The Political Economy of Peru’s Forest Sector (1990-2010)

This research paper aims to analyse Peru’s forest sector at the macro level within political and economic contexts in which the state and the business sec-tor had a paramount role in changing the forest environment in the Peruvian Amazon Basin. Firstly, the state fostered the inclusion of new forest players into the Peruvian tropical forests, namely, landless peasants and settlers, as a result of agrarian reform implemented in the 1970s that indirectly produced land conflicts between these actors and indigenous communities. Secondly, the promotion of large-scale agriculture development programmes and cattle ranching financed by the World Bank spawned forest loss in the Amazon Ba-sin in the 1980s. Thirdly, neoliberal policies boosted a culture of privatization which reached the natural resources field in the decade of the 1990s. Indeed, the 27308 Forest Law defined forest concessions as a policy mechanism, establishing a set of rules and technical procedures to manage forests. However, this process concentrated forest concessions among powerful timber companies who networked with the largest concessionaires, illegal loggers and corrupt state forest agencies to extract timber, exacerbating deforestation and livelihood conflicts with ancestral tribes in the Peruvian Amazon Basin. This study reveals that timber companies seem to have captured the Peruvian state. Indeed, they control the forest policy-making process, reflected in the way forest legislation enables large timber companies to manage tropical forests while excluding Amazonian tribes. This capture has been facilitated by intrastate conflicts and a lack of coordination and differentiated roles between non-state actors such as grassroots movements, national non-governmental organisations and civil society members, who would otherwise reinforce the state’s role as conservationist and advocate for indigenous communities’ livelihood in the Peruvian Amazon Basin. -- Relevance to Development Studies -- This paper posits that the rights-based access approach, promoted by De Soto as a paramount element of overcoming rural poverty, is of limited use for development in contested spaces like Peruvian tropical forests, where timber companies hold a set of assets including capital, technology, market knowledge and access to authorities to profit from forests in an unsustainable way at the expense of trees and indigenous communities’ livelihoods. It is important to highlight that Peru represents a particular case in which these mechanisms of access have not only conferred them the ability to benefit from forests, but also the power to capture Peru’s forest sector