In April 2023 the Costa Rican finance ministry wrote to the environment ministry with a number. The environment ministry could spend 53,298,950,000 colones in the year ahead, and the share of that total the finance ministry had calculated for the national forest financing fund came to 14,055,600,000. In May the environment minister redistributed the ministry's shortfall across his own programmes, and the fund was told its figure was 13,705,600,000 instead. In the budget submission it is obliged to file, the fund wrote that at that figure it could not sign a single new hectare into the country's environmental services payments.
Three earmarked shares finance FONAFIFO, and its own financial statements name all three: a fraction of the single tax on fuels, 25 per cent of the water use canon established by executive decree 32868-MINAE, and 40 per cent of the forest tax. Where the fuel share came from and what the money buys are set out in this publication's account of how the payment mechanism works. What the statements add is a fact about plumbing rather than about policy. Those three shares were once transferred straight to the institution. Since 2021 they have not been. Law 9524, on strengthening budget control over the central government's deconcentrated bodies, folded the fund's budget into the ordinary and extraordinary budget law of the republic, so the finance ministry assigns the money and the legislative assembly votes it. The earmarks remain in statute. They stopped determining what arrives.
A ceiling that arrives in a letter
The paper trail is unusually legible because the fund publishes the letters. For 2023, official letter OM-272-2022 of 12 May set the maximum at 14,055,600,000 colones against 14,055,625,231 the year before, which the fund's own comparison table records as a variation of 0.00 per cent. For 2024 the finance ministry's calculation of the specific destinations produced exactly the 2023 figure again. What changed the answer was the second letter. The environment ministry's own ceiling had fallen by 3,600,000,000 colones, which the fund's submission says left several of the ministry's programmes practically without resources to operate, so the minister reallocated between them on the basis of how much each had managed to spend in 2021 and 2022. The fund lost a further 350,000,000 colones in that reallocation, a cut of 2.49 per cent.
Where the reduction landed is the more interesting half. Capital transfers take 10,782,675,954 of the 13,705,600,000, or 78.67 per cent, and fell by 1.63 per cent. Almost all of that, 10,755,490,732, is not spent by the fund at all but passed to Trust 544, held with the national bank, which is where payments on the environmental services contracts are actually made under article 49 of the Forest Law; the balance of 27,185,222 is social security contributions. Salaries take 1,974,830,487, or 14.41 per cent, and are the only line that rose, by 3.40 per cent. Everything else was cut hard: services down 9.40 per cent to 789,650,894, materials and supplies down 36.14 per cent to 26,717,072, durable goods down 52.30 per cent to 31,292,207, and current transfers down 51.21 per cent to 100,433,386. The six lines add to the ceiling exactly. A budget squeezed this way protects the contracts and the payroll and takes the difference out of everything else the institution does, which is a trade the fund sets out rather than conceals.
What the fund says the number costs
Both submissions state the consequence in hectares, and the arithmetic is the fund's own. The target for the environmental services programme had already been cut by 100,000 hectares for 2022, leaving 250,000. Under the 2023 ceiling the fund reckoned it could finance roughly 217,000 of those 250,000. Under the 2024 ceiling it could service the contracts already formalised, more than three thousand of them over approximately 211,000 hectares, and no more, which leaves the 39,000 hectares of new contracting unfunded and the national development plan's target of holding at least 250,000 hectares in the programme unmet. Nothing in either document treats this as a surprise or as a negotiating position. It is written as an arithmetic result and filed with the ministry that produced the constraint.
The financial statements put a longer number on the same problem. Collection of the fuel tax recovered after the pandemic, and the fund records that the recovery did not translate into a larger allocation, because of the state of the national finances. Its estimate is that over five years the institution went without 19 billion colones it would otherwise have received. The underlying exposure is named in the same statements, in a note on uncertainty risk that prints the weaknesses side of an analysis the fund's own commission on covid risk valuation produced: heavy dependence on a single fuel tax, whose falls raise the chance of missing targets set in national and sector planning instruments; and rules on the use of surpluses which, under sustained cuts, stop the administration meeting payment obligations on contracts it has already signed.
Two smaller figures show how little room is left once the ceiling is set. The operating budget for 2024 had to come down by more than 290 million colones, and the fund lists what that means: the annual subscription to the International Tropical Timber Organization goes unpaid, no financial or information systems audits are commissioned, travel, fuel and vehicle maintenance fall by up to 40 per cent, cleaning and other basic services by up to 30 per cent, and the computer replacement plan by 88 per cent. Meanwhile the only mid-year budget modification approved by 30 June 2023 was worth 2,762,800 colones and required an executive decree to make it, which the fund notes is 0.02 per cent of its budget. Execution to that date stood at 48.36 per cent of the year's total, against 45.86 per cent at the same point the year before.
The same law, the other agency
The fund is not the only body the 2021 change caught. The national system of conservation areas went the same way in the same year, and describes itself in its current strategy as a programme of the environment ministry whose resources the finance ministry assigns and the legislative assembly approves, drawn from sources whose legal foundation sits in wildlife conservation law 7317, biodiversity law 7788, national parks law 6084 and a scatter of executive decrees. What it has to run on those resources is 149 protected wild areas in nine management categories covering 28,532.47 square kilometres of land, island and sea, with 1,137 staff, of whom 255 are administrative, 577 technical and 305 in services, spread across nine regional and 28 subregional offices. Sixteen cooperation projects and 121 agreements sit alongside the budget, and the strategy notes that in most of them what the partner contributes is in kind.
