• Forest peoples: A ray of hope
• Community Forest Management: A feasible and necessary alternative
• The causes of deforestation and those responsible for it
  

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

- Forest peoples: A ray of hope

Tropical rainforests are among the world's most diverse and at the same time most threatened ecosystems on Earth. While governments have agreed on the diagnosis, they have failed in the implementation of global and national measures for ensuring their conservation. Within that context, it is important to highlight some fundamental issues which have yet to be truly taken on board for forest conservation to be possible.

The first issue is that forests are not empty. Tropical forests have been inhabited by indigenous and traditional peoples for hundreds of thousands of years, well before the creation of most of the modern national states. Each of those peoples have a very precise knowledge of the boundaries of the territory used, managed and owned by them.

Linked to this knowledge, the second issue to highlight is that forest peoples hold the rights to those territories by virtue of first settlement. However these rights are not recognized by most national governments, which declare that forests legally belong to the state. This legal injustice --in most cases concocted by colonial rule-- paves the way to forest destruction through government concessions for large scale exploitation, including industrial logging, mining, oil drilling, plantations and many other destructive activities.

The third issue is that forest peoples hold the knowledge about the forest. Proof of this is that for centuries they managed to live with the forest while fulfilling all their material and spiritual needs through skillful management. The causes of most modern destructive practices is usually found in external pressures on forests from government policies rather than in forest peoples' themselves.

The fourth and perhaps most important issue regarding the future of the forests is that forest peoples are the ones more directly interested in their conservation, because forests not only ensure their livelihoods, but are an integral part of their way of life, where respect for nature is at the core of their culture. They are not mere "stakeholders" but "rights-holders" and as such they are the most willing (and able) to protect their resources in the long term.

Forest peoples thus constitute a ray of hope for the forests' future. They hold the rights and the knowledge and their physical and cultural survival depends on ensuring their conservation. In many cases, forest peoples are adapting their knowledge to a changing situation, working out and implementing alternatives for sustainable and equitable livelihoods, away from the official and already meaningless "sustainable development" discourse which governments and TNCs have emptied of the meaning it initially carried.

The ray of hope represented by those peoples is, however, still not strong enough and needs support from all organizations working for human rights and forest conservation. Being the main on-the-ground opposition to forest destruction, forest peoples form a basis for the establishment of worldwide alliances of people willing to support their struggle. Such support should not be seen, however, as "us" assisting "them", but as a collaborative effort to ensure present and future livelihoods for all people on Earth.

The Johannesburg Summit is an opportunity for governments to re-commit themselves to forest conservation. The way to prove their political will would be to explicitly acknowledge the territorial rights of indigenous and other traditional forest peoples and to commit themselves to incorporating this in their national legislation. This would be the first step in the right direction, because it would create the necessary basic conditions for making forest conservation possible. Will governments finally do what needs to be done and allow this ray of hope to shine?

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- Community Forest Management: A feasible and necessary alternative

Ten years after the Earth Summit, deforestation continues to advance in most of the countries of the world, and in particular in tropical regions. In our successive bulletins we have abundantly recorded cases and processes of destruction, behind which in one way or another, it is possible to perceive the hand of the North.

Although this is the predominant model, advancing with all the force of globalisation and the power mechanisms it has at its disposal (namely multilateral financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation, credit conditionalities etc.), there is also another model or other different models. These are the systems that indigenous peoples and local forest-dependent communities have developed over hundreds or thousands of years. These societies have a rich tradition in forest management on the basis of totally different parameters from those of the predominant model, based on the community and with the objective of conservation. They have been ancestral custodians of this ecosystem as it is an intrinsic part of their way of life and undoubtedly, they have become an obstacle to the economic forces which, following their profit-making equation are attempting to destroy it. For this reason, these forces have tried to silence these traditions and to make them invisible.

