An interview with Dr. B.C.Y. Freezailah, Executive-Director of the International Tropical Timber Organization
· The International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) is the operating organization of the International Tropical Timber Agreement which came into force in April 1985. Dr B.C.Y. Freezailah, former Deputy Director-General of the Malaysia Forestry Department, was appointed first Executive-Director of ITTO by the International Tropical Timber Council. This interview was conducted during Dr Freezailah's visit to FAO headquarters in November 1986.
Unasylva: Welcome to Rome and FAO, Dr Freezailah. First, how many members are there in ITTO?
Dr Freezailah: The International Tropical Timber Organization has 40 members: 18 producing and 22 consuming, and there are indications that a few more countries will become members.
Consumers or producers, or both?
Both. At present the 40 members cover more than 95 percent of tropical forest resources and tropical timber trade.
As the newly appointed Executive Director of ITTO, what are your immediate objectives, say in the next 6-12 months?
My immediate tasks are mainly domestic; to establish the secretariat and to make preparations for the second meeting of our council, which is scheduled to be held in Yokohama in early April 1987. The council meeting wilt focus on the work programme for the organization and of course the staff needed to implement the programme and also the budget.
How is ITTO financed?
There are two accounts to be set up. One is the administrative budget which is assessed on all member countries. This is based in accordance with the vote each member has. The producing members hold 1000 votes and the consuming members hold 1000 votes. In other words, the administrative budget will be shared equally between the two groups.
The vote of the consuming members is based on their import volume. For the producing countries it is slightly more complicated. There is a formula, by which we have taken 400 votes and allocated one-third to the members in Asia, one-third to the members in Africa and one-third to the members in Latin America. We have taken 300 more votes and divided them in accordance with their export share. The last 300 are divided according to forest resources. This means that a country that is conserving its forest resources is not penalized. So we think the formula provides a balance among the regions and also gives equal emphasis to trade and to conservation.
ITTO has been established under a commodity agreement but unlike other commodity agreements it doesn't have a price-stabilizing mechanism in terms of market interventions or production quotas. It is at this point in time consultative and developmental in nature.
The second account is the project account. For this we are going to tap voluntary contributions from the financial institutions and the common fund when it is established.
Our thinking at present is that we do not want to tap the traditional sources of funding. We want to open new sources of funding. Our goal is a net increase into what goes into tropical timber and forestry.
What do you see as the relationship between the Tropical Forestry Action Plan and ITTO?
The Tropical Forestry Action Plan to my mind is a very important programme and I'm very impressed with the programme so far. The focus of ITTO is on tropical hardwoods and import-export markets. For this reason, we have a narrower focus than TFAP, so our direct interest in TFAP is in that particular segment of it.
What will be ITTO's basic mode of operation?
We are going to be action- and project-oriented. Our secretariat will be small. That means that whatever projects and activities we want to implement will be done through existing agencies and organizations. The role of ITTO is not to compete with anybody, nor will we duplicate what others are doing. We are going to work through and complement and strengthen existing programmes in tropical forestry.
The focus for ITTO is thus quite specific. It gives a commodity focus to tropical timber. We will work on four programmes. Number one, we are going to be involved with research and development. Secondly, we are going to promote increased and further product processing in producing countries; thirdly, we want to establish a more effective system of market intelligence; and fourthly, we want to promote more and better reforestation and forest management.
Because ITTO has a council with all the members in it, three permanent committees have been established to provide the working arms subordinate to the council: the Committee on Economic Information and Market Intelligence; the Committee on Reforestation and Forest Management; and the Committee on Forestry Industry. Their role will be to advise, evaluate and implement projects.
Will the committees have full-time staff?
No. Members of the committee will be members of ITTO. We hope each committee wil be chaired by a prominent member country.
Under the Tropical Timber Agreement, research and development is made a common function of each committee. How will that operate?
This means that we do not have a committee on research and development by itself because R&D is a function of all three committees. So our research projects on forest industries will be covered by the Committee on Forestry Industry, and so on.
