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Global Forest Coalition
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Nš 13: July 2004 Contents:
About Forest Cover Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Forest Cover, the newsletter of the Global Forest Coalition (GFC). The GFC was established by a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Indigenous Peoples Organizations (IPOs) to facilitate the informed participation of NGOs and IPOs in intergovernmental meetings related to forests. Forest Cover is published four times a year. It features reports on important intergovernmental meetings by different NGOs and IPOs and a calendar of future meetings. The views expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Forest Coalition, its founding members or the editors. For free subscriptions, please contact Simone Lovera at: lovera@foei.org Ex
Silvis: Conventional Wisdom Here we go again. For some governments – especially those of Northern countries that have few or no forests – the forest convention that has been talked about since 1992 is the “almighty” forest convention. It would be a gift from the international community to enable forests to be protected and better managed – for their own sake, of course. For others, the proposed forest convention is the “damned” forest convention. Key Southern governments are against any legally-binding agreement that could impair their “sovereign” right to manage their natural resources. These two antagonists actually have a lot in common. While both of them recognize that forests are valuable, both of them also destroy forests, manage them badly, engage in mere token conservationism and pay mere lip service to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. And where the two sides take a different view, the reasoning each uses is equally bad. Proponents of the forest convention act as if they think the convention could rectify all the problems of the world’s forests. Yet how it could do that isn’t clear, since most of these proponents are already parties to other treaties and agreements aimed at solving these problems, but which do nothing of the kind. Would the new convention change the patterns of consumption and production driving deforestation and forest degradation? Would it change the predatory nature of globalization? Would it ensure respect for human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities rights, and so on? “Come on, don’t be naïve,” comes the response. “Of course we don’t pretend that!” Well, what then? These realities are what we need to address, and if they are too much for a humble forest convention to tackle, well, so much the worse for the convention. We don’t need it. Let’s go home and do what we say everybody else should do. Southern governments opposing the forest convention, on the other hand, often take the line that “those Northerners have already destroyed their forests – as well as ours – and now they want us to preserve what’s left so that the environment doesn’t suffer. But don’t we have the right to develop?” Their reasoning is no better than that of their opponents. The first question to ask is: whose forests and what development? Most governments claiming to defend their peoples’ right to development have failed disastrously to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Their development plans are confined to desperate attempts to reproduce the predatory nature of life in most industrialized societies: over-exploitation of nature and people for the benefit of the few. In fact, there already exists a legally-binding agreement on forests, acceptable to over 180 countries, that enshrines the conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the forests: the Convention on Biological Diversity. If there is need for any legally binding international instrument, this is it – and it’s already here. What is needed now is urgent implementation of its principles, in coordination and consultation with, and with the agreement of, Indigenous Peoples and other forest peoples, empowering them and dismantling the privileges of the powers that persistently ravage them. But if governments are really all that anxious to negotiate something new, they can alleviate their anxiety next July when negotiating the successor agreement to the 1994 International Tropical Timber Agreement. The ITTA was first negotiated in 1983 under the auspices of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to help countries producing and consuming tropical timber consult and cooperate; to help expand, diversify and improve structural conditions in the tropical timber trade; to promote research and development in forest management and wood use; and to foster new national policies for using and conserving tropical forests and their genetic resources and maintaining ecological balance. The renegotiated 1994 version of the ITTA set up a fund to help ensure that members’ timber exports came from sustainable sources by the year 2000. Scheduled to expire on 31 December 2006, this agreement has been, to put it mildly, only partially successful. It should be revamped to help ensure that consumer countries take responsibility for their role in this still-unsustainable trade. Participating countries could start by safeguarding the integrity of the world’s remaining forests from the grab of the World Trade Organization. And they could focus on the needs of small-scale communal producers instead of continuing to hand out unjustifiable privileges to prosperous transnational actors following unsustainable practices. UNFF,