For many years, forest policy has been based on the notion that local forest users were ignorant and destructive. The State authorities in capital cities, responsible for policy-making, looked down on the knowledge and capacities of the indigenous peoples and local communities, overlooking what was obvious: they were the most interested parties in the sustainable management of the forests as these were their source of life --no one better than these peoples knew forest ecosystem functioning and management.

It is thus that the so-called experts classified indigenous forest management practices, implying a sustainable rotation system, together with those of settlers-farmers herded by governmental policies towards tropical areas (and for whom the forest was more of an obstacle than a resource), accusing them all --indigenous peoples and farmers-- of being the main agents causing forest degradation.

This prejudiced vision prevailed for a long time, but recently forest communities have launched a process of empowerment, making their positions known, setting up local, regional, national and international alliances, linking themselves with other sectors of civil society with similar positions, demanding respect for their rights, dialoguing, defending their territories, expressing their positions in international fora.

And at this time, when the economic, social and environmental impacts of the industrial and Western development model are revealed as more than sufficient proof of unsustainability, when the loss of the ancient harmonic links between humans and nature --which up to now had enabled the life of our species on the Earth-- hurts and is felt in its tragic dimensions, a change becomes imperious, a change implying a return to the sources. And it is in this sense, against the prevailing power that the community-based natural resource management systems become visible once again and arise with the force of an alternative to be followed.

In 1978, during the World Forestry Congress "Forests for People," a gradual change of perspective started to gain acceptance on an international scale, insofar as people started recognising that those who most know about forests are those living in them.

On the basis of successful cases and of the analysis of others that were not so successful, a movement has been established, both at national and international level, gathering those who seek to promote community forest management. At the level of international processes --and in particular the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD)-- this current has materialised in the Community Forest Management Caucus, which met in June in Bali, Indonesia, at the same time as the last preparatory meeting for the WSSD. Those who participated in the Caucus --among which the WRM-- have committed themselves to actively promote community forest management as an alternative which is not only feasible, but its incorporation into the WSSD would be socially and environmentally desirable, as a solution to the forest crisis.

Beyond more or less elaborate technical definitions, the name itself of "community forest management" already expresses its characteristics quite precisely. However, it might be useful to identify at least some of the minimum assumptions for it to be considered as such.

In the first place, the community management system seeks to guarantee access and control over forest resources to the communities living in them, but mainly to those who depend on the forest to satisfy their economic, social, cultural and spiritual needs. Forest management should be aimed at offering security not only to the present generation but also to coming generations, and also at increasing the possibility of sustainability. It therefore is based on three principles:

- the rights and responsibilities for forest resources should be clear, safe and permanent.
- forests should be managed in an appropriate way so that they can supply benefits and added value.
- forest resources should be handed down in good condition to ensure their future viability.

In general terms, the concept incorporates basic defining elements that do not attempt to refer to a single model but to a diversity of models. Each one will have its own special characteristics, as a result of the culture and the environmental characteristics of the site, but all of them within a conceptual framework transcending the merely technical.

Such a conceptual framework includes a holistic vision of the world, spanning ecological, social, political, economic, moral and spiritual factors. Its moral values are based on harmony and not on conflict; social values are seen in links based on co-operation and association among community groups; ecological values seek to integrate people and their environment with economy on a local scale through the adoption of a multifunctional and multiproduct approach. In this framework, the economy seeks to reduce poverty, promoting equity and self-sufficiency; and social integration aims at promoting local development based in the communities. Furthermore, democracy in decisions on local resources implies that measures should be adopted by the community itself, in the ways it decides to. In turn, spirituality and culture are an integral part of the forest communities who consider the forest to be the home of their ancestors, of spirits and sacred gods, giving it a much wider dimension than that of a purely commercial one.

It is important to note that this is not a theoretical suggestion, but a description of real situations existing throughout all the continents. Community forest management exists and is increasingly visible, in spite of the opposition or insufficient support it receives on the part of governments and international organisations.

