MS12B
Simone Lovera 1
Addressing the direct and underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation should be an absolute priority for the forestry sector. Deforestation cannot be compensated for by simply planting trees. Considering the many ecological, social and economic problems associated with large-scale tree plantations, presenting them as a solution for deforestation can be compared to presenting a bag of fish bones as a solution for the depletion of the world's fish stocks.
The underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation are cross-cutting issues, and relate to practically every agenda item of the 2003 World Forestry Congress. This paper discusses underlying causes of forest loss, like unsustainable consumption patterns, trade agreements, lack of appreciation for the non-economic values of forests, and lack of participation of local communities and Indigenous Peoples in forest-related policies and institutions.
Recommendations include:
Global action should mainly concentrate on ensuring that the successful initiatives communities have taken in the field of forest conservation, management and restoration are not trampled on by corporate-led globalization and other underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation.
Partly as a result of a strong and effective advocacy campaign by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Indigenous Peoples' Organizations (IPOs), the need to address the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation was gradually recognized by policy-makers in the course of the 1990s. In 1997 the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) recommended that a global workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation should be organized. This global workshop was organized by a unique coalition of NGOs, IPOs and governments in January 1999. Almost 60 case studies and in-depth papers on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation from all over the world were contributed to the process, using an elaborated version of the diagnostic framework that had been approved by the IPF. The process also involved the organization of seven regional workshops and an Indigenous Peoples' workshop. This paper will highlight some of the most important conclusions of this process. It should be realized that the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation are not only relevant for a fair assessment of the status and trends of forests. They relate to practically every agenda item of the 2003 World Forestry Congress.
It might be good to reiterate that deforestation is one of the biggest problems faced by the world community. In past years, there has been a tendency in certain sectors to trivialize the world's deforestation rates. One important argument has been to add up lands recently covered by trees and present this as a compensation for deforestation (FAO, 2001). Regretfully, the great majority of what are counted as reforested areas are in fact "green deserts", endless acres of trees deprived of any variety of life forms or other ecological values. According to the definition that was adopted last year by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), not only a monoculture eucalypt plantation counts as "reforested" area, any orchard, garden, or other land with more than 10% tree cover can be counted as a "reforested" area (UNFCCC, 2001).
Large-scale, monoculture tree plantations have little in common with forests, and they are highly problematic from an ecological, social and economic point of view. As documented in the case studies from Chile (Catalan and Ramos, 1998) and Brazil (Roldan, 1998) that were contributed to the Underlying Causes Initiative, tree plantations lead to wide-spread deforestation, and displacement of Indigenous Peoples and other local communities (see also Friends of the Earth International, 2000). In South Africa, the women of some local communities nowadays have to walk many kilometers more to gather fuelwood, as their communities have been surrounded by "reforestation projects", that is, tree plantations that are inaccessible to them (Carrere and Lohmann, 1996).
Tree plantations also score poorly in terms of employment: in Hawaii a 10 000 ha pulp plantation would produce 40 to 60 jobs, while the same amount of land used for diversified agriculture would create over 4 000 jobs (Mattoon, 1998). In Brazil, each job at the plantations of Bahia Sul Celulose required an investment of between US$226 000 and US$338 000. Meanwhile, an alternative development project in the same region with a similar total level of investment could generate 150 000 jobs at a cost of a mere US$8 300 each (Carrere and Lohmann, 1996). Plantation companies in Brazil produce almost 800 times less jobs per hectare of land than small-scale agriculture (Carrere and Lohmann, 1996). Unemployment and landlessness are not only major social problems in countries like Brazil, they are also a key reason for the expansion of the agricultural frontier into pristine forests like the Amazon and the Mata Atlantica.
Presenting this kind of "reforestation" as a solution for deforestation can be compared to presenting a bag of fish bones as a solution for the depletion of the world's fish stocks. For this reason, the global workshop on underlying causes of deforestation recommended to "Change the FAO definition of forests and forest related concepts (deforestation, afforestation, reforestation, plantations) to include the ecosystem approach as defined in the Convention on Biodiversity and introduce definitions for different types of forests" (Verolme and Moussa, 1999).
