Parklands in Costa Rica help reduce poverty

Entrance to Tortuguero National Park

A recently released report from Georgia State University gives us yet another reason to protect the rainforest: parklands, it turns out, can also help with economic development.

Studying data from Costa Rica and Thailand, researchers concluded that national parks in developing countries can actually help to reduce poverty in the areas surrounding the preserves.

“The effect of national parks and reserves on their human neighbors is arguably the most controversial debate in conservation policy,” says the new study, “Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand” released in April 2010. The debate is especially heated in developing nations, where ecosytem preservation and economic development are often seen as at odds.

“Because ecosystem protection limits agricultural development and exploitation of natural resources,” says the report, “opposition to protected areas is frequently driven by the assumption that they impose large economic costs and thus exacerbate local poverty.”

And while the researchers found that people living near national parks were indeed on the whole poorer than the national average, careful analysis of census data revealed that the poverty wasn’t a result of land preservation, which in fact often “generates economic benefits by…promoting tourism and improving infrastructure in remote areas.”

In the graphic below (courtesy of the report), protected areas created before 1980 are in green (these were the areas that the report studied). The relative poverty levels throughout Costa Rica are shown, with pink being the richest and dark red the poorest. The diagram makes use of data from 1973; the report compared that to economic data from 2000.

Apart from the effect of protected areas on poverty, the map is interesting to me in that it shows where Costa Rica’s wealth is (or was) concentrated: in the Central Valley around the capital city of San Jose, which is to be expected, but also in pockets around the country, like near Palmar Norte and Palmar Sur (north of the Osa Peninsula), near Cuidad Neily and Paso Canoas (near the Panama border), around Liberia in Guanacaste, and along the Pacific Coast between Jaco and Dominical. I would imagine that an updated map would show even more wealth along Guanacaste’s “Gold Coast” – where in beach towns like Tamarindo and Playas del Coco development is moving along at breakneck speed.

Here are some maps of Costa Rica with cities and towns marked, if you want to compare them to the map below.

Green means protected parklands; light pink means wealth, dark red poverty.

See also:
Boom town greed and condo ghost towns in Playas del Coco

Expat residents must now enroll in Costa Rica’s medical system: So how is it? Four views

A public hospital in San José, Costa Rica

With the new immigration reforms that go into effect in Costa Rica next week, it looks like expats who are legal residents in Costa Rica must enroll in the national healthcare system,  the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social. Known  as the Caja, the system gives its members low-cost access to neighborhood clinics, pharmacies, and public hospitals.

Some Costa Rica expats are satisfied with Caja (public) care; others are most definitely not.

Visit Miss Move Abroad to read one whole-hearted and one half-hearted endorsement of the Caja, and two accounts of what can only be termed ordeals at public hospitals.

Costa Rica elects female President

Yesterday Costa Ricans went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected Laura Chinchilla president for the next 4 years. Chinchilla, who was Vice President in the current administration of Oscar Arias, resigned that post so she could run for president.

She ran a campaign that declared her “firme y honesta” — firm and honest — and promised more doctors in the state-run medical clinics and more police officers on the streets. She is a social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortions.

She won 47 per cent of the vote; Otton Solis from the Citizen Action party and Otto Guevara from the Libertarian Movement party conceded defeat with 24 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.

Chinchilla, 50, is married with one teenaged son. She will take office in May, becoming Costa Rica’s first female president and Latin America’s fifth in the last two decades. The other four are Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who was elected in 2007, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, elected in 2006, Panama’s Mireya Moscoso, elected in 1999, and Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro, elected in 1990.

Click here for election photos.

Boom time greed and condo ghost towns in Playas del Coco

Rick Vogel, the genial host at Rancho Armadillo in Playas del Coco, is a good natured guy. But he pulls no punches when describing what’s going on in his adopted town and country.

“Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered,” he says, speaking of boom time greed in Coco.

Boom time became bust time a few years ago. Bruce Hammond of Better Homes Realty in Playas del Coco said that as far as he could see, the downturn here started in July of 2008 but by October of that year it was like “someone hit the ‘off’ switch.” Almost $3 billion of planned development was put on hold.

But back in the days of sky’s-the-limit condo flipping there were realtors, says Rick, who pulled some pretty hoggish stunts. Like selling a piece of property they knew didn’t have access to water and never would, not once but multiple times, as each new buyer discovered that he could build his dream home but his dream faucets would always be dry.

