Is community forest-based enterprises sustainable in Amazon?

Since the end of the 1990s, the Brazilian PROMANEJO program (Projeto de Apoio ao Manejo Florestal Sustentável na Amazônia) financed several community forest-based enterprises (CFEs). CFEs are seen as an opportunity for extractivist and farmers interested in investing in forest exploitation instead of forest conversion for agriculture or cattle ranching. In the Brazilian Amazon, forest areas reserved for community management cover around 120 millions hectares and farmers are also allowed to explore their legal forest reserves (80 % of each land property area) or individually or through CFEs scheme. However numerous factors are threatening CFEs. The paper aimed at analyzing these factors and identifying the solutions to guarantee CFEs long term sustainability. Our study is based on a detailed analysis of the socio-economical sustainability of two contrasting case studies of community forest management systems in the Para State. The first case study is an example of forest management system carried out by an association of 6 small farmers in individual property. The second case study represents an example of partnership between a logging company and 80 small family farmers owning in common a 15,000 ha forest area. In contrast with the first case, the elaboration of the forest management plan and the logging operations are under the company responsibility. This study includes the historical analysis of the elaboration, approval procedures and implementation of legal CFEs as well as a detailed cost and benefits analysis of logging operations. Moreover, prospective economic scenarios have been built in order to point out the minimum economic conditions required to make such alternative profitable. The results show several limiting factors affecting the economic sustainability of both systems, the most important being: the complexity of legal procedures for the acceptance of forest management plan (1-2 years), the low price of logs, the high costs of extraction and the duration of rotation cycle (30 years). (Résumé d'auteur