UNFCCC and ITTO: the Need to Move Away from Plantations Widespread and growing opposition to monoculture tree plantations has prompted a reaction from the plantation lobby to occupy all available forums in order to defend and promote its own agenda. Plantation lobbyists have paid special attention to the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) and its predecessors, the Intergovernmental Panel and Forum on Forests, together with the Convention on Climate Change. The result is that both forums have become major plantation promoters. More recently, the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) has followed suit by promoting plantations in the tropics. How is it that all three of these forums, with their different agendas, have become vehicles for the promotion of industrial plantations? In the case of the UNFF, support for plantations – defined as "forests" – is clearly the result of successful lobbying by the plantation industry coupled with the presence of vested interests from the forestry sector. Governments have also been happy to promote monoculture tree plantations at UNFF because the “expansion of tree cover” that plantations provide disguises the fact that governments are acting in opposition to the UNFF mandate of forest conservation. At the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the picture is different. Here the main lobbyists are from the oil industry, which wants to prevent excessive change in fossil fuel use. But Big Oil and Big Plantations have managed to find a common "solution" to fit both their aims: planting trees to soak up the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning. A win-win solution for them, though a lose-lose situation for humanity as a whole. The ITTO is different again. Both the name of this organization and its cast of characters from countries producing and consuming tropical timber reflect the fact that it perceives tropical forests mainly as lumber. Although in theory the ITTO should be interested in ensuring a continuous supply of tropical wood, in practice it has overseen a depletion of forests in most producing countries to feed unsustainable patterns of tropical wood use in consuming countries. As a result, the ITTO too is increasingly interested in replacing the diverse forests that have been destroyed with endless “productive” rows of commercial trees. If allowed to happen, the next step will be even more threatening: the replacement of existing varieties of trees – native or exotic – with engineered living organisms. This move has already been accepted by the Convention on Climate Change, which holds that genetically-engineered plants will improve the efficiency of "carbon sinks". Although the organisms being promoted will look like trees, however, their environmental and social effects are unknown. Clearly the UNFF should have taken on the request presented at UNFF4 by a large number of NGOs to ban genetically-engineered trees. But, as anticipated, the UNFF has not yet responded. If the UNFF, UNFCCC and ITTO have veered off course, what should they be doing? Clearly, the UNFF’s mandate requires it to move away from plantations – which destroy forests and forest peoples' livelihoods – and instead begin to work to create an enabling environment for community forest management, which would pave the way for real forest conservation. The Convention on Climate Change should support the same approach – as a means of ensuring that forests continue acting as carbon reservoirs – while at the same time creating conditions for moving away from fossil fuel energy as fast as possible. The ITTO, meanwhile, should move away from industrial forestry and instead support community efforts in sustainable forest management, as a way of ensuring a long-term supply of tropical wood, extracted in a socially-equitable and environmentally-friendly way. Participants in all three forums – as well as all plantation promoters – ought to take on board a recent publication by the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) entitled "Fast-Wood Forestry: myths and realities" (2003). Regardless of the differences we may have with this research, it certainly constitutes a major step in the right direction. The authors, C. Cossalter and C. Pye-Smith conclude that governments should "adopt a landscape approach to plantation development. Investment in plantations should not be considered, and permission for private companies to establish plantations should not be given, if it can be demonstrated that the plantations will prevent the delivery of a full range of forest goods and services at the landscape level.” If a plantation is likely to adversely disrupt the hydrological cycle or reduce water quality, Cossalter and Pye-Smith argue, then it should not be established. Likewise, “plantations should not be established if they have an adverse effect on local communities; if, for example, they are likely to lead to a net loss of employment or to local communities being deprived of firewood, grazing land and other goods and services on which they depend. All these factors should be considered together, not independently, as there may be trade-offs that are acceptable. In any case, local communities, like other stakeholders, need to be involved at the earliest stage of planning and development. Finally, we must stress that there should be a presumption against any planting which would lead to the loss of primary forest, ecologically significant secondary forest or other important ecosystems.” UNFF-4: Hopes