The strategy is candid about money in a way official documents usually are not, because its own analysis of weaknesses and threats is printed rather than summarised. The water use canon appears three times. The budget allocation of the canon does not follow the clauses of article 14 of decree 32868; there is a risk that canon resources are not transferred at all if that article is breached or if institutional reports arrive late; and the transfers that do arrive arrive late. Elsewhere the same lists record that the legal framework in force makes it difficult to capture and create new sources of finance, that there is no method for prioritising investment so as to give the institution financial sustainability, and that political influence limits the institutional budget. These are the system's own words about itself, in a document it published.
What it charges at the gate is published too, and the pricing says a good deal about who the parks are priced for. The sheet lists each area open to the public with two prices side by side. Manuel Antonio is 1,600 colones or 16 dollars. Every sector of Corcovado is 1,600 colones or 15 dollars. Guayabo is 1,000 colones or 5 dollars, Cabo Blanco 1,600 or 12, the forest reserve at Bosque del Nino 600 or 5, and Gandoca Manzanillo charges nothing either way. Resident children aged two to under twelve pay 500 colones and so do school parties on an organised visit, while a non-resident child of the same age pays 5 dollars. The note at the foot of the sheet is the one that matters: the currency of the non-resident tariff is the United States dollar, or its equivalent in colones at the moment the ticket is bought. The resident price is a fixed colon amount and the visitor price is indexed to a foreign currency, which means the two halves of the gate revenue behave differently every time the exchange rate moves. The sheet carries no date of its own.
Read together, the fund and the park system describe one country with two conservation budgets and a single point of control over both. The instruments Costa Rica is known for were designed around dedicated revenue that would arrive whatever the treasury thought of it, and since 2021 that is not how either of them is paid. One more thing follows, and it concerns the record rather than the money. The fund's index of reports carries files loaded as recently as July 2026, while its index of budget documents has had nothing added since November 2023, so the most recent published account of what the ceiling permits is still the one written for 2024.
Sources
Every figure, date and deal name above is drawn from one of the documents below. Each was fetched and cached on the retrieval date shown.
- FONAFIFO, Anteproyecto Plan-Presupuesto 2024, Programa 881, May 2023. The fund's own budget submission: article 46 of the Forest Law quoted in full, the two letters that fixed the 2024 spending ceiling and the dates they arrived, the expenditure table by line against 2023, and the fund's list of what the ceiling means it cannot do https://www.fonafifo.go.cr/media/4047/anteproyecto-plan-presupuesto-fonafifo-2024.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- FONAFIFO, Plan-Presupuesto 2023, approved. The preceding year's submission, carrying the ceiling for 2023, the letter reference and date it was communicated, the comparison against 2022, and the hectare count the fund said that ceiling could finance https://www.fonafifo.go.cr/media/4051/plan-presupuesto-fonafifo-2023.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- FONAFIFO, Estados financieros separados al 30 de setiembre de 2023. The audited-basis statements and their notes: the three earmarked shares that finance the institution, the change of route those shares took in 2021, the accounting treatment that followed, the estimate of revenue forgone over five years, and the risk register naming fuel tax dependence https://www.fonafifo.go.cr/media/4043/ef-separados-fonafifo-30092023.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- FONAFIFO, Informe de seguimiento semestral, ejercicio economico 2023. The finance ministry's standard half-year instrument, completed by the fund: execution by object of expenditure at 30 June for 2022 and 2023, and the single mid-year budget modification approved by that date https://www.fonafifo.go.cr/media/4079/evaluaci%C3%B3n-presupuestaria-i-semestre-fonafifo-2023.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- FONAFIFO, Presupuestos. The fund's index of published budget documents, each row carrying the date the file was loaded. Cited for what the page carries and how recently, not for any figure https://www.fonafifo.go.cr/es/documentos/presupuestos/ Retrieved 2026-08-30
- FONAFIFO, Informes. The sibling index of published reports, listed the same way and with the same load dates. Cited only for the comparison of how current the two indexes are https://www.fonafifo.go.cr/es/documentos/informes/ Retrieved 2026-08-30
- SINAC, Plan estrategico institucional 2023-2030. The conservation area system's own strategy: the estate and staff it reports, the statutes its money comes under, the change of budget route in 2021, and the weaknesses and threats its own analysis records about the water canon and about raising money at all https://www.sinac.go.cr/ES/docu/Planificacion/Plan%20Estrat%C3%A9gico%20Institucional%20SINAC%202023-2030.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- SINAC, Tarifas de ingreso a areas silvestres protegidas. The published price of entry to each protected area open to the public, in two columns, with the notes governing children, school parties and which currency the non-resident price is denominated in. The sheet carries no date of its own https://www.sinac.go.cr/ES/transprncia/rendcuent/27%20reas%20Silvestres%20Protegidas/Tarifas%20Ingreso%20ASP.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30