EcoVitality is a non-profit, tax-exempt environmental group set up to protect ecosystems and wildlife in remote rural areas of poor countries, where most of the Earth's biodiversity is located.  When conflicts arise between economic development and environment in these regions, economic pressures almost always win out. This means the currently-accepted conservation approaches, including environmental law, education, and advocacy by environmental groups, have been FAILING to prevent ecological degradation  when nature is most threatened. 

EcoVitality has a better idea.  We plan to create new conservation-compatible business enterprises in poor rural areas, to market the resulting goods or services in the U.S. and other wealthy nations, and to send the profits to the producing communities in return for effective conservation commitments.  We are now applying this strategy by using the profits from African wildlife safaris to fund lion conservation programs in Namibia.

OUR ECONOMIC INCENTIVES STRATEGY

Under current worldwide economic and trade conditions, good opportunities for making conservation profitable in developing countries are uncommon.  However, conservationists cannot afford to accept this condition as inevitable and must try to change the underlying circumstances.  Accomplishing this difficult but vital task requires that EcoVitality use a comprehensive approach that devotes careful attention to every facet of creating and maintaining conservation-compatible enterprises that can prove successful in international markets, including:

(1) Conducting market research to identify a catalog or roster of goods and services that could form the basis for conservation-compatible enterprises in poor rural areas of developing countries.   A "conservation-compatible" good may be any kind of product or service that can be produced in an ecologically sustainable manner.  This good need not be derived directly from natural resources exploitation.

(2) Matching this roster of potential conservation-compatible enterprises against the talents, experience, and interests of people in rural communities who would be willing to conserve local ecosystems and wildlife in return for receiving our economic development assistance.   We would agree to create new business opportunities or strengthen existing businesses in remote rural areas that are especially worthy of conservation from an ecological perspective.

Hand-Lathed Jamaican Vases that could be Turned into Lamp Bases

(3) Negotiating explicit environmental agreements in the poor rural areas describing the protections each beneficiary group or community must maintain for ecosystems and wildlife in their area.  This would require at least a general scientific survey of the ecological conditions in the area, and we would try to find a partner NGO with scientific capabilities to conduct this survey and document the environmental baselines against which we can measure conservation progress.

(4) Teaching people in developing nations how to produce the conservation-compatible products or services they have agreed to make with our assistance.  This will also entail teaching them to package tangible products for shipping and how to export the products using shippers we identify.

Wine Rack Made in Indonesia from Recycled Teak Wood

(5) Importing and distributing the resulting goods in developed consumer nations, where higher prices can potentially be obtained and where virtually all of the environmentalist consumers are located. 

(6) Marketing, marketing, and marketing these conservation-compatible products or services to consumers while emphasizing their desirable environmental implications as well as their intrinsic utility.  EcoVitality will have to develop an extensive web of marketing advisors and business contacts in the specific market niches where the conservation-compatible products or services will be sold.
 

Semi-Precious Gemstones from Namibia Could Be Used for
 Architectural Ornamentation or other Decorative Purposes

(7) Sending as much of the net proceeds as feasible to the producer groups in rural communities to create strong economic incentives for them to comply with the negotiated conservation agreements.  We will also have to ensure that the economic benefits are widely enough distributed to attain a broad degree of community support for our project. 

(8) Periodically monitoring local ecological conditions to ensure compliance with the terms of the conservation agreements, and, if required, threatening to withdraw our exporting and marketing assistance when beneficiary groups fail to comply with the conservation commitments they have undertaken.

Breadboard from Australia that Could Be Made in a
 Number of Developing Nations with Forest Resources

(9) Occasionally using litigation, legally-mandated information disclosure requirements, media publicity, and other means  to make ecologically destructive goods less profitable in developed consumer nations, and thereby to improve the competitive position of the conservation-compatible goods EcoVitality will be marketing from rural areas where environmentally protective practices are used.

(10) Soliciting funding support through foundation and institutional grants and public contributions to pay many of the overhead costs of creating and implementing conservation-compatible economic enterprises tied directly to improved conservation outcomes. Our strategy has too many environmental protection and administrative requirements to be financially self-supporting, but we believe this approach  can be substantially less costly and more effective than current conservation programs that require major funding support without producing commensurate environmental accomplishments.

