Branching Out, Deeply Rooted
…a proposal by the International Network of Forests and Communities
August 2002

National and international initiatives and negotiations have repeatedly failed to achieve "sustainability" for the world's forests and communities. It's time for a different approach. Below are 10 discussion points that the International Network Forests and Communities (INFC) is taking to Johannesburg. These '10 Points for Forests' might serve as a basis for exploring how we can build a stronger global forest movement - a movement towards sustainability designed and implemented by grassroots actors focused on the "root" causes of forest loss and degradation.

1. Developing Sustainability

Sustainable development has come to mean sustained economic growth and industrial expansion often at the expense of the worlds' forests and communities. In contrast, developing sustainability goes beyond marginal reforms and actively addresses the root causes of forest loss and degradation. Developing sustainability requires re-visioning governance systems and political-economic arrangements that perpetuate unsustainable patterns of growth. From the local to the global, how might we (re)create and support institutions, trade, and development practices that serve to maintain and protect ecosystem integrity and social justice?

2. Community and Ecosystem-based Forestry

By liquidating timber values from the world's forests, industrial forest management exacerbates environmental degradation and perpetuates inequitable distribution of resources. Can ecosystem-based community forestry fulfil multiple values - ecological, social, cultural, spiritual - in addition to economic values?

3. States Supporting Transition

In general, state governments and international bodies have created obstacles rather than opportunities for developing sustainability. How can state governments make the transition to facilitate and enable community-based forest governance and management? How can we transform states, rather than always having states transform our initiatives?

4. Control over and access to forests

Centralised power structures continue to hold dominion over forests, disrespecting the rights, needs, and desires of local peoples. How can we meaningfully redress this imbalance of power? How might we support, advance and secure the land and tenure rights of indigenous and traditional peoples, local communities, and other non-corporate user groups?

5. Gender and Equity

Within communities, gender, ethnicity, status, and other differences restrict participation, access, and decision-making power in forest management. How can we ensure that our work addresses these imbalances of power and furthers the rights of the most marginalised members of societies? These are priority issues for so many peoples who seek to develop sustainability in the world's forests and communities

6. Peoples' Governance of Global Forests

The current international framework has achieved little in the way of halting, or even slowing, the global forest crisis. How can we go beyond the state-centric international system to create more legitimate, open, democratic processes for discussion, decision-making, and action? Can we develop and implement new forms of peoples' forest governance that derives legitimacy from territorially based forest communities?

7. Shift From Liquidation to Restoration Economy

Current global economic trade regimes and ideologies epitomised by the WTO and IMF favour large corporations and capital-intensive industries, disempower civil society and fuels massively wasteful production and consumption of forest products. Instead, how might we collectively protect traditional 'circular' economies, and implement new systems of trade that maintain and restore forest biodiversity while supporting the communities who depend on them?

8. Primary Forests not Plantations

Primary forests are systems of irreplaceable biological and cultural diversity. Yet the conversion of ancient forests to industrial plantations is a market-driven "solution" to meet growing demands for forest products and the need for "carbon sinks". Rather than planting forest and agricultural monocultures, how can we restore degraded forest areas to benefit both biodiversity and communities?

9. Eliminate Ecological Debt

Northern industrialised countries continue to accumulate enormous ecological debt to the South through excessive consumption of energy, and resources such as forest products. What strategies can we employ for a "demand management campaign" in order to reduce the global ecological debt, and to end the South to North subsidies upon which industrial forestry/consumption is based?

10. Learning from the South

It is a popular but mistaken (and arrogant) assumption that development "aid" and "assistance" flows one-way from North to South. It is clear that the South has much to teach the North on the path to sustainability. For example, peoples in the South have decades of experience implementing community forestry projects, whereas the concept is still unfamiliar in most Northern communities. How can we facilitate an exchange of information, knowledge, and wisdom between peoples in the North and the South?

Casting a sceptical eye on projected outcomes from the WSSD in Johannesburg, we see an opportunity in September 2003 to gather to discuss and define a new agenda for forests. Piggy-backing on the World Forestry Congress in Quebec City, Canada - which will bring together an estimated 6,000 representatives from (primarily) government and industry, the INFC is proposing holding a parallel event called Like the Shade of a Tree: The Peoples' Forest Assembly.

Like the Shade of a Tree: The People's Forest Assembly, proposed for 18-20 September 2003, would be a time for global citizens to re-define alternative futures for our forests, beyond the scripts of the WTO and the IMF, and to take the necessary steps to implement these futures. Given the impasse since the Rio conference, it is time for indigenous peoples, NGOs, academics, and forest activists to take their place as legitimate actors. Now is the time to act!