Land Reform In Bolivia: The Forestry Question

In this paper we discuss forestry issues related to land reform in Bolivia. We find that although the current land reform satisfies most of the conditions necessary for adequately addressing development issues in the agrarian sector, it does not deal with many challenges related to forest management, and in fact contains provisions conflicting with the objectives of sustainable forest management. Given that a large part of the land being titled is actually forest land, omissions of, and conflicts with, the objectives of sustainable forest management are critical, and may have harmful ramifications for the preservation of forest resources as well as poverty reduction within forest-dependent communities.