Landowners have a right to plant the highly profitable trees, though the plantings need to be regulated, he said.
In the 1980s, landowners rushed to cut down the native, diversified forest and then to tout "reforestation" bonds to finance monoculture plantations of non-native but more profitable trees such as teak to naive foreign investors or indeed tourists.In April, the environment minister, Rene Castro Salazar, said Costa Rica's forests were no longer shrinking, indeed their area had increased.
And it is getting thirstier, as profitable fruit trees and vines have replaced other crops.
But plantation forestry can be as profitable as chopping trees from virgin forest, and has the obvious advantage that growers can choose which species to cultivate.
In general, some 85% of deforestation takes place within 50km of a road, because a road makes it more profitable to fell trees, first for timber and then for pasture, the biggest contributor to the denuding of the forest.
Also long-term silvicultural trials support the conclusion than diameter limit cutting is more profitable than single-tree selection.
The Trees of Hope project began in 2007 to make tree farming profitable for farmers, by providing them with income to plant and manage trees.
It might be more profitable to release the understorey trees instead of clearcutting all trees and establishing a new stand by planting.
The law also made industrial tree plantations more profitable by privatizing large swaths of public lands and eliminating taxes on both the land and the products coming from these areas (Aylwin 2000; Montalba Navarro et al. 2005).
For a century after its arrival, American agricultural experts attempted to coax a profitable crop out of the carob tree, which seemed to flourish in the Southwest.
