Can Butterflies Save Mexico’s Rain Forest?

(http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/columns/americas/950919-butterflies.html)

A butterfly project in Mexico’s endangered rain forest typifies the small-scale projects designed to create alternatives to cattle ranching and logging. In one poor town deep within the jungle, butterflies have transformed how residents view the jungle.

As dusk settles on this town deep in the Mexican jungle, butterflies dance along the river bank and the town erupts in hot pursuit.

Moises Vazquez Cruz, 13, stalks the jungle around his family farm. Domitila Santos Flores hunts them with her three daughters. Nicodemus Cruz, a 65-year old corn farmer with aching knees, nabs any butterfly unfortunate enough to land near his home.

“The whole town is crazy for butterflies,” says Cruz. “I hope we never run out.”

What has captured the town’s imagination is not so much the colorful insects themselves as the cold cash shelled out by biologist Roberto Ruiz who comes each week to buy them. In the last nine months, Ruiz has spent $20,000 for the butterflies. The insects are shipped to Mexico City where they are carefully catalogued, warehoused and eventually sold to museums and international collectors.

The controversial project is part of a last ditch effort to save what remains of Mexico’s tropical rain forest. In the last three decades the Lacandon jungle, in Mexico’s southeastern corner, has been reduced from about 3 million hectares to less than 600,000. Montes Azules S.A., the company which markets the butterflies, hopes to develop a series of small scale projects designed to give poor residents an alternative to logging and cattle ranching.

“The jungle has no future,” says environmentalist Homero Aridjis, head of the environmental Group of 100 in Mexico City. “The oil companies, the Zapatistas, the loggers — everyone wants a piece of it.”

Montes Azules, S.A., the company behind the butterfly project, is considering other small scale projects including producing perfume from a jungle fruit. The butterfly project is unique, however, because it challenges one of the cardinal assumptions of conservation — that rare species should be untouchable. The project’s designers argue that a much greater threat to the insects is the destruction of their habitat. They are killing a few butterflies in order to save many.

The income generated from capturing butterflies has helped change the perception of the jungle in the town of Chajul. Many families take in between $25 and $200 a month — a substantial amount in this town with no plumbing or electricity.

Ricardo Biseco’s teenaged son convinced his father he could make more money collecting butterflies than cattle ranching, so Biseco decided not to clear more jungle land.

To participate in the butterfly project, the town agreed to set 120 hectares of jungle aside as a community reserve.