ACA Supports Indigenous Land Claim in Bolivia

December 22, 2008

In October 2008, ACA embarked on the final stage of our project to map all the Brazil nut stands in the northern territory of the indigenous Tacana. The tree census in the Bolivian Amazon is intended to support the Tacana petition for government recognition of their territorial land claim, known as a TCO in Bolivia.

Mapping activities and territorial management planning began in 2007, when ACA began work in the Puerto Pérez and El Tigre areas of Bolivia. Since then, much of the mapping has been conducted by CIPTA (Consejo Indígena del Pueblo Tacana), the Tacana People’s Council.

The data collected in this project will be used as the basis for natural resource management plans for the new TCO. These data will also be used to produce new knowledge about distribution of Brazil nut forests, nut production, harvesting dynamics, and growth rate.

Tacana TCO II History: Several years ago, CIPTA made a land claim in the Bolivian state of La Paz, known as TCO Tacana II, on behalf of four Tacana communities: Puerto Pérez, Las Mercedes, Toromonas, and El Tigre. However, since the TCO system requires indigenous petitioners to both prove that they actively use the natural resources within the land claim and create a natural resource management plan for the area, the claim was put on hold. Then, in April 2007, ACA began mapping locations of productive Brazil nut trees in the TCO to support the petition. By the end of 2007, researchers had completed a census of Brazil nut forests in Puerto Pérez and El Tigre. Between June and July 2008, they finished the Brazil nut census in Las Mercedes. So far a total of 13,019 Brazil nut trees have been mapped.