From a former member of the CI board.

• Author: Albright, Adam
• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

As a former board member of Conservation International, I read with interest Mac Chapin's article on the difficulties that the large international NGOs seem to be having in reconciling their interests in biodiversity preservation with those of the local indigenous tribes.

While much of what Dr. Chapin writes could be discounted as his personal opinions, there was one statistic that jumped out at me as being quite objectively verifiable: that while the guidelines of CI's Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund stipulates that at least 50 percent of its grants be made to small independent organizations working in the field, in the first two years of CEPF's Latin American program only 22 percent were, with many of those grants going to CI spinoffs. As this statistic was derived from CEPF's annual report it does seem quite solid, and therefore worrisome.

My own experience with CI is that while it marshals a tremendous amount of muscle to...