Abstract: The indigenous groups Bribri and Cabécar of Ujarrás, Salitre and Cabagra indigenous territories from Talamanca have based their ancestral subsistence activities on a harmonious relationship between forest and crops by the ancestral technique called polyculture, which is a mechanism for managing the forest with a production of food and medicinal resources highly diversified. However, with the arrival of non-indigenous settlers, and the cultural exchange with them, people from these indigenous groups have adopted the use of the Sikwa (non-indigenous) livelihoods for agricultural production, instead the use of traditional-ancestral Skowak system (indigenous), degenerating on the unsustainable use of the forest resource within their territories, being the fire a commonly used practice in local agriculture. The loss of forest due to the use of fire and other bad agricultural practices threaten to continue reducing the forest cover of these three territories, which puts the availability of forest resources at serious risk. According to SINAC and local indigenous governments, by 2015 fires consumed more than 1,300 hectares of forest, into La Amistad buffer zone in these three territories, concentrating the problem mainly in Ujarrás and Cabagra. To address this problem, it seeks to implement agricultural practices based on agroforestry and agroecology to emulate the skowak system in at least 18 plots (6 per territory) to be managed by family groups selected through ecological criteria (biological connectivity) and social-economic (economic and development potential, and impact at the local level). In addition, brigades of trained and equipped forest firefighters to prevent fire as a risk factor for forest cover. |