More generally, it makes little sense to put all our efforts into mopping the floor, if the tap is still running. Conservation, protection and restoration of forests should be an absolute priority for the forestry sector. Addressing the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation is a prerequisite for this.
Human needs and demands for forest products form an obvious underlying cause of forest loss. It has often been argued that, theoretically, timber can be produced in a sustainable manner, which implies that, theoretically, it is a sustainable product. Regretfully, on planet earth, the great majority of timber is still produced in an utterly unsustainable manner. The great majority of the case studies contributed to the global workshop demonstrated the devastating impacts of unsustainable timber exploitation in countries as varied as the Russian Federation (Babintseva et al.. 1998; Kyalunziga and Lebedev, 1998), Chile (Catalan and Ramos, 1998), and Cameroon (Awung, 1998). Much of this timber is even produced illegally: it is estimated that approximately 50% of the tropical timber entering the European Union is not produced according to the rules and regulations of the production countries (Matthew, 2001).
In the light of the fact that most timber is produced unsustainably, the current demand for timber is unsustainably high. Moreover, unsustainably high consumption levels of other forest products, and crops that replace forests like soy and oil-palm, are a major cause of deforestation and forest degradation too. Unsustainable consumption patterns were highlighted as a major underlying cause of deforestation in countries as varied as the United States of America (Steiner, 1998), Chile (Catalan and Ramos, 1998), Sweden (Lindahl, 1998), the Indian Andaman islands (Sekhsaria, 1998) and Colombia (Cortes Arboleda, 1998). Indisputably, some timber demand is fulfilling basic needs, especially the demand for fuelwood for non-commercial use by rural communities. However, nobody could argue that junk mail fulfils a basic need. Yet, in the year 1997, an average American family received some 553 pieces of junk mail. Nearly 10 billion mail-order catalogues were discarded in the United States of America alone (Abramovitz and Mattoon, 1999). It should also be highlighted that there are few areas where underconsumption and overconsumption are as unfairly divided over the world as in forest products: an average citizen from a developing country consumed around 0.095 m3 of industrial roundwood in 1990, while an average citizen from an industrial country consumed around 1.141 m3, more than 100 times as much (Abramovitz and Mattoon, 1999).
Therefore, one of the first recommendations of the global workshop was to "develop, implement and enforce integrated and holistic national policies to change consumption and production patterns..." (Verolme and Moussa, 1999).
While the need to address unsustainable consumption and production patterns of forest products and products that have an impact upon forests is becoming more and more profound, the actual policies and measures needed to address them are increasingly undermined by the increasing influence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) over national policy-making. The results of the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference that took place in Doha (Qatar) in November 2001, might lead to yet another set of obstacles to effective policies to stimulate sustainable consumption and production. The Doha mandate includes wide-ranging negotiations on market access for non-agricultural products, including timber (Yu, 2002). These negotiations will undermine policies to promote community-based forest management and secondary employment in the forest products sector. They might lead to a prohibition of measures to prevent dumping in the timber sector and of measures to prevent the export of unprocessed logs, or of other policies to promote socially and ecologically sustainable development. Meanwhile, existing agreements on "non-tariff barriers to trade" already form a major obstacle to labelling policies that would allow consumers to choose between sustainably and unsustainably produced timber (Yu, 2002).
But the main threat of the current trade negotiations will come from the negotiations in the agricultural sector. The negotiation position of the United States of America and the European Union in the agricultural negotiations has been to ensure that developing countries are forced to open up their markets, while the level of their agricultural subsidies remains unchanged. This will lead to a major takeover of the world's agricultural markets by a few large-scale export-oriented producers. The main victims of this expansion of large-scale export-oriented agriculture are the world's small farmers, who will lose their local markets and thus their farms and livelihoods. The expansion of large-scale export-oriented agriculture also forms one of the main direct and underlying causes of forest loss, as described in the case studies from Paraguay (Nunez and Ibarra, 1998), Hungary (Gyulai, 1998) and Colombia (Cortes Arboleda, 1998).
