Forest policy, legislation and planning

National forest policies

The development of national forest policies generally centres on needs and requirements for the implementation of sustainable forest management. Asia-Pacific countries recognize the need for sustainable forest management, and for forests to contribute to national development and the benefit of local communities. There is a high degree of commonality in the general thrusts of most national forest polices, though national conditions dictate the specific policy emphasis in individual countries. Topical concerns in forest policy development include deforestation and forest degradation, illegal logging, plantation development, devolution and decentralization of forest management, and conservation. Table 6 identifies the key forestry policies and programmes in Asia-Pacific countries and summarizes the general thrust of each. Most countries have a number of supplementary policies and, in some instances, the basic policy listed in Table 6 has been substantially revised.

Specific changes in forest policies during the past several years were reported to the nineteenth session of the Asia-Pacific Forestry Commission. These include:

• In Bhutan, new forestry priorities have been specified in the 9th Five-Year Plan. These centre on SFM at the community level, efforts to increase community involvement in forest management, and strengthening of the country's extension capabilities. A greater emphasis is also being placed on production forestry to generate employment and income, particularly the development of wood-based industries.

• During 2002, Cambodia adopted the Statement of the Royal Government on National Forest Policy. The policy emphasises conservation and sustainable management as twin pillars supporting sustainable socio-economic development. The policy designates the country's remaining forest resources as Permanent Forest Estate, to be maintained in perpetuity. Community participation in forest management is seen as necessary to ensure food security, poverty reduction and socio-economic development.

• Pakistan has established a National Forest Policy 2002 after a broad consultative process. The new policy focuses on substantive issues related to the economic aspects of forestry, forest health and productivity including preservation of fragile eco-systems, and maintaining forest cover to meet present and future needs. The central plank of the policy is sustainable management of forests, with a special emphasis on preventing damage from illegal activities.

• In India, the National Forestry Action Programme 1999 (NFAP) provides a comprehensive long-term strategic plan for the next 20 years. It identifies the issues and the programmes for achieving sustainable forestry development by harmonising activities of different stakeholders. The plan identifies five programmes: (1) protecting existing forest resources, (2) improving forest productivity, (3) reducing total demand, (4) strengthening policy and institutional frameworks and (5) expanding forest area. Unfortunately, the NFAP remains largely unimplemented owing to budget shortages.

• The Tenth National Five-Year Plan (2002-2007) commenced in Nepal from mid-July 2002. The major forestry priorities include managing and utilising forest resources in a sustainable manner to ensure a balance between the environment and socio-economic development. In keeping with an overall goal of poverty reduction, the plan encompasses the expansion of community and, especially, leasehold forestry to generate employment for the poor and disadvantaged, increasing private sector involvement in forest management, and the adoption of improved land-use practices. The policy specifies that forest and other wooded land cover should be maintained at 40 percent of national land area. Nepal also released a Revised Forestry Sector Policy (RFSP) in 2000, which emphasises management of the forests of the Terai, Inner-Terai and Siwalik regions of the country. The RFSP provides more specific guidance on the general tenor of the Five Year Plan, with short-, medium-, and long-term objectives.

• Mongolia has implemented a National Programme on Forestry with three five-year phases, running through to 2015. The main goal of the Programme is to develop a national forest policy framework and establish policy-based guidelines for forestry activities. Key objectives are to increase forest protection, promote rational utilization and rehabilitate forests to ensure sustainable economic development and ecological sustainability.

• The key goal in Australia's forest policy is to ensure society obtains a balanced return from all forest uses. For the past several years this objective has been pursued through the development of Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs). The RFA process aims to provide certainty for forest-based industries, conservation and the community through:

  - the establishment of a Comprehensive, Adequate and Representative (CAR) reserve system under nationally agreed criteria;

  - ensuring ecologically sustainable forest management (ESFM) across the whole forest estate; and

  - an internationally-competitive forest industry.

  Once agreements are signed, they are in place for 20 years, subject to five-year reviews. To date, 10 RFAs have been signed, with the most recent covering the Southern region of New South Wales was signed in April 2001.

• The national forest programme process in Indonesia was initiated through Presidential Decree No. 80/2000. Multi-stakeholder dialogue in support of the process commenced in three regions (Sumatra, Kalimantan and Nusa Tenggara) in July 2001. Key imperatives for Indonesia's national forest programme are protection, production and participation. More specific issues to be addressed include:

  combating illegal logging;
  forest fire prevention and suppression;
  restructuring forest-based industry;
  forest plantation development and reforestation; and
  decentralization of the forestry sector.

