Fueling new attitudes towards conservation.

High in the Montecristo massif the territories of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras come together at a point called Trifinio. Around this point, in an area over 2,700 square miles, lies one of Central America's major cloud forests, harboring a rich variety of endemic species of flora and fauna. The massif also contains mixed forests of pine and oak, as well as tropical and subtropical species.

The Trifinio region supports a rural, agricultural population of some 600,000. Over the years, as the growth of the local population put increasing pressure on natural areas, the governments of the region became concerned with conserving the dwindling forest while offering inhabitants opportunities to support their families without extracting increasingly scarce forest resources.

In 1986, with the technical cooperation of the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA), the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras developed the Trifinio Plan. This unique, trinational plan, financed by the five signatories and the European Economic Community, led the three countries to establish in 1987 La Fraternidad Biosphere Reserve as the areas' protected nucleus.

One of the most important elements shaping the Trifinio Plan was the need for action in the energy sector. In response, the government of Finland, through the Finnish International Development Agency (FINNIDA), contributed US$1.4 million to support the Program for Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection, which is executed by the OAS Department of Regional Development and Environment. This plan seeks to strengthen the local institutional capacity to rationalize energy supply and manage renewable national resources.

In the Trifinio region, almost all rural housewives and many of those living in the towns use firewood for cooking over rudimentary open stoves. This method of burning firewood is very inefficient because most of the heat generated by combustion is lost into the air. The average rural family uses approximately 9 cubic yards of firewood per year. As a result, the approximately 100,000 rural families who live in the Trifinio region use about 915,000 cubic yards of firewood, leading to the loss of almost 15,000 acres of forest every year.

A longstanding and widespread practice involves slashing and burning the forest to clear the land in order to raise grains, which are the major source of food and income for farmers...