Ten years ago, the World Rainforest Movement met in Malaysia and issued the Penang Declaration. Much of what it stated was at the time original thinking and challenged the "received wisdom" of most national and international experts. It is therefore important to take stock of the changes that have occurred since then in order to identify the changes that still need to be implemented to save the world's endangered forests and to ensure the livelihood of the people that depend on them.
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The Pan European Forest Certification Scheme (PEFC) was presented on April 20 at a seminar in Wuerzburg Germany. The scheme, set up by forest owners and part of forestry industries, is meant to present an alternative to the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council Scheme) scheme. Forest owners claim the FSC scheme is not suitable to deal with small-scale forestry, and is too much led by NGOs.
On April 7th we endorsed a letter signed by a number of international civil society organizations and addressed to the World Trade Organization's Third Ministerial Conference to be held next November in Seattle, USA, which expresses opposition to the expansion of the powers of the WTO through a new comprehensive round of trade liberalisation, and asks governments to review and rectify the deficiencies and injustices of the present trade system and the WTO regime itself.
By Larry Lohmann
Forest degradation is associated with the activities of loggers, timber consumers, paper companies, and multilateral agencies. Often overlooked is the role of a much lower-profile set of actors: forestry and engineering consultancy firms.
What follows is part of the statement made in Rome by Mia Siscawati, from the Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment, on the impacts of industrial tree plantations on people and forests in Indonesia.
"As a forester working for environmental NGOs in Indonesia I am glad to have the opportunity to visit the FAO and to join this COFO meeting. I would like also to thank ITFF for the opportunity to have a special meeting with NGOs.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is negotiating a new international agreement to eliminate all tariffs on forest products worldwide, and to consider eliminating non-tariff forest protection measures. The terms of the agreement, that is to be formalized during a Ministerial Meeting to be held in Seattle, USA, from November 30 to December 3 this year, have been strongly critizised by the international environmental NGO community. Actions are being planned to denounce it. What follows is an article which we believe can shed light into this obscure issue:
"Tree plantations help alleviate pressures on natural forests, thereby contributing to halt deforestation." The wording may slightly differ from forester to forester and from plantation company to plantation company, but the above is repeated over and over again to convince the public that tree plantations are good and should be further supported and promoted if we wish to save the world's forests.
National Geographic is a worldwide known publication dealing with the diversity of landscapes and peoples in the world. According to a renewed vision of Geography, lately the magazine has been paying much attention to environmental issues.
We received a fax from the former President of the Environment Committee of the Venezuelan Congress, Dr. Lucia Antillano, thanking WRM for its activities in that country. The fax says:
The destruction of Acre, in the Western Brazilian Amazon began in 1877, with the arrival of peasants from Brasil's Northeast, escaping from drought and misery. They were brought to the forest as cheap labour to exploit rubber for the benefit of the so called “seringalistas”, composed by powerful Brazilian and foreign economic groups. They were even forced to fight against the indigenous peoples that inhabited that land: only ten out of the sixty indigenous nations that lived in the Jurua valley, in Acre, survived and their population decreased dramatically.
A workshop on Forests, Plantations and the Multilateral Development Banks was held from 2-4 December in Montevideo, Uruguay, organized by the Latin American and Caribbean NGO Network on the Multilateral Development Banks. Representatives from 18 NGOs -most of them from Latin America- participated in the event. Presentations on the Forest Policy of the World Bank, the situation of forests and tree plantations in the region and case studies on several Latin American countries were made (see article in this issue).
B.C.Y Freezailah, executive director of the International Tropical Timber Organization compared in Tokyo sustainable management of tropical forests with tree plantations and concluded that tropical forestry will need to switch to tree plantations.
He stated that 'tropical timbers from natural forests are increasingly facing competition with timbers from temperate forests, against which tropical timber from sustainably managed natural forests is at a distinct disadvantage.' (the 'temperate forests' mentioned are in fact plantations in Chile and New Zealand.)