The Maya Golden Landscape in southern Belize is a patchwork of protected areas, agricultural lands and small communities, part of the greater Maya Forest, the second-largest tropical forest in the Americas, after the Amazon. It’s a haven for predators like jaguars (Panthera onca) and pumas (Puma concolor), and threatened species like Baird’s tapirs (Tapirus bairdii) and harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja), among countless others. Yet this landscape, like so many others in the tropics, is under continuous pressure. Land managers have had to balance the needs of biodiversity with those of the communities living here. And they’ve turned to cacao, a traditional Maya crop still widely cultivated for home consumption — and the raw ingredient for chocolate — as part of the answer. Belize’s first agroforestry concession The Maya Golden Landscape spans 300,000 hectares (about 741,000 acres); nearly an eighth of this area is dedicated to Maya Mountain North Forest Reserve, a type of protected zone where limited extractive activities are permitted. The reserve was established in 1997, and initially faced the same pressure that besets much of the area: the encroachment of banana and citrus plantations, poaching, and illegal logging, especially along its southern border. Portions of the reserve were stripped of their protected status in subsequent years, but the problems persisted. In 2012, a group of farmers from the nearby community of Trio, along with the nonprofit Ya’axché Conservation Trust, proposed agroforestry as a way to reconcile the needs of communities and conservation. The farmers wanted to cultivate cacao,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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