Once More Dashed The two-week Fourth Session of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF-4) held 3 - 14 May 2004 in Geneva was a letdown for many participants, capping a three-year series of disappointments in the forum’s lack of democracy and effectiveness. In particular, the meeting dashed the hopes of Indigenous Peoples who had hoped to be recognized as “rights holders” at least in the minimal sense acknowledged by the Convention on Biological Diversity or the World Conservation Union, and to have a real say in the wording of resolutions bearing on their central concerns. For example, Indigenous Peoples saw their views arrogantly swept aside in the final resolution on social and cultural aspects of forests, which failed to mention either Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their land or community-based forest management. As the Earth Negotiations Bulletin observed, the inclusion of only one “weak reference to Indigenous Peoples . . . served to reinforce the perception that UNFF does not reflect the concerns of civil society”. Indigenous peoples also saw their opinions marginalized and excluded during negotiations over the resolution on traditional forest-related knowledge, which was not adopted due to disagreements over the text. Indigenous representatives to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues are arguing that discussions on this issue should take place in a human rights forum. The “Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue” (MSD) at UNFF-4 was also disappointing, amounting to nothing more than a series of ineffectual statements. What Indigenous and other civil society representatives said was not incorporated into the final resolutions, suggesting that the MSD was a mere formality designed to distract attention from the real action taking place elsewhere. In the future, Indigenous Peoples need to be recognized as rights holders in forests and not just stakeholders, and their full and effective participation assured. Indigenous Peoples are not against the UNFF process. They do not want to kill it, but to reform it thoroughly so that it can do its job more effectively and fulfil its mandate. Since the very beginning, Indigenous Peoples’ organizations have proposed improvements to the process. Unfortunately, their inputs have never been taken into account. The participants who are not taking the UNFF seriously, on the contrary, are those governments who not even deign to report on how their countries have implemented the proposals of the UNFF’s predecessors, the International Panel on Forests and the International Forum on Forests. It is the attitude of such governments, and not of Indigenous Peoples, that arouses concern about the future of the process. Let us hope that UNFF-5 will see a radical review of the whole process. Indigenous Peoples’ organizations should not delay starting to work towards this difficult but worthwhile end. For more information, please visit: http://www.un.org/esa/forests Branching
Out: Global Caucus Wades into UNFF As many members of the Global Caucus on Community Based Forest Management have experienced first hand, relying on governments is not always the best strategy for getting things done. Results come when local communities and Indigenous Peoples assert their rights and assume their responsibilities to manage, use and control their forests. All the same, eleven members of the Caucus took the trouble last May in Geneva to present an important statement to the plenary of the fourth meeting of the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF4). The statement urged governments to implement the top five Proposals for Action of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests and the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests – the predecessors to the UNFF – that are relevant to community based forest management and rights. A special focus was IFF Proposal 66, which asks governments voluntarily “to use national forest programmes … or other relevant programmes to involve indigenous and local communities and women to participate in the formulation and implementation of measures that aim to protect their rights and privileges in relation to forest lands, traditional forest-related knowledge and forest biological resources.” The results, however, were disappointing. Many countries failed to acknowledge the issue during discussions on Traditional Forest Related Knowledge (TFRK), especially Canada, which could not bring itself to agree to references to the rights of indigenous and local communities at all. Canada’s big brother to the south was similarly reticent, suggesting only that we need to facilitate increased “access” to TFRK – as if increased access would really help “protect the rights and privileges” of indigenous and local communities and women. Nor did UNFF4 get much praise from other quarters. The UNFF “has failed to deliver,” thundered the Earth Negotiations Bulletin*. “Continuing the arrangement in its current form is neither politically viable nor desirable”. The UNFF, the Bulletin went on, will need to figure out “how to jumpstart the political will of governments” to “induce action on the ground”. But it seemed to many observers that it might be better to leave governments on their