In this framework, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg offers a good opportunity to disseminate this approach as an alternative to the predominant destructive model. The Forest Community Management Caucus is working to gather forces and to try and have an influence on governments as a way of having an impact on how the texts of international agreements are drawn up, on identifying strategies and mechanisms to create a world movement that will go beyond summit meetings, establishing links with other similar groups, making the most of the presence of the mass media to reach public opinion and thus be able to create awareness.

In Johannesburg the governments have the possibility of taking the community forest management system as a reference and of attempting to change the predominant course of forest policy. Whether they take these suggestions into consideration or not will reveal the degree of commitment they have with forest conservation.

Article based on information from: "Forests, People and Rights", by Liz Chidley, edited by Carolyn Marr. Down to Earth, International Campaign for Ecological Justice in Indonesia, Special Report, June 2002, http://dte.gn.apc.org/srfin.htm ; "When there's a Way, there's a Will", Report 1: Developing Sustainability through the Community Ecosystem Trust, by Michael M'Gonigle, Brian Egan, Lisa Ambus, and Heather Mahony, David Boyd, Bryan Evans, Eco-Research Chair of Environmental Law and Policy, University of Victoria, Canada, and the International Network of Forests and Communities, July 2001, http://www.forestsandcommunities.org/PDF/CET%20Flyer.pdf

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A DESTRUCTIVE PRESENT

- The causes of deforestation and those responsible for it

Over the ten years following the Earth Summit, governments have been engrossed in a series of international processes with the declared objective of ensuring forest conservation. However they will be able to show little or no concrete results at the Johannesburg Summit Meeting, for the simple reason that forests have continued to disappear.

In the best case, a few governments --in particular, European ones-- can argue that their countries have managed to reverse the process and that they have more "forests" than before. However this hides two fundamentally important facts. On the one hand, that the extension of their "forested area" refers in fact to monoculture tree plantations that have little to do with their original forests. On the other hand, it hides an even more important fact: that conservation of its forests has been achieved at the expense of the forests of other countries, in particular those of the South.

Additionally, both these and the other Northern countries are directly responsible for the serious deforestation processes that have taken place and continue to take place in the South, through the imposition of a development model that has generated poverty and environmental degradation in the euphemistically called "developing countries."

We doubt whether there is any government that can seriously dare to state at Johannesburg that it has not only conserved its own forests but also has not contributed to forest loss in other countries. Even countries such as China and Thailand, which have decreed a prohibition against felling their forests, are now clearly responsible for deforestation processes in third party countries.

In order to understand the above statements it is necessary to understand the different causes of deforestation and forest degradation, that may be grouped into direct causes and underlying (or indirect) causes. The direct causes are easier to see and are those that, in most cases, are attributed the responsibility for deforestation. However, in fact it is the other causes --the so-called "underlying" causes-- that determine that the direct causes take place.

As an example, increasingly, a large number of peasants clear-cut or fire forests to use the soil for agricultural crops and stock-raising. This is a direct cause of deforestation. However, the reason for peasants emigrating to the forest is because they do not have land in their place of origin which they can cultivate and this arises from an unjust policy regarding land distribution. This is an underlying cause. Furthermore, if the peasants come to the forests it is because the government or the logging or mining companies have opened up roads. This --the opening up of roads-- is another underlying cause. In many cases, the government promotes migration, aiming at the expansion of the agricultural frontier in order to increase exports. This implicitly has various underlying causes: inter alia, the need to pay foreign debt, policies imposed by international financial institutions, the existence of consumer markets in rich countries.

The motor behind the direct causes

The most important direct causes of deforestation include the conversion of forest lands for agriculture and cattle-raising, urbanization, road construction, industrial logging, mining, oil expoitation, construction of oil and gas pipelines, shrimp farming (in the case of mangroves), fires and the construction of huge hydroelectric dams. Large-scale monoculture tree plantations to ensure the global paper industry with cheap raw material, are also a direct cause of deforestation as in many cases they have been preceded by firing or clearcutting of native forests.

