Reforming Forests: From Community Forests to Corporate Forestry in Mexico

The announcement that the reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution and a new agrarian law would open ejido lands to private investment and ownership launched a tumultuous wave of comments and criticisms that has not receded to date. Most of the debate has focused on the impact on the ejido as the reservoir of rural labor, producer of agricultural commodities and livestock, and bearer of ancient Mexican rural traditions. Despite this relative lack of attention, forests have actually been the subject of an unusual amount of legislative attention over the past decade. The last major overhauling of forestry law was carried out comparatively recently, in 1986, and was the first new forestry law since 1961. The 1986 law had been intended to codify a decade of efforts to establish a community forest sector in Mexico. In 1992, just six years later, the combination of reforms to Article 27, the new agrarian law, and a new forestry law radically changed the legal framework and overwrote many of the advances made in community forestry. These herculean legislative efforts, for all their complexity, have two overriding goals: to open ejido forestlands to investment, and to develop a plantation sector within the Mexican forest products economy. ¹