The trade negotiations in the WTO are themselves a reflection of an even deeper root cause of forest loss. Economic aspects and conventional economic policies work against forests, as most forest values will never be properly reflected in monetary economies. Policies have to incorporate and build upon the social, cultural and spiritual values of forests. In this respect the global workshop recommended " ... to integrate the social and environmental values related to forest ecosystems and use this in decision-making processes, particularly in the design of legislation and policy instruments for the conservation of forest ecosystems" (Verolme and Moussa, 1999).
But the conflict between conventional economic policies and forests goes deeper. In his case study on deforestation and forest degradation in the South Pacific Island State of Tonga, Denis Wolff identified the monetarization of Tonga's economy, with its associated impacts of increased need for cash income, commercialization of agriculture to meet this need for cash and resulting intensification and expansion of land use, as one of the main causes of deforestation in his country (Wolff, 1998). Rick Steiner describes in his study on the degradation of the Alaskan coastal rainforest how the American government introduced the concept of commercial logging amongst Indigenous communities in Alaska (Steiner, 1998).
"... Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971 ... ANCSA was the brainchild of Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who proudly touted the act as a radical piece of "social engineering." Like others before him, he believed that Alaska's Native people should be assimilated into lives much like other Americans - above all, there should no longer be tribal governments, just corporations. Under ANCSA, Alaska's 220 Native villages formed for-profit corporations, and 13 regional corporations were established. All land and money received through ANCSA became corporate assets - something completely foreign to the ancestral relation to the land. ... To many industrialists, ANCSA became a cynical means of opening up millions of acres of ancestral lands to short-term, commercial exploitation. By one stroke of Richard Nixon's pen, Alaska's Native people were enlisted to advance the unsustainable exploitation of Alaska's natural resources, particularly the coastal forest...."
The development of the human potential to conserve the world's most biodiverse ecosystems requires first and foremost that human beings learn to appreciate and respect the social, cultural and spiritual values of forests. Addressing the lack of valuation of forests is a major challenge, and it requires a long-term strategy. It requires the integration of holistic approaches to forest values in all research, technology and education policies. It starts with education about the environmental functions of forests in primary schools, but it also requires the integration of holistic valuation methodologies in forestry curricula.
Meanwhile, it is essential that poison is not presented as medicine: recently, there has been a trend to try and adapt nature conservation to the laws of monetary economies instead of vice versa. However, policy measures and incentive mechanisms that try to adapt forests to the laws of neo-liberal economies by privatizing and commercializing each and every forest function will only lead to further marginalization of the non-monetary values of forests, and the rights and needs of the - often monetarily poor - communities that depend on those forest values.
Meanwhile, those who grew up in the forest itself, have learned to adapt themselves to nature. Indigenous and other forest peoples all over the world have proved that they are able to respect and live with the multiple values of forests. Community-based forest management has been the success story of the past decade. All over the world, Indigenous Peoples and other local communities have proved that they are capable of developing and implementing sustainable forest management models. Their roles and responsibilities should be respected: the lack of participation of local communities in decisions over forest management was highlighted as an underlying cause of forest loss in a large number of case studies, such as the ones on Thailand (Trakansuphakon, 1998), Chile (Huilcaman, 1999) and India (Sekhsaria, 1998).
In theory, the need to ensure full participation of local communities in forest management and in forest-related policies and institutions is nowadays widely recognized. In practice, however, multistakeholder management is complicated: "Observations of multistakeholder negotiations suggest that in practice, a truly level playing field is impossible to achieve. Power differences persist, if in no other way than through historical relationships among stakeholders.... We need to therefore be vigilantly alert to and deal explicitly with power differences.... Instead of assuming we have eliminated or temporarily neutralized political differences within negotiations, practitioners need to ... work actively to increase the decision-making power of disadvantaged groups." (Edmunds and Wollenberg, 2002)
It is the appreciation of Indigenous Peoples and other forest-dependent communities of the multiple values of their forests, rather than global thinking, which has been and will continue to be the basis for action. However, if the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation are not addressed, the thousand flowers that these communities have allowed to bloom will be trampled on by overconsumption, trade liberalization, corporate-led globalization and other cross-sectoral policies and trends. The responsibility of the international community lies there: to prevent global processes from harming all the good work that is already being done.
All case studies contributed to the Underlying Causes workshops are available at: http://www.wrm.org.uy.
