Mr Tage Michaelsen
Chief, Forest Conservation, Research
and Education Service
Forest Resources Division
FAO Forestry Department
Mr Mohamed Anechoum, Secretary-General of the Ministry in Charge of Waters and Forests
Mr Ben Romdhane, FAO Representative in Morocco
Experts, Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of FAO's Forestry Department, I would like to thank the Royal Government and the people of Morocco for hosting this expert consultation on Forestry Education here in the city of Rabat. It is a great honour and a pleasure to be here and I am sure we all look forward to the next couple of days of hard work, but in very pleasant and friendly surroundings.
Many of us in this room received our forestry education at a time when foresters were expected to manage forests on behalf of the state or other large landowners. The main management objective was sustained yield of timber and a few so-called minor forest products. In order to be able to do this, forest guards were employed to control unauthorized encroachment (for agriculture and grazing) and extraction (of a number of forest products) by the rural population living in or near the forest.
When someone in the mid 1980s started saying that forests issues were too important to be handled by foresters our first reaction was that they must be joking. As a profession we were generally unprepared for what the next two decades would bring. Terms like sustainable forest management, stakeholder dialogue, conflict resolution, environmental services, etc. were yet to appear and to be introduced, sometimes with foresters being the last to understand, or accept, their significance.
As a profession we must ask ourselves why this is so? Why is it that society, in its quest for progress towards sustainable forest management, is increasingly turning to non-foresters? And why is it that foresters are often being perceived as resisting, rather than promoting, change?
One reason is that forestry education has not been able to keep up with, let alone anticipate, the dramatic changes in the way forests and their goods and services are being perceived by society. It may not be an exaggeration to state that in many cases, forestry education institutions have been training foresters to deal with the past rather than with the present and, even less, with the future.
This expert consultation is an important opportunity to make a contribution to change this. Our profession is a proud one with rich traditions. However, if we wish to regain our place at the negotiating table of modern society we must first restore our relevance as being able to contribute to - because we shall not any longer be alone - sustainable forest management.
This requires first of all that we understand the full meaning of sustainable forest management or, as formulated in the "Forest Principles" of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development - the Earth Summit - in Rio de Janeiro 1992, the "management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests."
Time does not allow me to enter into a discussion on the definition of sustainable forest management. In a way this is fortunate, because I might very soon get into trouble, starting with something as basic as having to define what is a forest. In the last two decades a number of goods and services provided by forests, not only to those who own the land, but to society at large, have been emerging with the corresponding emergence of stakeholder or interest groups. Today, different groups may have distinct views of the same forest such as, a source of income and employment as well as a source of biological diversity. Also, it may be seen as vegetation for the protection of soil and water resources; a sink or storage of carbon; an area for recreation and spiritual renovation; and land which needs to be cleared for agriculture, amongst others.
The forester of today and tomorrow must not only be aware of these often-conflicting interests. He, and increasingly she, must also be able to participate and contribute to the complex and often politically sensitive dialogue and consensus-building necessary to achieve sustainable forest management.
This does not mean that silviculture, timber production, and forest harvesting are things of the past. Far from it. International trade in timber products alone exceeds US$ 100 billion annually. The right species and provenance, nursery and planting techniques, forest protection measures, etc. are as important as ever. Our task at hand is not to design forest curricula that will replace this knowledge and move forestry completely into the faculties for social studies.
Perhaps the biggest change will be in terms of whom we as foresters believe we serve. As countries devolve responsibility for forest management to local communities, foresters are often perceived as being the last vestige of outdated centralized management of natural resources and as being nostalgic about the days when they single-handed made major decisions about large areas of forested land. Those days are now gone - often together with the forests.
The future will be more complicated than the past. We will receive conflicting orders from the new forest owners and from those who represent legitimate interest groups. More will be expected from us in terms of goods and services provided by the forests, those that remain and those to be created or restored.
You, the experts, are gathered here to formulate recommendations that will contribute to enabling new generations of foresters to accept and deal with this challenge. At FAO, we look forward to the outcome of this consultation with great expectations and with a keen desire to convert you recommendations into reality. The consultation comes at a time when the intergovernmental forest policy dialogue has concluded five years of intensive consultations, resulting, among other things in a consensus recommendation to all countries to formulate and implement national forest programmes. The quality and relevance of forest curricula is a fundamental element if these programmes to are contribute towards sustainable forest management.
I wish to thank the countries and institutions that have agreed to make available their experts for this meeting, including Chile, France, Gabon, Morocco, United Kingdom, USA, the "Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza" (CATIE, Costa Rica), the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF, Kenya) and the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre (RECOFTC, Thailand). Also, those who have joined hands with us for this important review of forestry curricula: the Forestry Education Unit of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), the Mediterranean Programme Office of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-MedPo), the Regional Office for Central Africa of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Republic of Congo, the Tempus-Tacis ENARECO Project in Ukraine, several Moroccan institutions, and FAO staff from Headquarters (Sustainable Development Department and Forestry Department) and the Near East Regional Office.
I wish to conclude by thanking l'École Nationale Forestière d'Ingénieurs for having accepted the challenge of organizing this expert consultation and the experts and resource persons who have taken time out of their busy schedules and have travelled far to contribute to this important event. We look forward to working with you during the coming few days.
Thank you very much.
