USE-VALUES OF TREE SPECIES IN A COMMUNAL FOREST RESERVE IN NORTHEAST PERU

Several rural villages in the department of Loreto, in northeast Peru, have sought to protect local control over access to natural resources by establishing communal reserves. Most of Loreto's villages have heterogeneous populations of detribalized Indians and mestizos, called riberenos (people of the riverbanks). The communal reserves of ribereno villages currently have no legal status, but are regulated by written communal rules and are actively guarded by community members. An inventory of trees greater than 10 cm in diameter was conducted in one ribereno communal reserve, a fifty-year-old secondary forest. A doubly random sampling procedure was used, producing a total sample size of 7.5 ha. Tree species utilized by community members were found to comprise 60% of the total number of species sampled. Uses were divided into six categories: food, construction, craft, remedy, commerce, and other, "use-values" were assigned to each species, based on an ordinal system developed by Prance et al. (1987). The presence or absence of markets for specific forest products was found to be a major determinant of the species' overall use-value to ribereno populations. Neither the existing markets nor the lack of firm land or resource tenure for ribereno communal reserves encourages sustained management of forest resources.