The government is currently drafting a National Forest Statement to provide a political expression of Indonesia's commitment to achieving sustainable forest management.

Table 6: Overarching national forest policies and programmes in Asia-Pacific countries

Strategies and mechanisms to implement forest policies

While most countries in the region have articulated well-defined forest policies, there remain substantial challenges with implementation. Scarcity of resources, lack of political will, weak law enforcement, institutional weaknesses, shortages of suitably skilled staff and inadequate operational structures all create impediments to effective policy implementation. During the past decade, the principal shift in implementation strategies has centred on substituting participatory forestry practices for traditional centralized forest management strategies. Many countries are moving in this direction, but progress is generally slow.

Forest policy implementation strategies fall in three categories:

1. Regulation and control to discourage particular activities;
2. Incentives to encourage desired activities;
3. Removal of impediments to encourage specific activities.

Historically, Asia-Pacific countries have regulated forest management, mainly by assigning management responsibilities to government agencies and by attempting to enforce strict controls on forest access. The massive, sometimes transient, populations of Asia, along with some traditional tenure systems that have relied on common access to forests have often conflicted with policy initiatives. This has led to a general failure to meet many forest management objectives defined by governments, particularly those relating to conservation and sustainability. While many countries are experimenting with participatory systems, the region generally retains a strong paternalistic approach to forest management. In most countries, government forestry agencies continue to dominate forest management and government officers display high degrees of scepticism over local people's ability to manage forests sustainably and resistance to change towards participatory forestry.

The use of direct incentives has been particularly popular in the region in relation to the establishment of forest plantations. APFC has undertaken a comprehensive multi-country study on the Impact of incentives on the development of forest plantation resources in the Asia-Pacific region. Analysis of the case studies identifies several issues common to all countries, including the limited impacts of direct incentives.

The general context and socio-economic environment explain to a considerable extent the effectiveness of direct and indirect incentives and investors' interest in plantation establishment. High interest rates, low wood prices, lack of suitable planting areas and the financial attractiveness of alternative land uses (e.g. oil palm) discourage interest in tree growing by the private sector. Good governance, clear land tenure arrangements, national security and market development attract and empower investors (small- and large-scale). Such indirect or enabling incentives often have a greater influence than direct incentives such as free seedlings or inexpensive credit, which are commonly offered in hopes of stimulating more forest plantation development (Enters et al, 2003).

Some developed countries such as New Zealand and Australia have evolved strong market-based economies with well-developed information systems. The primary roles of governments in forest management have moved towards the creation of policy environments in which desirable outcomes can be achieved through market mechanisms, rather than payment of direct incentives. Such environments require judicious regulation, but also strong government efforts to remove impediments to the private sector and communities (Box 3).

The formulation and implementation of national forest programmes (nfp) as a means of implementing forest policies has been widely recognized in international dialogue conducted under the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) and the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). National forest programmes encompass a broad variety of strategic frameworks encompassing Forestry Sector Masterplans, National Forestry Action Plans and suchlike.

Many developing countries continue, however, to be constrained in developing national forest programmes by a number of critical factors. These include:

• lack of knowledge on how to address key cross-sectoral and economy-wide constraints to sustainable forest management;

• inadequate knowledge and information on how to create an enabling environment for forestry sector development through the design and implementation of effective forest policies;

• weak capacity of countries to manage and implement national forest programme processes that are participatory, multi-sectoral and country-led; and

• broader constraints related to governance, accountability and transparency of sectoral information.

In response to these challenges, FAO and leading international partners have established the National Forest Programme (nfp) Facility. A major objective of the Facility is to provide direct country-level support, with grant money, to ease the development and implementation of nfps. Facility support has two main objectives. First, it is directed towards developing national capacity to assemble and exchange forestry information and knowledge, with particular emphasis on addressing poverty alleviation and governance issues. A second objective of the Facility is to stimulate the engagement of civil society in the forestry debate, and ensure the active participation of a broad range of stakeholders in the nfp process.

The Facility is already active in several countries in Asia. In Thailand, for example, it is supporting the development of a National Forest Policy. In China, the Facility is assisting in developing new systems for information collection, management and sharing. The Facility is supporting a range of activities in Mongolia including work to integrate the national forest programme into broader strategies, assistance in policy reform including decentralization and institutional strengthening in the sector, and raising awareness of the public at large. Work has also been initiated in the Philippines to assist in strengthening Community-based Forest Management and in Indonesia to assist in the preparation of a National Forest Statement.