“We’re in a desert here,” said Rick. “The problem is water.” I’ve been hearing that sentiment everywhere I go in Costa Rica, from the ‘cielo roto’ (broken sky) valleys where it rains almost all the time, to the dry Guanacaste coast, even hotter and drier since swaths of the coastal dry forests have been cut down.

Another trick he saw was that a realtor would sell a local property for, say, $200,000, get a $50,000 deposit, use that $50,000 to buy the property from the Tico owners, then pocket the remaining $150,000.

These are not local Tico realtors, but foreigners with the imprimatur of multinational realty companies on their business cards. (I learned that you pay maybe $25,000 for a franchise and that you get pretty much nothing but the name).

Many condo projects in Costa Rica ground to a halt when the world economy took a nosedive

Playas del Coco has dozens of condo projects that started up years ago and now languish half-completed, rebar ladders rusting and cement foundations crumbling before they’re even built on. One huge construction crane visible in a development up the hill hasn’t moved, say the locals, for at least a year.

Many condos were sold in pre-construction, and some of those condos still haven’t been built. I met an African-American man from Louisiana (I comment on his race because most U.S. expats I meet are white) in line at the ATM.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“For better or worse,” he said, “I guess I do. Or I’m trying.”

He’d bought a pre-construction condo from Mapache and, four years later, it still wasn’t built. I don’t think Mapache is the only developer not delivering. The building of these mammoth complexes goes in phases, with continued construction funded by condo sales. When the world economic downturn put a huge dent in sales, much construction ground to a halt.

We talked to a Tica who ran a bar in Paraiso (near Playa Negra) who said many of the locals are out of work because all the developments that were employing them as builders or watchmen or cooks for the workers are ‘parado’ – stopped.

Like they say, when the United States sneezes, Costa Rica gets pneumonia.

If you want to look for a silver lining, it might be that in this climate it’s a buyer’s market. But as always, buyer beware.

Photos by David Webster Smith

La Ruta del Agua: tourism initiative to promote Nicaragua’s southern waterways

The boat is king on Nicaragua's Rio San Juan--even this one, with a 1-cylinder Lister engine

Navigating the Rio San Juan in Southern Nicaragua today, you won’t see much traffic. There are the local fisherman, a few sportfishermen, and the small boats that ferry local residents from very isolated towns to marginally less isolated ones.

But in centuries past, the river was a busy thoroughfare. Spanish conquistadors sailed upriver to Lake Nicaragua and settled the rich colonial city of Granada. Pirates made the same trip to plunder the wealth of what became the richest colonial territory in Central America. And in the mid-1800s, up to 10,000 people a year took the Nicaragua shortcut from the East Coast of the U.S. to the California Gold Rush, avoiding the long sail around the tip of South America. (Travelers also used Panama as a cut-off point, though the canal wasn’t yet built.)

Frank Ochomogo, local project director of the Ruta del Agua tourist initiative

Frank Ochomogo, local Project Director of a $14,720 million tourism initiative they’re calling “La Ruta del Agua,” would like to see the river regain some its former traffic, but this time from travelers who come for the nature, culture, sportfishing, and adventure rather than for the plunder or the quickest route to somewhere else.

I had breakfast with Frank in early December at Philippe Tisseaux’s Esquina del Lago lodge, and he explained that the initiative intends to develop tourism and infrastructure in the area of Southern Nicaragua defined by three bodies of water: The Caribbean Sea, the Rio San Juan, and Lake Nicaragua. The money for the project comes from a loan for the Interamerican Bank.

Although the project is on the books as a tourism development initiative, one of its major components—the improvement of infrastructure—will benefit local residents at least as much as tourists. Right now, the road from Managua to San Carlos—at 15,000 people, one of the bigger towns in the area—is only 300 km, but take up to 15 hours on the bus because the poor state of the road.

“We’re putting our house in order,” says Frank. “So that we can invite people in.”

Diving off the new San Carlos dock

The bulk of the money ($12 of the almost $15 million) is slated for infrastructure improvement. Besides road repairs, there are 11 new docks planned in communities throughout the Ruta del Agua area, and 8 new immigration posts to be built, each at the juncture of the San Juan and another river that feeds into it.

The entire waterfront area of San Carlos has already received a major face lift, with a new dock, a riverside promenade, a new immigration post under construction, and even a brand-new ATM machine that, marvels Tisseaux, “actually works and actually has money in it! That’s huge, you have no idea.”  There is also a bridge planned from Costa Rica to Nicaragua—from Santa Fe, they told me, though I couldn’t find that town on any map and couldn’t picture where a bridge connecting the two countries would go.

