Organic Farming May Save
Monarch Butterfly in Mexico

July 9, 2002
Aid for Farmers Helps Butterflies Too
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
New York Times

ONACIANO OJEDA, Mexico ‹ Standing in the small kitchen of her rustic house
in this remote community of Mazahua Indians, Celia Isidoro is singing the
praises of her new, efficient wood-burning stove.

"It's much easier to cook on," she says, pointing out the large surface of
the enclosed stove and recalling how she used to cook while kneeling over an
open, smoky fire on the floor of the same room. "We had to cut four
horseloads of wood a week. Now I can burn scraps, anything."
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But this is more than a tale of a happy housewife in this village 100 miles
west of Mexico City. Mrs. Isidoro is one of some 200,000 people living in
the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a stretch of mountain forests that
includes the protected areas where millions of monarchs migrate each winter.
Her stove uses half the wood of an open fire, a potentially huge benefit
here, where forests are quickly disappearing and where researchers estimate
that two-thirds of the logging is illegal.

Introduced by a small group known as Alternare (from the Latin for
alternative), the increasingly popular stoves are just one part of a quiet
revolution to teach rural farmers how to tread more lightly in this delicate
environment.

Working in eight different poor, rural communities around the butterfly's
roosting grounds and with nearly no talk of monarchs, Alternare is
succeeding by providing villagers with knowledge they actually want. The
group is teaching farmers how to build a house of longer-lasting adobe using
one tree rather than a faster-decomposing home that requires 25, how to farm
without chemical fertilizers and how to keep this rugged land productive so
farmers need not continually move to newly logged territory. While improving
the farmers' lives, Alternare, by no coincidence, is improving the situation
of the butterflies as well.

"For the butterfly to live you have to have integration with human beings,"
said Guadalupe Del Río, president and co-founder of Alternare along with
fellow biologist and co-founder Ana María Múñiz. "We're proving that this
can be done."

Many are applauding Alternare's efforts, including the United States Fish
and Wildlife Service, which has provided financing for the group since it
began its work five years ago. But there were those, particularly in the
beginning, who had their doubts, including the farmers themselves.

Walking from his now flourishing pumpkin fields to his huge composting pit,
dressed in a Coca-Cola T-shirt and cowboy hat, Santos Espinoza speaks
earnestly.

"I wasn't sure at first," he said, referring to Alternare's suggestion to
switch from the standard half ton of chemical fertilizers on every acre of
farmland to the untested novelty of using compost made from what he used to
burn as garbage ‹ corn stalks, grass, horse manure, leftovers. "We didn't
see any difference in the first two years."

Mr. Espinoza had reason for concern. Here, in the Chivati-Huacal monarch
sanctuary, one of the most severely devastated of the monarch roosting
areas, government programs and international groups have arrived with great
fanfare to dictate to these subsistence farmers how they should and
shouldn't live for the good of the world's beloved monarch. Over the years,
these communities, many of which own land in the reserve, have had their
logging rights eliminated or drastically reduced.

"They think they have been really discriminated against and that people are
more concerned about butterflies than them," Mrs. Del Río of Alternare said.
"People here are tired of others telling them what to do."

So the founders, two Mexican biologists, teamed with Gabriel Sánchez and his
wife, Elia Hernández, farmers who shared the women's vision but who could
prove, on their own land, that implausible ideas ‹ like having one family
live on the harvests of just two and a half acres ‹ were possible.

Now Mr. Espinoza speaks like a convert. "Now the plants are stronger and
give more fruit," he said, running his hands through his compost. "I'm
completely convinced that the earth needs this nutrition to give more food."

And so it went, in one heartfelt testimonial after another. Farmers working
under Alternare's tutelage explained how they were taking simple steps to
improve their farms and their lives.

"We couldn't grow anything here before," said Perfecto Espinoza, yanking a
huge beet from his garden. "It was pure rocks." Now his land bursts with
color, as do other gardens in this village where monocultures and fallow
fields are being replaced by broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, cilantro,
garlic, radish, onions and the all-important chiles.

"Before, the fields were corn, corn, corn," said Mrs. Del Río. "Nutrition
here has been really bad."

Two women display herbal medicines they are learning to make: eucalyptus
leaves and lime rind for coughs and a fever-reducing medicinal made from a
plant called cow's tongue. Erasmo Cortes, who has recently built himself a
new adobe house, gives a tour of his rustic nursery in which he is raising
seedlings of native trees to reforest around his home and which villagers
plan, in the future, to use to reforest the protected areas of the butterfly
sanctuaries.

Another man explains how he learned to enclose his chickens and cows, making
it possible for him to locate his animals easily and to collect valuable
eggs and manure. Others point out how they now dig canals and terrace the
land to prevent erosion and preserve the soils. And all around there is
great excitement about toilets ‹ a novelty here ‹ soon to be brought by
Alternare. These special devices separate solid from liquid waste and allow
collection of both to be used, ultimately, as fertilizer for the soils.

The farmers are used to discussing their work. Once people have been trained
in particular techniques or skills, they begin training others, in the
farmer-to-farmer method of conversion which has worked so well for
Alternare.

Despite the local enthusiasm, Alternare has its detractors, some of whom
complain that the work is not really about butterflies.

"Some people say this is social development," said Mrs. Del Río, shaking her
head. "No, this is conservation."

She insists that every step, whether as indirect as teaching farmers to
organize so they can work together more effectively or as direct as teaching
reforestation, makes the farmers less dependent on cutting the forest to
make their way.

Then there are those who worry that Alternare's process of changing rural
traditions one farmer at a time moves too slowly to save the forests of the
monarch butterfly. One study found that in the last 30 years, nearly half
the intact forest in the wintering areas had been degraded or destroyed.

Mrs. Del Río acknowledged that Alternare did struggle even to move at its
slow pace. The group only recently was able to patch together enough funds
to buy a reliable truck, critical for reaching one remote village after
another on these rugged roads. And Alternare does need to extend its reach.
Organizations within Mexico and from other countries, including Guatemala,
have asked to be trained in Alternare's methods, but without a training
center that has been impossible.

Despite the pace, Mrs. Del Río, who is trying to raise $150,000 to build a
training center, said she believed there was no other way.

"No law can change these things," she said of ending the logging. "You can't
conserve anything if you don't have enough to eat."

At the end of the day, in the dining room of one of the newly built adobe
houses, a group of farmers sits down at a rough wood table to a feast of
chicken, spicy green salsa and freshly cooked tortillas, all the work of
their own hands using farming methods recently put into place and all piping
hot off a new wood-burning stove.

But as distractingly fine as the food is, the ecological significance of the
meal is not lost on these men and women. Mrs. Isidoro, speaking of the
fruits of their labors laid out before them, said, "We're protecting the
forest."