However, the real motor behind all these activities being carried out in an unsustainable and predatory way, is the "development" model currently in force. This model implies the unrestricted exploitation of the totality of the planet's resources, with the aim of feeding an ever-growing consumer market, in particular in the Northern industrialised countries. Inequality in terms of exchange between North and South that has generated an increasing and unpayable foreign debt, obliging more and more resources to be exploited and extracted, just to pay off its service, has increased devastation. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, regional multilateral banks and the World Trade Organisation have been fundamental in this process, promoting and supporting governments to centre their efforts to orient production towards exports, with the aim of complying with the foreign debt service. Furthermore, structural adjustment programmes imposed by these organisms has implied that the States have "shrunk", with the consequence that there is a lack of human and financial resources at State level to address forest protection and sustainable management.

In most cases, the hidden causes of deforestation and forests degradation are related to macro-economic strategies offering strong incentives to obtain short term profits, instead of seeking sustainability in the long term. Deeply rooted social structures are also important, causing unequal land tenure and discrimination of indigenous peoples, of subsistence farmers and of poor people in general. In other cases, political factors are at stake, such as the lack of participatory democracy, military influence and exploitation of rural zones by urban elites.

The forces behind unsustainable agriculture

According to the FAO, 90 per cent of deforestation is caused by unsustainable agricultural practices, while logging and plantation forestry play a greater role in forest degradation. However debatable these figures may be, unsustainable agriculture is undoubtedly one of the major direct causes of deforestation and forest degradation in many countries of the world. A simplistic approach to the problem would imply blaming the "ignorance" of the farmers involved in this process. The process is however more complex. Few people actually decide that they want to leave their native land, go to the forest, cut it and convert it into agricultural land. They are driven to such actions by national and international forces with interests different to theirs.

In some countries, forests act as safety-valves to avoid social uprisings, in the following way. The concentration of power and land in few hands results in large groups of dispossessed people, which may lead to confrontation. To avoid conflict, some of these people are offered free land within the forests. Access to forests is made possible through government-promoted road projects, either built to open up and "develop" the forests or resulting from the commercial activities of logging, mining, and energy generation. In the above example, it is clear that deforestation can take place only because a number of government policies --social and economic-- indirectly promote it. Whilst the poor may operate the chainsaws or set the forest on fire, it is mostly governments and corporations who are behind such actions.

The far-reaching consequences of globalization

Forests are also opened up for modern large-scale agriculture or cattle-raising aimed at the export market. For example, forests have been converted for cattle in Central America, for soy bean production in Brazil and for pulpwood in Indonesia. In the first case, the process originated in the explosive development of a fast food --hamburger-- market in the US which required vast amounts of low-quality cheap meat which could be produced in nearby tropical countries. The result was widespread deforestation in Central America. Subsidized and highly intensive meat production in Europe requires an ever-increasing supply of grains to feed livestock. Soy bean is one of the major inputs for such production and enormous patches of forest have been opened up in Brazil --and in many other Southern countries-- to ensure the economic sustainability of that sector through the supply of cheap grain. A similar situation occurs with paper: the continued growth of paper consumption, particularly in high income countries, depends on the availability of cheap wood or pulp to feed the paper mills. Forests are thus being cleared in Indonesia --and many other parts of the world-- to give way to eucalyptus plantations aimed at supplying that market with increasing amounts of cheap raw material. In the above cases, it is clear that the production of hamburgers in the US, of meat in Europe and of paper in high-income countries are a contributory cause of deforestation in Central America, Brazil and Indonesia.

Land tenure policies and inequalities

Ecuador offers an example which applies not only to most other Amazonian countries but also to many other Southern countries in other regions. Since the 1970s there has been a great influx of farmers into the Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the most precious forest areas in the world. Most of these farmers came from the Andes and coastal regions of the country, where they were faced with landlessness, unemployment, and land degradation. Migration was strongly encouraged by the Ecuadorian Government, with a provision for land titles if they could prove they were turning it to "useful" land. Demostrating this was simple: to clearcut at least 80% of the forest within the assigned area. Therefore, the real cause of this terrible process of deforestation can be found in a series of governmental policies and not in the "ignorance" or "poverty" of the farmers that migrated to the Amazon.

