There is some good news and some bad so I guess we start with the bad.

It has become necessary to raise our prices in light of new organizational obligations and to compensate the staff for thier work. Since Ecuador renounced its own monitary system and adopted the dollar as its medium of exchange there has been a constant increase in the cost of living where it is considered that a basic income necessary to supply a family is well over 400$ a month. Currently the reserve has been paying between 6 and 7 dollars US a day in wages and considering we need to feed all the staff here an aditional 3 dollars a day for prep and food could be considered as part of this wage.

This wage is being raised progressivly in the case of kitchen staff but has been raised definativly for machete and transport based labour to 10$ p/d plus food.

I know it is not much. These new prices to cover this additional expence will take effect on the 1 of March 2007.

On the positive side we have received recognition from the Ministry of Environment for the new Fundacíon Los Cedros which is the legally recognized organization that is responsible for the protection of Bosque Protector Los Cedros.

This status will allow us to receive funding for project management and subsequently entail bookeeping expences. The new foundation has incorporated several new community members and some CIBT people as well.

Fabian Hernandez- Founder of the community eco tourism project Comite de Ecoturismo de Manduracos.

Jose Cueva- Comercial organic vegetable producer who also works in certification of organic produce. Jose also is an organizer of comunity participation in protected areas with the El Chontal protected forest and the Cambugan project.

Ximena Mina- Member of the ecotourism project and member of the Paroquial council here in our area.

Maritza Cifuentes- Secretarial/Administrative manager of CIBT who continues with this new organization.

Timoteo Metz- Founder of Restoration Forestry and member of directorat of Ancient Forests International.

Jose DeCoux- Long time Los Cedros organizer and resident.

We need some sugestions on where to look for support for this new orgainzational structure. The first task for the FLC will be to get the management plan updated and aproved by the Ministry of Environment.

Josef DeCoux
Executive Director
Fundacíon Los Cedros

In September, the PRIMENET project ran a training workshop at Los Cedros for community-based parabiologists.

Sara Richard created a video of the training, a short version of which is below. Much more information is available at the PRIMENET website.

Scientists at the University of Sussex are working with local communities in Ecuador to help save one of the world’s rarest species of monkey - and the endangered rainforest where it lives.
The Brown-headed Spider Monkey (Ateles fusciceps) is “critically endangered”, which means that without urgent action to protect the 50 known breeding pairs still in the wild, the species could become extinct. The spider monkey - unusual in that it is exclusively a fruit-eater - is under threat because up to 80 per cent of the dense rainforest that it depends on for food has been destroyed.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Cedros Reserve received news today that an important project has been approved for financing through the Darwin Initiative, one of the United Kingdoms important contributions to fulfill obligations under the terms of the Kyoto Treaty.

The project is to create a network for the conservation of the critically endangered Brown Headed Spider Monkey, a primate endemic to Northwest Ecuador. Though the details of the financing approved are pending, the Los Cedros Reserve will be the center for collection of primate data and host to the training facilities for training community based primate monitors.

This project will provide the reserve with a defined direction in a much neglected area of scientific study. Other participants in this project include the National Herbarium which will conduct habitat studies and the Museo de Ciencias Naturales which will coordinate primate data collection.

Training will be initiated at this reserve for selected individuals, who actually live in areas where this now difficult to encounter primate is found, to create this community based network of monitors and data collectors.

This project will also provide many new opportunities for volunteer placement.

This is just a little update on what has been happening at Los Cedros and to start out here is the run down on the constant legal battles that are being waged against the greedy and corrupt.

The Los Cedros reserve has been challenged from it’s inception by some members of a group of land speculators known as Association La Florida or Madrigal and known among the farmers and villagers as Los Calleros, surname of one of their first unpopular agents who worked in the communities.

The core group seems to be related to the Ecuadorian Chancelery or Ministery of Foreign Relations and in 1994 they received a land grant that superimposed itself on 400 hectares of the Los Cedros Reserve.

Since 1996 we have been aware of this problem and have made many petitions to the land grant agency for the rectification of this error on the agency’s part.

We have received no answer to any of the complaints we filed over the years but instead received notification after two years of administrative silence from the land grant agency that our entire land title was being challenged by some members of this same group of land speculators.

Today after changing the name of the organization and reason for incorporation they have newly emerged as the Corporacion Rio Manduraco, environmental organization dedicated to conservation and construction of the Choco/Manabi ecological corridor.

This new image is hard to reconcile with their efforts to destroy the Los Cedros Reserve unseals the objective is to increase the land under their control. Supposedly 3 members of Corp Rio Mandu need the 400 hectares of the Reserve to include it in the conservation strategy of the Corp. This is patently a land grab not conservation. To accomplish their aims they have gone to the extent of nullifying the entire reserve title.

So friends and neighbors we will be calling on you to help with your e-mails and pressure on the politicians of your country to support the Reserve before this travesty. Please get in contact with me here at the reserve if you have any ideas about how we could raise some funds to stop this or apply political pressure.

We have assembled a legal team that will go into action if the first notification of title annulment is ratified and executed. Then we will need your help and the help of your contacts to pressure the often mercuric government ministries.

On the bright side the community tourism program is growing with each passing year and we are training the first group of local mountain guides with the help of the master of community tourism, Sir Randolph Smith,KBS,. The first two 3 day workshops have been held in Los Cedros and Chontal. The Alberge Neotropical, a community based hostal and tourism office is under construction in Chontal and will soon be the information and coordination center for visitors to Los Cedros.

The community health center is now open with the attention 20 days a month by a licensed nurse. The community radio program is about to be implemented and this will provide radio communications between the municipality, hospital, police, Los Cedros and the distant communities surrounding the reserve. We do need some help with the funding for this program and owe 1.500$ as part of the contribution of Los Cedros.

The new bridge crossing the Guayabamba river at Chontal has now had all of it’s cement laid by a huge 400 person work day and will soon provide direct access to town from Quito.

The volunteer program could use some stimulation if any one has any good ideas. We had to raise our prices because of the inflation since dolarization and there are fewer people traveling here for the bargain travel Ecuador once was. Schools or programs out there looking for where to go?

See you around

jose

After a lot of hoop-jumping and considerable waiting, the Los Cedros website is now recognized by the Google search engine. Searching for either “los cedros” or “reserva los cedros” returns this page as the #1 suggestion; entering “los cedros reserve” results in it showing up as #3. Pretty good. Reservaloscedros.org is now also now the #2 response on AllTheWeb.com - another big search engine - when you ask that search engine for “los cedros” or “los cedros reserve”.

What all that means is www.reservaloscedros.org is now easily accessible to anyone searching the web for information about the reserve. Yay!