Friends of the Earth International papers are available at http://www.foei.org
Abramovitz, A. and Mattoon, A. 1999. Reorienting the forest products economy. In: The State of the World 1999. Washington D.C., Worldwatch Institute.
Awung, W.J. 1998. Underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation in Cameroon. Paper presented to the African workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Accra, October 1998.
Babintseva, R.M., Gorbachev, V.N., Laletin, A.P., Malkevich, V.N. & Titov, S.D. 1998. Underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Paper presented to the CIS workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Krasnoyarsk, July 1998.
Carrere, R. & Lohmann, L. 1996. Pulping the South: industrial tree plantations and the world paper economy. London, World Rainforest Movement.
Catalan, R. & Ramos, R. 1998. Southern Chilean native forests and the Mapuches. Paper presented to the Latin American workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Santiago de Chile, October 1998.
Cortes Arboleda, H. 1998. Deforestation and forest degradation in the region of the Black Communities of the Colombian Pacific. Paper presented to the Latin American workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Santiago de Chile, October 1998.
Edmunds, D. & Wollenberg, E. 2002. Disadvantaged groups in multistakeholder negotiations. Bogor, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2001. State of the World's Forests 2001. Rome.
Friends of the Earth International. 2000. Tree trouble, a compilation of testimonies on the negative impacts of large-scale monoculture tree plantations. Asuncion.
Gyulai, I. 1998. The underlying causes of forest degradation in Hungary with a special emphasis on the privatization of forest areas. Paper presented to the European workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Bonn, October 1998.
Huilcaman, A. 1999. Underlying causes of deforestation and degradation of the native forest in the Mapuche Territory of Chile. Paper presented to the Indigenous Peoples' Organizations' workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Quito, 1999.
Kyalunziga, I. & Lebedev, A. 1998. Deforestation and forest degradation in the Sikhote-Alin Region, District of Krasnoarmeiskii, Primorskii Territory. Paper presented to the CIS workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Krasnoyarsk, July 1998.
Lindahl, K. 1998. Forests and forestry in Jokkmokk Municipality: a case study contributing to the discussion on underlying causes leading to deforestation and forest degradation of the world's forests. Paper presented to the European workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Bonn, October 1998.
Matthew, E. 2001. European league table of imports of illegal tropical timber. London, Friends of the Earth-EWNI.
Mattoon, A.T. 1998. Paper forests. World Watch, March/April 1998: pp. 20-28.
Merrero, A. et al., 1998. Deforestation and forest degradation in the Cuban forests in colonial and neo-colonial history and the reversal of this unsustainable illness with the Cuban Revolution. Paper presented to the Latin American workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Santiago de Chile, October 1998.
Nunez, F. & Ibarra, J. 1998. Deforestation in the Yvyturusu Mountains, Paraguay. Paper presented to the Latin American workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Santiago de Chile, October 1998.
Roldan, R. 1998. The role of industry, the Aracruz case study. Paper presented to the Latin American workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Santiago de Chile, October 1998.
Sekhsaria, P. 1998. Causes of deforestation and forest degradation: Case studies of Andaman Island, Uttara Kannada and Gadchiroli-Chandrapur. Paper presented to the Asian workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Anyer, Indonesia, December 1998.
Steiner, R. 1998. Deforestation in Alaska's coastal rainforest. Paper presented to the North American workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Winnipeg, October 1998.
Trakansuphakon, P. 1998. Deforestation and forest degradation in Thailand. Paper presented to the Indigenous Peoples' Organizations' workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Quito, 1999.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 2001. Report of the seventh Conference of the Parties. Bonn.
Verolme, H.J.H. & Moussa, J. 1999. Addressing the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation - Case studies, analysis and policy recommendations. Washington, D.C., Biodiversity Action Network.
Wolff, D. 1998. Deforestation and forest degradation in the Kingdom of Tonga. Paper presented to the Oceania workshop on the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, Fiji, September 1998.
Yu, V.P.B. 2002. Implications of WTO negotiations for biodiversity. Amsterdam, Friends of the Earth International.
1 Global Forest Coalition, Legmeerstraat 77, 1058 NC, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. [email protected]