also launder illegally sourced timber through their concessions or with legitimate timber transport permits (GTFs) containing fraudulent information. The permits are issued by their contacts in the regulatory agency, the ATFFS.

GTFs have been used by companies as a kind of certificate of the timber's legal origins. Once the timber is laundered, it is then processed and sold. Exporters also sometimes buy illegal timber extracted from the Amazon. These exporters and other end-users hide their timber trafficking operations behind legitimate paperwork, such as the GTFs.

"As long as the documents say it is legal, and the state forestry agencies haven't proven otherwise, then they are 'good faith buyers,'" according to a 2020 InSight Crime investigation on timber trafficking in Peru.

This is what happened in the emblematic case of Yacu Kallpa. The case was named for the vessel on which the largest seizure of illegally-sourced timber in Peru's history took place in January 2016 in Mexico's port of Tampico, on its way to Houston, Texas. Exporters of almost 9,500 cubic meters of illegally-harvested timber claimed they bought the wood in "good faith" and that it had the appropriate documentation. Nevertheless, Peruvian regulators from OSINFOR later showed that 96 percent of the timber shipment was of illegal origin. What's more, an investigation by Global Witness, an environmental watchdog, uncovered how the representatives of the main exporting companies of the wood on the Yacu Kallpa - such as Inversiones La Oroza and Inversiones WCA - were aware of the illegal origin of the wood by the time it was exported.

Entrepreneurial Criminal Networks

The entrepreneurial criminal networks are market-driven and motivated by profits from the trade in timber, land or drugs. These networks finance and coordinate environmental crimes in the Peruvian Amazon while relying on the work of intermediaries and abundant cheap labor. These networks are dynamic, and their leaders often prefer to remain anonymous. They also conspire with corrupt authorities to carry out illegal activities.

Some of these networks are led by the patrones (bosses). Patrones is a euphemism for those who serve as the brains and capital behind timber trafficking operations. The patron can also be a broker for the big companies that supply national and international markets, especially for larger operations that require technical capacity, transport and machinery.

"The patrones are one of the major enablers of timber trafficking in the Peruvian Amazon," explained Rolando Navarro, the former director of Osinfor.

The patrones' job stretches the length of the illicit value chain. They receive and execute orders for larger companies by financing local logging ventures. This includes an upfront payment - with fuel, supplies and cash advances - to logging crews. These payments are used to pay laborers and cooks, as well as those responsible for clearing paths. They also pay for the chainsaws and equipment needed for their operations. It can sometimes lead to a kind of debt peonage system, with laborers falling hopelessly into debt when they cannot fill an order or via deception on the part of large-scale or small-scale patrones. Over time, it has taken on a name: sistema de habilitación (habilitation system).

Patrones can fill other roles as well. They can hire trusted transporters who know they are part of a timber trafficking operation and will pay bribes to authorities at checkpoints. The patrones can employ fixers, or intermediaries, who will take charge of filling in and organizing fraudulent documents. These fixers often have connections with the forestry authorities. In one example, a fixer named Norma Chuquipiondo Carillo, alias "Tia Norma," or "Aunt Norma," handled the paperwork needed to launder illegally-sourced timber in Ucayali. Her resources included books of blank but signed processing reports from sawmills, falsified logging contracts and official stamps from the forestry authorities, among other illegal documentation.

Land traffickers and drug traffickers also facilitate deforestation. They illegally seize lands throughout the Amazon, often in Indigenous reserves and protected forests, and then they legalize the properties in their name or in the names of third-party operators. As previously mentioned, these networks often cut and burn the forests. Sometimes they use the land for agriculture or for cattle, and then sell it to small farmers or to large agribusiness. Sometimes they steal the land and sell it right away.

For their part, authorities blame the rise of drug trafficking operations in the Amazon on small family clans. Peruvian authorities have identified about 50 such clans, many of which have been around for a decade or more. They not only control drug production but also infrastructure, such as clandestine airstrips. In the VRAEM, these clans have the protection of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), or the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (Militarizado Partido Comunista de Peru - MPCP), the most organized and lethal non-state armed group (NSAG) in Peru. But in other areas, they operate independently.