Catching Blue Damsel Aquarium Fish with a Net, not Cyanide

Every step in this comprehensive ICAD (Integrated Conservation and Development) process will be difficult to implement, and we realize that this economic-incentives strategy cannot succeed everywhere.  Yet, we believe this environment-and-development strategy has a much better chance of success in poor rural areas of developing countries than any conventional conservation program has been able to achieve.

"SERVICE BUREAU" PARTNERSHIPS

EcoVitality intends to form partnerships with local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have been trying to combine sustainable development with nature conservation.  We may also form partnerships with government agencies involved in promoting conservation in particular areas.  In these cases, we will act as a "Service Bureau" by marketing conservation-compatible goods produced by the NGO partners partners under the EcoVitality  trademark and logo.  This arrangement increases  environmentalist brand-name recognition among consumers and enables our partner organizations to benefit from economies of scale in the marketing of conservation-oriented goods.  As long as we can ensure that ICAD projects sponsored by other NGOs or agencies in poor nations will improve environmental conditions, our role should be to strengthen these enterprises by offering better development opportunities, stronger economic incentives tied to conservation outcomes, and more effective compliance measures to ensure environmental agreements are followed.

Wine Rack from Papua New Guinea

ADVANTAGES OF ECOVITALITY'S CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

In comparison with conventional sustainable development and ICAD programs, we think EcoVitality's economic-incentives strategy (ECOV) offers numerous advantages that will increase the effectiveness of ICAD projects:

I. COMPREHENSIVENESS:

In essence, we must accomplish everything conventional sustainable development or ICAD programs attempt to do, and much more:  initial market research, product development, production assistance, exporting, shipping, importing, distribution, marketing, eco-marketing, sharing economic returns among producers, writing conservation compacts and monitoring compliance, persuading the people to obey their environmental agreements, penalizing groups that do not comply.  This comprehensive process must be maintained for many years or decades because most rural villagers cannot be readily trained to participate effectively in global markets where competition is usually fierce and often unfair due to environmental externalities.  EcoVitality programs presume mutual inter-dependence, not the chimera of economic independence in the most remote, undeveloped areas of the world.

conventional "sustainable" development programs normally stop at regional or national borders, requiring producers to sell their goods in national or international markets while competing against comparable goods made with ecologically destructive methods.   Environmental economists and other experts have complained for decades that market prices seldom reflect the full value of environmental resources, and that inaccurate market prices lead to inefficient natural resources exploitation.  Yet, conventional development programs have done little or nothing to overcome most environmental market imperfections.  They have instead relied on the very same imperfect markets and imperfect market prices to secure the ostensible benefits of development.  It should not be surprising that these unrealistic half-way measures have repeatedly failed.   In contrast, EcoVitality is undertaking every step necessary to create and maintain conservation-compatible markets.

II. INCREASED ECONOMIC RETURNS AND CORRESPONDING CONSERVATION LEVERAGE:

EcoVitality will be selling goods or services from poor states in wealthy consumer nations, and we have an strong incentive to raise the economic returns for producers as much as possible in order to increase our leverage in requiring compliance with the conservation compacts we will negotiate with them.  In contrast, conventional programs ordinarily make producing groups in developing countries deal with for-profit businesses that have incentives to minimize producer returns and increase their own profits.   Thus, we expect to provide significantly higher economic returns than conventional programs, and to create commensurately more powerful conservation incentives.

Eco-Tourism In Namibia and Other Developing Countries

III. MARKETING FOCUS AND EXPERTISE

Conventional environment-and-development programs focus on what producers in developing nations can MAKE in an environmentally safe way, while we focus on what we can SELL in developed consumer states that we can teach people in poor nations to make.   Because we are continually searching for the highest valued/ priced goods we believe rural villagers can produce, and eco-marketing these goods intensively in the developed states, we expect the economic returns of rural villagers per day of effort to exceed by far the typical returns from conventional programs.

This distinction explains why many conventional programs recommend greater production of  the SAME rainforest products, raw logs or sawn timber planks cut by local saw mills, while we sponsor the manufacture of fairly simple wood products including bed serving-trays, wine racks, end tables, and coffee tables that can be made from a single tree and s for premium prices up to 10-times or higher in earnings per tree.  conventional programs in tropical areas often recommend production of bulk agricultural commodities, such as cocoa, copra, and palm oil, despite the already high level of competition and their low market prices, while we intend to market higher-priced crops such as exotic chilies and specialty foods including unfamiliar nuts and fruits.  Most conventional programs do not put much time, effort, or expertise into marketing--their staff would rather be working in the bush--and this is frequently a fatal weakness of their approach.

