From the 1970s to the early 1990s, residents of northern Costa Rica watched as their forested landscape underwent a radical transformation. First cattle ranchers, then banana and pineapple producers arrived to clear land for their operations. Then the Caribbean jungles began to disappear, and habitat teeming with birds, monkeys, frogs and peccaries gave way to homogenous pastures and plantations. To curb the destruction, the government in 1996 passed the country’s Forest Law, which included major new conservation initiatives, and the land clearing began to ease. “There had been so much devastation by chain saw and ax,” recalls Olman Araya, a native of Costa Rica’s northern region and general manager of Fruver, a San Carlos-based pineapple producer. “Then a new attitude took hold, encouraged by... [Log in to read more]