Memo to President Calderon on ECOLIFE Initiative

Mexican President Felipe Calderon recently toured the United States and visited his alma mater at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

President Calderon agreed to meet with students privately in an off the record discussion. Before this meeting, he recieved 23 policy proposals of less than 250 words from the Harvard community. One memo to President was submitted by a collaborator with ECOLIFE FONDATION, and the memo highlighed the MoreThanMonarchs.org initiative founded by ECOLIFE. President Calderon responded to this memo by bringing up Mexico's Payment for Environmental Services Program which pays farmers to protect their forest. President Calderon highlighted his country's forest policy again in his formal address to the Harvard Community which can be viewed online, at Harvard's Institute of Politics website.

NOTE: An english translation of the memo to President Calderon follows below. It follows the a format given by the Harvard University Mexican Association who facilitated this process:

"Community representatives from Michoacan informed me that clandestine activities have extracted timber, and the above is of total knowledge of the different institutions, nevertheless, it has not been possible to eliminate this activity, given that they act with the protection of a group of loggers that threatens the region.

...our reporting of this excessive logging has not been listened to and as a result, the population in general has decided to exploit the forest themselves, which with so much sacrifice our former authorities had protected.

The communities do not trust the government to stop the logging. Their cynicism reinforces a perverse incentive to participate in the felling. If the communication between the farmers and the government is broken, solutions cease to exist.

PROPOSAL

Increased transparency and communication between government and farmers.

GOVERNMENT SHOULD

• Listen to the forest owners
• Facilitate reporting of logging
• Increase personnel of the CONANP and PROFEPA

EXPECTED RESULT

• Increased transparency and communication will permit
• Improved capacity by the Mexican Government to solve environmental crimes
• Bring out evidence of internal corruption
• Improve government-farmer relations

VIABILITY

There is a precendent for farmer-NGO collaboration, and the government should share this aspiration. The webpage www.masquemonarcas.org receives logging reports on the Internet that are sent to the government. Simultaneously, they are recorded digitally. Only transparency, communication and public reporting can combat corruption and restore public trust."

Jordi Honey-Rosés
PhD student
Urban and Regional Planning
University of Illinois