IV.  BETTER MARKETING THROUGH BRAND-NAME IDENTIFICATION AND ECONOMIES OF SCALE:

We will put EcoVitality explanatory labels on every product we sell, and we will sell every product and service under the EcoVitality trademark name and logo.  We will maintain mailing lists of contributors, newsletter readers, and product buyers who supply sufficient information.  We will create on-going relationships with wholesale and retail businesses in  different product lines, and we will repeatedly ask them for suggestions about what new products can be manufactured in developing nations.  We will appear at trade shows and marketing conferences seeking new orders, ideas, and contributions. This is  part of our commitment to be professional marketing specialists emphasizing eco-marketing.

We will be identifying, importing, shipping, distributing, and selling similar products from a variety of developing countries. Because we will be performing these functions many times, we should benefit from numerous economies of scale and from increasing expertise in these areas. In contrast, conventional programs normally make each producer group do their own exporting and marketing or else deal with international agents and companies that normally try to reduce producer returns and autonomy.

A Marketing Poster from our Marine Aquarium Project

 
V. CONTINUING INTER-DEPENDENCE:

A goal of conventional programs is to promote self-sufficiency and independence among producers.  When people in poor countries have been taught desirable production practices and a little about how to run a business, they are supposed to assume responsibility for the whole business enterprise while their development trainers move on to new projects in new areas.  In contrast, EcoVitality presumes it will often take decades for the neophyte producers to overcome many impediments preventing them from competing effectively in diverse world markets or from dealing with international trade bureaucracies in dozens of countries.

Moreover, we want to promote INTER-DEPENDENCE in which village producers recognize that they cannot maintain their improved incomes without our continuing assistance, just as we cannot maintain our conservation program in the area without their continuing cooperation.  This mutual inter-dependence is precisely what provides our greatest leverage in inducing producers and beneficiaries in poor nations to meet their conservation obligations.

VI. BETTER COMPLIANCE STRATEGY:

Enforcement has long been considered the "Achilles heel" of environmental protection efforts: Legal mandates are very rarely implemented or enforced in developing nations; environmental education is voluntary and seldom leads to tangible, enforceable commitments; environmental stipulations in grant or loan contracts lose their value when the money runs out; few ICAD or Sustainable Development programs have enforcement mechanisms of any kind.  If a conventional project is successful, there is no way to prevent local people from expanding production levels through exploiting environmental resources in a nonsustainable manner.  And if the conventional project is failing, environmental protections are the first thing to be jettisoned in an attempt to reduce costs and increase profits.

In contrast, EcoVitality  insists on ecologically safe production limits as a condition of our compacts and we will threaten to terminate our assistance if producers expand their output to the point where significant environmental damage occurs.  EcoVitality will control how much of each product we will agree to sell and we can withdraw our assistance if producers try to sell additional goods behind our back, causing ecological degradation.  The cost of "cheating" or excessive expansion by producers will be the risk that we may withdraw our on-going marketing assistance in wealthy consumer nations. We believe the producers will virtually never be able to do as effective a job as we can in selling their goods in developed states, and they may therefore regard the potential risk of violating agreements with us as a prohibitively high one.   Conventional conservation programs clearly create no equivalent compliance incentives.

Most advantages of our ICAD projects arise directly from the central characteristics of our economic incentives strategy, including comprehensiveness, inter-dependence and continuing assistance, creation of marketing expertise and economies of scale, and using economic gains that people in poor countries desperately want as the primary lever to enforce the stronger conservation commitments we want.  This approach is a more realistic and effective way to attain BOTH conservation and development on a long-term basis.  Anyone who agrees with us that SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT REQUIRES SUSTAINABLE ACCESS TO SUSTAINABLE MARKETS should also recognize that less ambitious, less comprehensive, less supportive ICAD and sustainable development programs are very likely to fail, just as the overwhelming majority of these conventional programs have failed in the past.

If you want to support our efforts to attain more effective protection of ecosystems and wildlife in remote rural areas of poor countries, we hope you'll consider contributing money, skills, volunteer efforts, and business contacts to our conservation programs.

All text and photos on this web site are the intellectual property of EcoVitality and
all rights are reserved unless otherwise stated.   Contact us for reuse permission.