high horses in Geneva and get on themselves with the real work of making meaningful changes to who controls and profits from so-called “national” forests. The 11 Caucus participants, however, managed to gain much that was positive from participation at UNFF4, including collaboration with the Indigenous Peoples Alliance, networking, and a crash-course on international relations. Below, three Caucus members explain what was good and bad about the experience for them. Freddy Molina is a board member of the Asociacion Coordinadora Indigena y Campesina de Agroforesteria Comunitaria Centroamericana, a non-profit, community-based organization from Central America which brings together associations, cooperative societies, federations and grassroots organizations led by small and medium agroforestry producers, indigenous peoples and peasants. Apsara Chapagain is the vice-chairperson of the Federation of Community Forestry Users Group, Nepal, a national network of forest user groups established in 1995. Johnson Ginger is a Huu-ay-aht board member of the Bamfield-Huu-ay-aht Community Forest on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, jointly managed by the community of Bamfield and the Huu-ay-aht First Nation. Was this your first time at UNFF? What did you think about it? What did you hope to accomplish here? Was it a good use of your time? Johnson: This was my first time. It stimulated me to continue supporting community-based forest management by informing associates, colleagues, friends, etc. that we should be working towards community forests rather than these big timber licences that are handed out to the big corporations. It made me realize how we especially in British Columbia are getting a raw deal – the government virtually gave away massive forests to Weyerhauser – they get to log the land, and ship it all out. Jobs are being lost, Canadian jobs we need. I didn’t realize the magnitude before going to UNFF. It was a pretty good use of my time – well, about half and half. I was so new to it, and I didn’t feel very prepared. But even being exposed to it, I think I’m starting to get the big picture, and maybe how I might get more involved with national and global advocacy. On the other hand, the meeting was made up of a lot of thank-yous and congratulations – which are not the best use of time! Apsara: This was my first time, too. The process is satisfactory in general. Inter-continental experience-sharing and learning with indigenous people is realistic and helpful for translating into practice in our national context. There were many reading materials, and the coordination among several countries in the same field was appreciated. But if there were systematic and organized discussions, participants would have benefited still more. Better time management is recommended for this conference. Freddy: This was my second time. This process is good and can be even better. I had the opportunity to give a presentation on our experience. I think that my experience has strengthened those of us who have always believed that the best way to save our forests is to involve communities in sustainable management. I also showed that the Guatemalan experience must be taken into account. What was the most important issue discussed at UNFF? Johnson: I thought the Traditional Forest Related Knowledge issue was really important. I was talking with one of our elders the other day, and she was saying that if we lose our old growth, then how do we pass on this knowledge? The old growth and second growth are different ecosystems. If we lose the old growth, we lose the knowledge. This is generations of knowledge. Being interested in the knowledge is not enough, we need the forests to go with it. If we do lose it – well, that should be against the law. If you had to send a message to the UNFF regarding a recommendation for action, what would it be? Freddy: I would recommend worldwide community dialogue and joining forces to achieve international support that is direct, not through middlemen. We should also always make sure that new alliances, communities and other groups have strategic plans aimed at true community empowerment; we must put a stop to making money off of the poverty and ignorance of our peoples. Apsara: Mechanisms should be built to implement the actions recommended by the conference. The recommended points should be translated into practice soon. Nepal community forests have the lead in practice; this can be shared worldwide. UNFF can play mediator in this regard. Johnson: UNFF can also work to help us pressure our own governments, or to pressure our governments to uphold their agreements – and to make sure things are being done right. It’s too bad it has to be this way . . . but governments can’t seem to do it themselves. The governments are making lots of money off the “major stakeholders”, like Weyerhauser. I can see why they don’t want to change. We are in treaty negotiations to take some of our traditional territory out of Weyerhauser’s hands to put it into ours. Ironically, we have to prove to the big stakeholders that we are capable of managing this forest – even though we did it just fine before Macmillan Bloedell and Weyerhauser came along! For information on the Global CBFM Caucus: http://www.forestsandcommunities.org For more information on the UNFF: http://www.un.org/esa/forests * Earth Negotiations Bulletin can be downloaded at http://www.iisd.ca/linkages Decentralising