Smaller pieces of the funding pie will go to promotion and low-interest loans to local tourism-related businesses so that they can expand their capacity.

A tributary of the Rio San Juan near the Costa Rica / Nicaragua border

The Ruta del Agua area is rife with nature reserves–Guatuso, Vida Silvestre San Juan, and Indo Maiz—and cultural and historical treasures like the Solentiname Archipeligo, known for its painters and artisans, and El Castillo, a Spanish fort built in 1675 to guard against pirates.

Tisseaux, French-born and now a Nicaraguan resident, helps sportfishermen chase town the river’s mammoth tarpon. He also does a lot of reading about the history of his adopted country. “About 100,000 people came up the Rio San Juan on their way from the eastern United States to the Gold Rush in California,” he says.  “That means that a good portion of people descended from the 49ers had a relative that passed through the area.”

One of the travelers who made the trip was Mark Twain, who described the area as consisting of “dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion of vine work.”

All photos by David W. Smith.

Fuentes Verdes: Keeping Lake Arenal blue, the lakeside green, and developers honest

Unfinished condo project near Lake Arenal, Costa Rica

“We’re not the ugly police,” says Ed Yurica, president of Fuentes Verdes, an environmental watchdog group in the Lake Arenal area of Costa Rica. “What we’re about is water. No one gets to mess with our water.”

He and Sandra Shaw Homer (the former president of Fuentes Verdes) are catching me up on all the new development in the area. We’re talking about a local condo project that is an undeniable eyesore, reminding me of an unfinished cell block with killer views of the lake. But the project’s aesthetics are not  the problem, Ed and Sandy tell me.

“They have no water,” says Ed. “Can you imagine—hundreds of supposedly high-end condos and they haven’t secured water rights?”

Fuentes Verdes sees projects like this one all the time, and they try to bring any permitting or environmental problems to the attention of the local officials or, if necessary, national institutions, who aren’t always vigilant in policing big developers.

Through an outsider’s eyes, the land around lovely Lake Arenal looks mostly unspoiled. But Ed and Sandy aren’t outsiders. Ed, 59, is medio-Tico (half Costa Rican): his grandfather was a founding father of Tilaran, a town just west of the lake. Then his mother went and married a gringo and Ed lived in Seattle for a long while, so he’s also norteAmericano, with the accent and the “terrible Spanish” (he claims) to prove it.  Sandy, in her early sixties and originally from the East Coast of the U.S., has lived on the lake for two decades, speaks Spanish very well, and has become more and more prone to fits of rage, she half-jokes, when she sees yet another foreign developer come in and think he can run roughshod over local laws and over the land itself.

Two situations in particular are sticking in Fuentes Verdes’ collective craw, and they stand for the dozens of other affronts to the land and culture that are visited on this area every year.

So many condos, so little (legal) water

The first is the unfinished cellblock of 315 condos going by the name of Maleku, perched on a ravaged hillside above the lake’s northwest shore. Ironically, they’ve appropriated the name of a nearby indigenous tribe (the Maleku), perhaps to make the project seem native to Costa Rica. The developer is from Canada.

“They had to cut away half of a mountainside before they could start the building,” says Sandy, which caused some erosion problems during building and is likely to cause more.  But an even bigger problem is that the project has no water.”

The project started well enough.  SETENA (part of MINAE, the Ministry in charge of how building projects affect the environment) approved the project’s Environmental Impact Study (required of projects here in Costa Rica since 1995). And the project secured a building permit from the local municipality. But one of the trickiest things, even in this country where, during the wet season,  rain-swollen rivers wash out bridges and (on a more positive note) heavy rains create the opportunity for hydroelectric power, is making sure there’s a reliable source of clean water for any new development, a source that doesn’t threaten the supply of nearby communities.

Developers either negotiate directly with AYA, the national water company, or (more commonly) they make a deal with the local ASADAs, water committees that are the only organizations legally allowed to provide a hookup to a locally-controlled water supply. ASADAs tap springs or other water sources, create the infrastructure to deliver that water to people and businesses, and then regulate the delivery of that water.

“Local ASADAs are getting smart,” says Sandy. “They know they have a valuable commodity. Often they’ll negotiate with developers, saying, ‘Ok, you build a certain amount of infrastructure, and pay this much for the water, and we’ll have a deal.’ But it can take a long time to come up with a workable solution.”