Consumption and production patterns

Consumption and production patterns play a key role in deforestation, as they are the answer to the question why many countries, if not the majority, changed to export oriented products. It is seldom the production of food for the poor which causes deforestation. On the contrary, the largest areas of forests converted to other uses are currently being dedicated to the production of cash crops. These products, which vary from coffee and beef to coca and soy bean, are in many cases almost exclusively produced for export markets. Export oriented production is stimulated as a way of repairing the trade balance and balance of payment distortions. Under the current free-trade oriented ideology, the standard solution of institutions like the International Monetary Fund for these problems is increasing exports, instead of decreasing imports.

A global problem with many actors

Deforestation and forest degradation occur both in Northern and Southern countries and their underlying causes also originate in both, although with varying degrees of responsibility. Industrialized countries have not only cut down or degraded their own forests in the past; many are still doing so today. This occurs either through large-scale clear-cutting --as in many areas of Canada, the US or Australia-- or through the simplification --and therefore degradation-- of forests reducing them to a few commercially valuable species at the expense of biodiversity --such as in Sweden, France or Finland. At the same time, problems resulting from industrialization are having a strong impact in forest degradation. In the South, some forests are being clear-felled --mostly for unsustainable export-oriented agriculture, tree and oil-palm plantations and cattle-- or are being degraded as a result of the selective logging of the more commercial species --such as mahogany.

Some underlying causes originate within the country --either Northern or Southern-- while others can be found outside national boundaries. In this latter situation, the main responsibility usually lies in the North. Macro-economic policies imposed on the South through a number of mechanisms can also contribute to deforestation. One of the more obvious results of such policies has been the increasing incorporation of Southern agricultural exports to markets in Northern countries, usually at the expense of forests. The same macro-economic policies have resulted in the concentration of wealth in the North which, coupled with strong incentives to consumerism, have created unsustainable consumption patterns which have a strong impact particularly --though not exclusively-- on Southern forests.

Southern governments and elites also hold responsibility for some deeper causes of deforestation. Government policies on indigenous peoples' rights --particularly those affecting territorial rights-- have been the cause of much deforestation which would not have occurred if those rights had been recognized. Policies over land tenure rights in general have resulted in the concentration of the best agricultural lands in a few hands and the consequent migration of poor peasants into the forests, resulting in large-scale felling of trees. In most cases however government policies are linked to external actors such as multilateral institutions, "co-operation" agencies and transnational corporations who must share the blame. It is known that building access roads is one of the main underlying causes of deforestation. The road then opens up the forest to loggers, landless peasants, mining companies and many other actors, resulting in generalized deforestation. Road-building is one of the activities promoted and funded by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and other regional multilateral banks and it allows governments to comply with the International Monetary Fund's policies to increase exports. Road-building is also linked to transnational corporations' interests, as they can thereby access natural resources and incorporate them into the global market.

Looking towards the future

The above is a brief summary of some of the causes of deforestation and forest degradation, proving that their conservation is not a merely "technical" issue of appropriate forest management. Forests are not disappearing because the people and their governments are ignorant or because there are no suitable management plans. The forests are disappearing because a series of inter-connected national and international policies prepare the way for this to happen. Therefore, it is at this level that solutions must be found.

At the present time, the predominant economic model is exacerbating the causes even further --both direct and underlying-- that are at the root of the problem, while the actors involved --governments, companies and multilateral organisations-- continue to mislead public opinion, assuring it that the problem is being tackled.

The way of avoiding this deception is to inform that self-same public opinion about the real causes --and those responsible for them-- of the loss of forests, as a way of generating social pressure that will oblige these actors to adopt the necessary measures, both at national and international level, to ensure forest conservation.

The present summit meeting in Johannesburg is an excellent opportunity to place the issue on the agenda and to unmask the false discourse of those who dress in environmental green, while their sole interest is the green banknote of the United States.

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