Forest Management How to decentralise decision-making about forests was the topic of a successful international workshop organized on 27-30 April in Interlaken, Switzerland. The workshop, sponsored by Indonesia and Switzerland in cooperation with the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and other governments, assembled nearly 200 experts from over 50 countries and 30 organizations to discuss how to care best for forests during the decentralisation process now taking place in about 60 countries. Participants discussed both what decentralisation can do for forest management, and what forest management can do for decentralisation. The workshop featured presentations on participants’ own experiences with decentralisation, roundtable discussions on federalism and community forests, and various side events and working groups. Field trips were also organized to explore the role of private owners and local communities in decentralisation in different parts of Switzerland. At a roundtable on local communities, Arvind Khare of Forest Trends emphasized that local communities are both the owners of a majority of forests and the largest investors in forest management. Khare said that increased demand for certified forest products and growing attention to sustainable forest management could be boons for community-controlled forests, but that communities needed secure tenure, revenue from taxation, decision-making powers and access to markets if they were to manage forests successfully. Hannah Wittman of Cornell University spoke about the impact of the recent decentralisation in Guatemala on local communities, focusing on the conflict between traditional community forest practices and the technical management of national forest projects. She said local management groups should be able to participate formally in forest policy decision-making and the development of government sanctions. Adolino Saway of the Philippines’ Local Government Unit said that the decentralisation of protected area management in his country had faced problems including lack of collaboration among different agencies, under-representation of local communities on the protected area management board, and the risk of abuses by educated members of local groups. Key to effective decentralisation, he added, are effective participation of local stakeholders and capacity development. At a pathbreaking side event on decentralisation in CIS and Eastern European countries, participants agreed that forest reform was an issue involving many sectors and required political consensus, willingness of national governments to cooperate with provincial and local authorities, clear and equitable division of responsibilities and financial resources, a clear system of accountability, and legal frameworks for reforming forest stock ownership and authority over forest uses, protection and renewal. Eastern European and ex-Soviet Union countries have diverse ownership structures, and while some have already changed their laws to suit new economic conditions, their central governments will have to continue to play strong roles in forest management. Policymakers, bureaucrats, forest sector actors and the public in general all want more information about forest management. During the discussion on the meeting report, participants agreed on the following recommendations: • Develop a common understanding of decentralisation in the forestry sector and help get information disseminated on it; • Formulate approaches to maintain protected areas while enabling traditional use by Indigenous/local people and forest dwellers; • Develop principles of subsidiarity (decision-making at the lowest levels possible) for forest management and use; • Develop principles for choosing institutions that can equitably represent local people; • Encourage fair compensation for forest services, including through market mechanisms; • Analyze the implications of decentralisation for National Forest Programs and identify strategies that allow them to address it; • Strengthen stakeholders' capacity, particularly at the local level, through partnerships and methods that build upon their existing knowledge; • Promote the involvement of NGOs and other major groups as strong partners in planning, monitoring and implementation of decentralisation. For more information, please visit: http://www.iisd.ca/sd/forest/sdlak/ Reports on Other Forest-related Meetings Getting Strangled in Counting Carbon How do you measure how much of the greenhouse gas released by forest degradation is actually due to human action? How do you measure how much carbon dioxide from Northern fossil-fuel burning might be absorbed by a Southern tree plantation established under the Clean Development Mechanism? How do you measure how much carbon might be stored for how long in harvested wood? Such questions occupied the subsidiary bodies to the Framework Convention on Climate Change for more than a week between 16-25 June in Bonn, Germany. The accounting methodologies one of the bodies – the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technical Advice – came up with would give any physics professor an acute headache. Southern countries in the Subsidiary Body on Implementation, however, had a more straightforward response to the ever-more convoluted number-crunching demanded by the Kyoto Protocol. This was that there was simply no way they would ever be able to do the national carbon inventories the Protocol requires – no matter