Apparently the developers of Maluku didn’t want to wait or go through the proper channels. Rumor has it that they’re buying water from a local farmer. But it’s illegal in  Costa Rica for an individual to sell water—water rights are sacrosanct, with a healthy environment actually guaranteed by the constitution—and water must be regulated by the appropriate national or local water board.

Another problem with the Maleku development is density. “The typical project around the lake,” says Sandy, “is a gated community of many large lots. These have their own problems, but with a high-density project the potential problems escalate exponentially.”

Supermarket in Tilaran draining its waste into the town aquafier

Pali supermarket in Tilaran was set to drill down into the town's aquafier to drain their waste water.

Pali is a national supermarket chain that has stores all of Costa Rica, including on the middle of Tilaran. Recently it set up an extensive drilling rig in its parking lot. “Supposedly the idea,” writes Ed Yurika in a recent Fuentes Verdes email newsletter, “was to dig a hole to put their aquas residuales in. Now if I have this right those are the waste fluids that come from washing down their butcher shop and vegetables and floors and whatever else they clean.”

So why is that a problem?

“Tilaran is essentially built over a lot of water,” writes Ed. “The aquifer below is extensive. So if one perforates this aquifer and dumps aquas residuales down that hole, I would ask what happens to the water supply of Tilaran?”

What, indeed? Check with Fuentes Verdes to see how both these stories will end.

Two more bridges shut down yesterday

Heavy rains swelled the Rio Nandayure near Route 902 in Guanacaste, damaging the base of the bridge. Photo by Julio Pena, La Nacion

Yesterday, reports La Nacion, two other bridges were shut down due to structural damages, stranding townspeople who rely on the bridges to get them to the main highways.

One of the bridges is over the Burro River, on the road between San Ramon and Tres Esquinas de La Fortuna. The other bridge is over the Nandayure River in Guanacaste province, resulting in the inhabitants of Zapotal and Bejuco being cut off from the larger nearby town of Carmona. Apparently there is a rough alternative route between the towns that requires a 4 x 4 vehicle. No one was hurt when these bridge collapsed.

Bridge collapses on Osa Peninsula—and it’s not the first

Many of Costa Rica's bridges make you wonder if it'd be better to swim. Photo from emmacarson.com

Just when I thought it was safe to get back on the road, a bridge over the Río Rincón in Puerto Jiménez, on the Osa Peninsula, collapsed on Friday (11/6) when a 95-ton crane attempted to cross it.

The Osa Peninsula, home to Corcovado National Park and deemed by National Geographic Magazine “the most biologically intense place on earth,” is a popular tourist destination for intrepid travelers.

According to La Nación (the country’s Spanish-language daily), the 50-year-old bridge was only meant to support only 35 tons.

Luckily, no one was hurt. But Dios mio! How’m I gonna get to Puerto Jimenez?

Or around the rest of the country, for that matter.

School bus plummets into river

About two weeks ago, on October 22, a bridge in Turrubares (a canton in the province of San José) collapsed and a school bus carrying 38 passengers plunged into the Tárcoles River. Five people were killed. The Turrubares collapse lead to serious questions about the Public Works and Transport Ministry’s competence to maintain bridges and forced the resignation of ministry head Karla González.

The National Emergency Commission (CNE) has declared a “red alert” over the state of bridges in Costa Rica, but engineers have an uphill battle figuring out which bridges to repair first.

Necessary tools for  bridge repair: Google and YouTube

An article in the November 6 issue of the Tico Times reports that “engineers tasked with identifying dangerous bridges in order to prevent another fatal collapse are resorting to Internet images of Costa Rican bridges uploaded by tourists, such is the inadequacy of the government’s own infrastructure file.

Engineer Guillermo Santana of the University of Costa Rica’s National Laboratory of Materials and Structural Models (LANAMME), says there is no complete record of the country’s bridges and the maintenance they have (or haven’t) received. So the engineers have been “getting help from tourists who have uploaded holiday pictures of Costa Rican bridges onto Google and YouTube.”

LANAMME’s research on 418 of the country’s 1,450 bridges shows that half of the structures are more than 50 years old, while the remaining 40 percent have been in use for more than 30 years. Ninety percent of the bridges were thus considered close to or past their recommended life span.

The 10  bridges deemed “high risk” and which will be repaired first are located above the Río Aranjuez, Río Abangares, Río Azufrado, Río Puerto Nuevo, Río Nuevo, Río Chirripó on Route 32 and Route 4, Río  Sarapiquí, Río Sucio and Río Torre.

This Tico Times map was drawn before the Puerto Jimenez bridge collapsed on Nov 6.