Forest legislation

Most countries in the region have numerous policies, laws and programmes aimed at regulating and orienting the use of forests and the development of forestry activities. Some of these are outdated and, even more significantly, execution, control and monitoring are frequently deficient, reducing the effectiveness of legislative and planning efforts. For example, Bandaratillake and Sarath Fernando (2002) notes that, despite efforts to address shortfalls in legislative structures, out-dated forest legislation is a major challenge in implementing a holistic approach to forest management in Sri Lanka:

The glaring deficiency is that the existing laws do not address all the main issues. Thus the legislation does not adequately support the policy. As legislation is the most important tool in translating policy statements into action, if proper laws are not implemented or enacted, it is unlikely that the policy objectives can ever be achieved.

Similarly, in the Philippines, failure to enact the Sustainable Forest Management Bill means the sector continues to be governed by outdated legislation (Presidential Decree No. 705 issued in 1975). Thus while policymakers are strongly cognizant of the need for comprehensive legislative reform to tackle the problems besetting the forestry sector, an impasse over whether to allow commercial logging in the remaining natural forests has stalled implementation for more than a decade. Thailand's proposed Community Forestry Bill has been stalled for a similar length of time over controversies such as whether people should be allowed to continue living in protected forest areas.

Most countries are making efforts to modernize legislation to support economic, social and environmental policy frameworks. Significant new legislation enacted during the past several years includes:

• In Australia, a Regional Forest Agreements Act 2002 came into effect in May 2002. It provides legislative commitment to the Commonwealth's obligations under the RFAs and ongoing support for the implementation of an Action Agenda for the Forest and Wood Products Industry, through the Forest and Wood Products Council. The Action Agenda, launched in September 2000, is a government-industry programme to maximize sustainable and profitable activity for tree-growing, value adding and marketing of Australian forest and wood products.

• In Bangladesh, a major amendment to the Forest Act was enacted in 2000. This amendment incorporates social forestry aspects into the governing forest legislation. There remain, however, significant challenges in developing a legislative environment that encourages private tree growers to the extent desired.

• Forest and Nature Conservation Rules 2000 have been formulated in Bhutan to support the implementation of the Forest and Nature Conservation Act 1995. The new rules deal with:

  management of production forests;
  private and community forestry;
  timber production and trade;
  management of protected area systems; and
  land clearance on government and private land.

• Illegal logging has been a legislative focus in Cambodia in recent times. In January 1999, the government issued Declaration No. 1 on Measures to Management of Forest and the Elimination of Forest Illegal Activities. This Declaration cancelled all permissions to establish new sawmills throughout the country, in order to eliminate the utilization of illegal wood supplies. Only wood processing mills belonging to forest concessions and their subsidiaries are allowed to operate. In 2002, the Government of Cambodia introduced a new Forestry Law to define the framework for management, harvesting, use, development and conservation of the forests in Cambodia. The principal objective of the Law is to ensure the sustainable management of forests for their social, economic and environmental benefits, including conservation of biological diversity and cultural heritage.

• The Government of Indonesia controls, regulates, and manages the nation's forests under provisions and regulations enshrined in Act No. 41/1999 Concerning Forestry (which replaced of the Basic Forestry Law of 1967). This law is the primary source of authority and guidance for all forest administration and regulation and forms the legal basis for forest land-use planning. Act No. 41 enables forest areas to be classified and delineated according to their intended functions, (e.g. protection, production, nature reserve and recreational purposes). Indonesia has also enacted Act No. 22/1999 on Regional Governance and Act No. 25/1999 on Fiscal Balance between Central Government and Regional Autonomy. These Acts authorize and necessitate decentralization of forest management and include provisions for institutional restructuring and changes in systems for forest policy development and planning.

• In Vanuatu, a new Forestry Act 2001 lays down some general principles of forestry administration, and sets out the steps for preparation of the Forestry Sector Plan. The new Act sets out rules for access to forest resources, including a requirement for all commercial forestry operations to establish an agreement with the customary owners ? either a Timber Rights Agreement, a Timber Permit or a Forestry Lease. Commercial forestry operations will also require a licence to harvest ? either a Timber Licence, Mobile Sawmill Licence, Sandalwood Licence or Special Licence. All licensees must pay a forest management charge into a Forestry Project Fund for forestry management, conservation and development purposes.