The Ban and the Gas Bottle
In 1967 the Dominican Republic banned commercial logging outright, closed the sawmills and handed enforcement to the armed forces. The forest has come back since — but the decision that did most of the work was a subsidy on bottled cooking gas, and a subsidy has to be paid for every month for ever.
The road from Bonao to Constanza climbs through cloud forest to a pass at Casabito, and then the vegetation changes character: tree ferns give way to Hispaniolan pine, straight-trunked and open-canopied, standing in grass. Keep going south from Constanza into Valle Nuevo and the pine goes on for tens of kilometres over ground above two thousand metres, where the puddles freeze at night and the lowest air temperatures ever recorded in the Caribbean were taken. It looks like the least tropical landscape imaginable and it is, botanically, the most local thing on the island — Pinus occidentalis, a pine that grows wild nowhere on earth except Hispaniola.
It also very nearly went. By the middle of the twentieth century Dominican forest was being cut for construction timber, for railway sleepers, for the sugar mills, and above all for charcoal, which is what most of the country cooked on. The usual figure quoted for what was left by the early 1980s is around a tenth of the national territory. Today official and FAO figures put forest cover above forty per cent. Part of that gap is genuine regrowth and part of it is a change in what gets counted as forest, and it is worth being clear about both, because the recovery is real and the number is softer than it looks.
Law 206, and the soldiers
In 1967 the government of Joaquín Balaguer enacted Law 206, the veda forestal — a blanket prohibition on commercial logging. Sawmills were closed, not licensed. The country stopped producing its own construction timber almost overnight and has imported most of what it uses ever since, largely from the United States and Chile. Enforcement was not given to a forestry service; it was given to the armed forces, and it was carried out the way soldiers carry things out. Forest guards shot people. Peasant farmers who cleared a hillside for conuco plots found themselves treated as criminals by a state that had never offered them another way to hold land. The ban worked, and it worked because it was violent, and both of those sentences are part of the record.
The other half of the policy
A logging ban stops timber leaving the forest. It does nothing about the reason most of the wood was leaving, which was that households needed to boil a pot twice a day and charcoal was what they could afford. Charcoal is made from small trees, in the informal economy, by people with no alternative income, and no amount of enforcement removes the demand. So the state went after the demand instead. From the 1970s onward the Dominican Republic subsidised liquefied petroleum gas heavily and consistently, and pushed the bottle into kitchens — first in the cities, then everywhere. The overwhelming majority of Dominican households now cook on propane. The change was slow, it was expensive, and it did more to keep trees standing than the veda ever did on its own.
A logging ban is half a policy. The other half is what people cook on — and unlike a ban, which costs a signature, that half has to be bought every month, for ever.
Who pays for the bottle
Subsidising a fuel is easy to start and very hard to stop, and the Dominican bill grew into one of the largest single items of discretionary public spending in the country. It also went overwhelmingly to people who did not need it, because a universal price subsidy is claimed by everyone who buys the product, and the households buying the most gas were not the poorest. From 2008 the state began replacing the blanket subsidy with a targeted transfer — Bonogas, paid onto the same social card the government uses for food assistance, so that the money follows the household rather than the commodity. The design is textbook and the politics of it are not: a targeted subsidy has a list, and being off the list is a thing people can shout about, which is why the transition has been partial and repeatedly renegotiated.
The same cheap gas produced a second effect nobody planned. When fuel prices rose in the 2000s, Dominican drivers converted their cars to run on it — the conversion kit is inexpensive and the price gap at the pump was large — and the country ended up with one of the highest rates of LPG road use in the hemisphere, and a second class of subsidy claimant with a lobby of its own. The policy that saved the pine forests is now also a transport fuel policy, which was never the intention and is now impossible to unpick.
The park with farms inside it
Institutionally the forest passed out of military hands in 2000, when Law 64-00 created a state environment secretariat — a full ministry from 2010 — and consolidated forestry, parks and water under it; Sectoral Law 202-04 four years later fixed the list of protected areas, which on paper now covers roughly a quarter of the country. Paper is the operative word in places, and Valle Nuevo is the clearest example. The valley was protected as a scientific reserve in 1983 and became a national park in the 1990s, and farmers went on growing potatoes, garlic and greenhouse vegetables inside it for decades, on some of the best cool-climate soil in the Caribbean, with irrigation drawn from the headwaters of rivers that supply half the country.
In 2016 the government ordered them out. Greenhouses came down, plots were cleared, and the state offered compensation and land elsewhere — which some families received and others still dispute. The pine is regenerating on the cleared ground and the streams have run cleaner since, and the people who lost a livelihood in a valley where their parents farmed do not find that a complete answer. Conservation in a country this densely settled is not a choice between forest and nothing. It is a choice about who absorbs the cost, and in Valle Nuevo it was absorbed by a few hundred households.
What the number does not say
The other thing that regrew the forest was not policy at all. Dominicans left the countryside — for Santo Domingo and Santiago, for the tourist coast, and for New York, whose remittances now underwrite a large number of rural households that no longer farm. Sugar collapsed as an employer. Marginal hillside plots were abandoned and pine and broadleaf came back over them without anyone deciding anything. Economists call this a forest transition and it has happened in Costa Rica, in Puerto Rico and across southern Europe; it is what the Dominican statistics are partly measuring, and it means the recovery rests on a demographic movement that could in principle reverse.
The pressure has not gone away either, it has changed shape. Charcoal is still made in the drier south-west and some of it crosses the border. Cattle and avocado keep pushing at the edges of the Sierra de Bahoruco. When Congress voted in 2014 to turn Loma Miranda — a ridge that happens to sit on a nickel deposit — into a national park, the president sent the bill back, and it took a later law to create the park at all. The Dominican Republic is one of the few tropical countries that can show a forest gaining ground rather than losing it, and it got there by banning one thing outright and quietly paying for the substitute for fifty years. The ban was the famous half. The bottle was the expensive one.