Cheap Labor

Part of what fuels the deforestation is the widespread availability of cheap labor. Workers cut down trees, burn forests, plant coca crops and transport timber. They often receive little payment for their work and are often victims of forced labor, particularly those in logging, and they can fall into a debt peonage system via their relationship with the aforementioned patrones.

While these people are employees of entrepreneurial criminal networks, they are not necessarily members of these criminal networks. They often participate in these environmental crimes due to a lack of economic alternatives or pressure from the patrones. Some members of Indigenous communities residing in the Peruvian Amazon, for example, have been subjected to forced labor, especially amid timber trafficking operations.

The labor force for illegal logging is composed mainly of cutters, cooks and those responsible for clearing trails. According to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an organization dedicated to the study of environmental crime and the destruction of the environment, workers usually enter the timber supply chain on the promise of a well-paying job. However, they often find themselves immersed in conditions of forced slavery and sexual exploitation.

When it comes to drug trafficking, the labor force consists of clearers who are employed to cut and burn the forest to make way for the coca crops. This role is often created once the land is trafficked and occupied by land invaders. The farmers who come to occupy the land then plant the coca leaf. Some workers are employed to help build infrastructure such as clandestine airstrips. Many farmers camouflage coca bushes among their licit crops, as it is more profitable to plant coca than harvest licit crops. According to an investigation by Ojo Público, farmers can earn about $12 a day working on a coffee plantation, while they receive more than double that for coca.

* Elisabetta Marinoni and Scott Mistler-Ferguson contributed to this investigation
*InSight Crime has partnered with the Igarapé Institute - an independent think tank headquartered in Brazil, that focuses on emerging development, security and climate issues - to trace the environmental crimes and criminal actors driving deforestation in Peru's Amazon. See the entire six-part series here.

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María Fernanda Ramírez, Juan Diego Cárdenas

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Felled and Burned: Deforestation in Peru's Amazon

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Rich in resources, Peru's Amazon is being deforested at an accelerated rate, losing more than 26,000 square kilometers of forest since 2001.

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Peruvian Amazon Rainforest: The Value of Its Ecosystem Services and Why We Must Act to Save It! - Fund the Planet

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The Peruvian Amazon rainforest is the second-largest swath of the Amazon, behind Brazil. This huge tropical forest, located in the western region of the

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Forest conservation efforts in Peru are failing across the board, study says

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Peru has attracted millions of dollars in forest conservation projects over the years, has a series of international agreements and targets to protect forests and has 254 public and private parks and protected areas - but these mechanisms have had little to no effect as deforestation skyrockets in the country, says a new study.

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The most sustainable land use practice that can be used to help protect Andean forests and ecosystems is agroforestry. Agroforestry is a land management practice that combines trees and shrubs with animal or crop farming. This allows for land to be used in multiple ways, instead of farmers needing to continuously expand their land to accommodate different plants and animals. Agroforestry allows for different types of plants and animals to live on the same land and coexist instead of having to fight for resources, which results in more biodiversity. This also helps the soil to stay nutrient rich since there are a variety of plants and animals living on the land, which decreases the amount of infertile land. Overall this decreases the need for farmers to continuously expand their farm land, which leads to a decrease in deforestation.

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Government action is also a practice that can be used to help protect Andean forests and ecosystems. One of the leading causes of deforestation is illegal logging, which is the practice of cutting down trees in protected areas. This leads to the loss of biodiversity in the forests and contributes to the extinction of many different types of animals. Increased government action can help to reduce illegal logging by helping to deter people from engaging in it. The Peruvian government can implement more severe punishments for engaging in illegal logging and invest in more patrols around protected areas and ports. This can help deter people from trying to engage in such acts, resulting in a decrease of deforestation due to illegal logging.