What will ITTO do that is not being done already?
As you know, there are three main parties involved in tropical timber and tropical forestry. One is the producing countries, and they want a better deal. And there are the consumers. They are concerned with supply, future supply. And there is also another party which is growing in importance - the conservation and environmental people. All of this is behind our thinking in ITTO; we can coordinate and harmonize all these interests so that the tropical forests will continue to provide the goods and services that are expected. We are therefore very much involved in seeking the support and cooperation of the trade and also of the conservation interests. These are the two elements that we feel must come together if tropical forestry and the tropical forests are to continue in a viable condition.
I think the future of the forest must be through its rational utilization and only this, I am convinced, will ensure its future.
What was the purpose of your visit to FAO?
Well, I mentioned that ITTO is not going to duplicate any work that is being done. We want to complement, and FAO to my mind is a very important agency. It contributed a great deal during the negotiations on the Agreement; somebody always attending the meetings and producing the background work leading to the final agreement. So I came to learn what FAO is doing on tropical forestry and to see how FAO and ITTO can best work together. As I mentioned earlier, ITTO is going to do things on a contract basis and one obvious choice is the Forestry Department of FAO, which has the prestige, the people and the knowledge accumulated over so many years - and we hope to be using FAO as the implementing agency for many of our projects.
So, I've met with the Forestry Department directors and their staff to discuss what they are doing and what they plan to do because we are trying to identify the gaps from our point of view in the existing programmes - what needs to be done and what we can support. We can then check these activities and see what to do.
I also had the pleasure and privilege of meeting with the Deputy Director-General and I'm extremely pleased by his support and encouragement. I must put on record my gratitude for the cooperation and the reception I got from the Director-General's office and from the Forestry Department. It is all that I had hoped for and I will leave Rome a very happy man.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Yes. I want to mention that ITTO had a very long gestation period and during that long period tremendous cooperation and goodwill built up and I think this is a precious commodity that augurs well for tropical timber. Why did it take so long? This is because tropical timber is such a very complicated commodity. First, there are three producing regions with different priorities and different problems. There are so many products involved, and there are the conservation and environmental sectors, and to put all of these things into a neat agreement is a difficult matter.
It's a credit to all the member countries and to all those who participated in the preparatory negotiations that finally produced ITTO. So many countries and people were interested, so many organizations are interested: so it took time. But I think it's all to the good of ITTO because it built a very strong foundation for us to move forward.
The environmental organizations, UNIDO, etc., all the organizations were there to assist the secretariat and provide input but, of course, FAO played the leading role.
Objectives of the International Tropical Timber Agreement
With a view to achieving the relevant objectives adopted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in its resolutions 93 (IV) and 124 (V) on the Integrated Programme for Commodities, for the benefit of both producing and consuming members and bearing in mind the sovereignty of producing members over their natural resources, the objectives of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983 (hereinafter referred to as "this Agreement") are:
(a) to provide an effective framework for cooperation and consultation between tropical-timber producing and consuming members with regard to all relevant aspects of the tropical timber economy;(b) to promote the expansion and diversification of international trade in tropical timber and the improvement of structural conditions in the tropical timber market, by taking into account, on the one hand, a long-term increase in consumption and continuity of supplies, and, on the other, prices which are remunerative to producers and equitable for consumers, and the improvement of market access;
(c) to promote and support research and development with a view to improving forest management and wood utilization;
(d) to improve market intelligence with a view to ensuring greater transparency in the international tropical timber market;
(e) to encourage increased and further processing of tropical timber in producing member countries with a view to promoting their industrialization and thereby increasing their export earnings;
(f) to encourage members to support and develop industrial tropical timber reforestation and forest management activities;
(g) to improve marketing and distribution of tropical timber exports of producing members;
(h) to encourage the development of national policies aimed at sustainable utilization and conservation of tropical forests and their genetic resources, and at maintaining the ecological balance in the regions concerned.
(For a list of ITTO member countries, see Unasylva 38 (155): 59)