how much money is pumped into the rapidly-growing economic sector that makes its living out of counting, verifying, monitoring and calculating carbon flows into and out of trees and other potential emission sources. This complexity-simplicity dilemma is also faced by small-scale Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects. On the one hand, accounting and monitoring methodologies for CDM projects need to be able to yield accurate, certain, future-proof and determinate numbers indicating how much carbon projects really absorb. On the other, the methodologies need to be easy and simple to ensure that project costs don’t go through the roof. If this dilemma can’t be solved, then pressures will increase for the CDM to fund only big projects like large industrial monocultures. Such dilemmas have prompted some observers to conclude that a simpler way to mitigate climate change might be just “to focus on renewable sources of energy, and avoid the traps of overly complex accounting, which ultimately could contribute very little to mitigating climate change”, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. That conclusion may be particularly worth listening to in view of the fact that the next Conference of the Parties of the Climate Convention, in December 2004, is expected to give serious consideration to the shape of the next Protocol of the Convention – which is badly needed, as the obligations in the Kyoto Protocol are generally recognized to be insufficient to prevent dangerous climate change. A future Protocol would oblige Southern countries to cut emissions — taking into account, one hopes, climate equity and the existing carbon debt of industrialized countries. But it is highly doubtful whether Southern countries will have the capacity to monitor and calculate emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation. For more information, please visit: http://www.unfccc.int Biomass: Energy of the Future? Biomass and other renewable energies, combined with increased energy efficiency, are crucial to the energy future, according to the Ministerial Declaration of the International Conference for Renewable Energies, which took place from 1 – 4 June in Bonn, Germany. The Bonn meeting was attended by government representatives from 154 countries, who agreed to support renewable energy through increased finance, capacity-building, research and technology, market liberalization and an international action programme consisting of voluntary partnerships (joint projects of business and industry, NGOs, governments and other stakeholders) and other unilateral actions. Biomass forms an extremely important source of renewable energy for the rural poor in developing countries. Better and more widely-used biomass technologies like efficient cook-stoves could reduce poverty, improve the life and health of women and children, mitigate climate change and reduce forest degradation and desertification. However, biomass projects can also have devastating social and environmental impacts. One such scheme, Plantar, a World Bank-supported tree plantation and charcoal-fuelled pig iron project, received the Global Forest Coalition Treetanic Award in December 2003 for its negative impacts on local communities and their environment in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Regrettably, the Renewables Conference failed to address the problems of large-scale monoculture tree plantations for biomass production, or other environmentally- and socially-unsustainable forms of renewable energy, like large hydroelectric dams. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.renewables2004.de For more information on Plantar, please visit: http://www.sinkswatch.org Calendar
of Forest-Related Meetings • The Thirty-Sixth Session of the International Tropical Timber Council will be held from 20 - 23 July in Interlaken, Switzerland. It will be followed by the United Nations Conference for the Negotiation of a Successor Agreement to the International Tropical Timber Agreement, which will take place from 26 - 30 July in Geneva. For more information, please visit: http://www.itto.or.jp • The UN Forum on Forests’ Ad Hoc Expert Group on Consideration with a View of Recommending the Parameters of a Mandate for Developing a Legal Framework on All Types of Forests will meet from 6 - 10 September in New York, USA. For more information, please visit: http://www.un.org/esa/forests • The thirteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora will take place from 2 – 14 October 2004 in Bangkok, Thailand. The meeting will discuss, among other topics, tighter control of the trade of ramin and agarwood trees. For more information, please visit: http://www.cites.org • ** The tenth Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held from 6 – 17 December 2004 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The meeting will discuss the future of the climate regime and issues related to the Kyoto Protocol, including simplified procedures for small-scale forest-related projects under the Clean Development Mechanism. For more information, please visit: http://unfccc.int • The thirty-seventh session of the International Tropical Timber Council will take place from 13 – 18 December in Yokohama, Japan. For more information, please visit: http://www.itto.or.jp (**Meetings at which the Global Forest Coalition can facilitate Southern NGO or IPO participation.)
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