JAMAICA’S Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park is at risk of losing the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation it earned in 2015 if coffee farmers continue to encroach on the 41,000-hectare spread by burning and cutting down trees across the mountain ridge.

The Jamaica Conservation Development Trust (JCDT), which manages the national park, showed the Jamaica Observer proof of the catastrophic clearing of land at various sections of the park, in places like Cinchona, Exhibition Hill, Monkey Hill, Abbey Green, and Mossmon’s Peak.

“The forest is being cut daily with chainsaws,” JCDT Deputy Chairman Adam Hyde complained.

“And these are not small farmers; these are serious farmers planting coffee. The big coffee farmers will tell you, ‘Oh, we don’t have any control over the small farmers,’ [but] these are the people who, by proxy, plant coffee for them, and sell to them. These are the farmers who are cutting down the forest.

“Each year it’s incremental; it creeps a little further, a little further, a little further into the forest. They light fires and they burn into the cloud forest, into the natural forest. So each year we’re losing more and more of the national park,” Hyde said.

As an example, the JCDT deputy chair spoke to the 600 Blue Mahoe trees planted last July as part of a project to establish a three-row-thick ribbon of trees at the boundary of the national park to make the area distinguishable from the rest of the forest. He said approximately 400 of them have been destroyed by coffee farmers, and the remaining 200 by goats.

The ribbon project is to eventually feature 675,000 trees.

“Back in July, or the end of June, I think, I was taking a team of volunteer scientists from the [United] States, Chatham University to be exact, helping us to work on endangered species, deforestation and general issues that the park is experiencing. We hiked from Honeywell to Cinchona. When we reached Cinchona we realised that there were a lot of fires inside the national park and it’s farmers, coffee farmers, cutting the forest and planting coffee.

“What bauxite mining is to the Cockpit Country is what coffee is to the Blue Mountains. I think that puts it into perspective,” said Hyde.

But the issue is complex, if not thorny.

For starters, the national park, or areas of it, are also referred to as the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve and the Blue Mountain Coffee Zone. It means that three sets of people claim jurisdiction/rights — the JCDT, Government’s Forestry Department, and the coffee farmers whose product appellation is derived from the geographical location that is Blue Mountains.

The national park is spread over 41,198 hectares (101,313 acres) and includes Jamaica’s highest point — Blue Mountain Peak. It has over 15 kilometres (nine miles) of hiking trails, hundreds of flowering plants, countless species of birds, numerous waterfalls, and is one of two places on the island which the largest butterfly in the western hemisphere — the Homerus Swallowtail — calls home.

As far as the coffee zone goes, there are some 7,000 farmers who operate in the area by the Jamaica Agricultural Society’s count.

Its president, Lenworth Fulton, acknowledged that coffee farmers are, in fact, cutting into the national park, but argued that several of them have legal rights to the properties through ownership or long-term leases.

“It’s a bad situation,” he conceded.

“Most of the coffee farmers have been there long before the area was classified as a protected area, and many of them own their lands… Some do have titles for the land. Some of it could be forestry lands, but they would have been on it for generations and would have leases, so that complicates the situation,” Fulton explained.

To his mind, the agencies involved have yet to approach the situation with a view to finding a rational, practicable solution.

“I am all for the environment, but it needs to be addressed in a proper, systematic way. There needs to be a programme to resettle the farmers on another piece of the Blue Mountain area and pay them an amount of money to properly compensate for their loss over a number of years,” Fulton told the Observer Monday evening.

He said the solution could include having some farmers change their crop type.

The world-renowned Blue Mountains and the adjoining John Crow Mountains are iconic Jamaican landmarks. The former home to the Leeward Maroons copped the World Heritage Site designation for natural and cultural heritage and is deemed an area of universal value deserving of special protection.

In an e-mailed response to the Observer, the Forestry Department said it received a report of a forest fire in a section of the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve in late June of this year and started investigations into the circumstances surrounding the blaze. That probe is still ongoing.

“A notice of contravention was served on an individual who was found to be illegally occupying land in close proximity to the area impacted by the fire. The investigations are ongoing as the agency is committed to taking the necessary actions against those who have breached the Forest Act, 1996 and/or Forest Regulations, 2001,” the department said.

It continued: “In the meantime, the agency’s team of forest rangers continues to patrol and monitor all forested areas under our management to ensure the protection and legal use of these resources.”

The JCDT, which is chaired by Lt Cmdr Michael Rodriguez, says time has run out.

“In the meantime, the forest is burning,” Hyde said, voicing impatience.

“UNESCO is concerned about our ability to protect the national park, and we risk losing the status if there is no protection,” he said, adding that other JCDT donors and partners, particularly Jamaica Conservation Partners, which granted the funds through which the 600 border trees were procured and planted, are also concerned.

Donors, he said, are eager to get trees into the ground, and insist that the trust keeps planting more and more trees. But Hyde insists that caring for seedlings until they are mature enough to establish roots and survive on their own takes time, investment, and protection.

Furthermore, he said it is the trust’s position that protecting the existing tree stock from the threat of farmers is a far more pressing concern.

“We need to protect what we have,” Hyde stressed. “On average you have about 2,000 trees per hectare in the national park. That’s basically 18 million trees that we need to protect.

“One of our key mandates is to protect what we have left, because that natural forest that is up there cannot be replaced by just planting pine trees,” he said, noting that pine is non-native to Jamaica and doesn’t provide food or housing for local animals.

The UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) website lists lack of conservation policy, and lack or inadequacy of management plans or systems among the factors that can cause a heritage site to be entered on its in danger list.