An interview with Mr D.J. Walton, Deputy Director-General, FAO
D.J. Walton, Deputy Director-General, FAO
This interview was conducted by
Farhana Haque, a freelance journalist based in Rome and formerly the principal English-language newsreader and commentator for Bangladesh national radio and television.
In July 1987 a high-level group of representatives of governments and development assistance organizations met in Bellagio, Italy for a two-day strategy meeting on tropical forestry, co-sponsored by FAO, the World Bank, UNDP, the World Resources Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation.
A statement issued at the close of the meeting contained a set of recommendations and called on world leaders to take steps within the framework of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan for the conservation and sustainable use of tropical forests.
FAO's Deputy Director-General, Mr Declan J. Walton, participated in the meeting, and afterwards gave the following account in an interview with Unasylva.
Unasylva: Who took part in the Bellagio meeting?
Mr Walton: The participants were a mixed group of senior peoples from governments and organizations. Besides the sponsoring organizations, there were several other international organizations represented, and I would mention in particular the UN Environment Programme, represented by its Executive Director Mr Tolba. There were a number of people from aid programmes: for instance, the head of the Canadian aid programme and a senior member of the United States aid programme. Of course, we also had a wide range of people from developing countries, associated directly or indirectly with the problems of forestry. For example, there was Dr Mahbubul Haq, the Minister of Planning and Development of Pakistan, who chaired the meeting, and the First Vice-President of Costa Rica, Mr Dengo. Then there were several participants from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from developed and developing areas. We had people from all regions; they had varying degrees of involvement in forestry issues, but they were ail deeply concerned about development.
What was the purpose of the meeting?
The Bellagio meeting was based on the Tropical Forestry Action Plan, and that Plan, as I see it, has two major facets, which I call action and advocacy. The Bellagio meeting was oriented mainly toward the advocacy aspect of the Plan - in other words, it was intended to lead to a clear, convincing and effective statement of what needs to be done, what needs to be changed, if the problems of the world's forests are to be tackled within a reasonable time-span.
Was this objective achieved, and how?
Yes, the immediate objective was achieved. The meeting produced a statement which was made available to the world's press and is being used by all the sponsoring agencies. FAO has published it in Unasylva 1, and we are giving it a great deal of prominence. The statement sets out some of the main directions in which more efforts are needed if the Tropical Forestry Action Plan, or any broader effort which may succeed it over the years, is really to make an impact in a serious practical sense on forest problems.
1
(157/158 (39): 5-7)
Although the principal objective in Bellagio was advocacy, the idea of action was also very much there. The Bellagio statement sets forth a series of still unanswered questions, it analyses areas which are not being fully or effectively dealt with at present, either under the TFAP or through other channels. It urges that these issues be taken up very seriously, and that a further Bellagio meeting be held, in about a year's time, to arrive at concrete, practical strategies so that work can be started on resolving them. The real degree of success which was reached at Bellagio depends on what happens in the future. In other words, it will be greatly influenced by the follow-up. It is too early to give any definitive answer; but personally I would be rather optimistic.
The statement calls for policy reforms from both national governments and development assistance agencies. Can you cite some examples of the types of reforms needed?
The principal policy reform needed by many governments is to give a higher priority to forestry in their national development plans. The chairman of the meeting, Dr Mahbubul Haq, cited himself as an example of the impact of the Bellagio conference. As Planning Minister of Pakistan, he had not taken any particular interest in what the country's forests were receiving in the way of resources under successive national development plans over the last 20 years. When he was asked to chair the Bellagio meeting, he looked into the matter, and found that forestry had been given an insignificant percentage of investment totally unrelated to its contribution to GNP. Pakistan is working on a new development plan which will be promulgated next year.
Dr Haq has set up a number of studies and working groups which will lead, he tells us, to a much more balanced and appropriate treatment of forestry in Pakistan's next national plan. This is exactly the type of reform that is needed by many governments.
It is, of course, not easy. All governments are under extreme pressure because of scarce resources. It is difficult for politicians to take decisions which mean moving resources away from certain attractive sectors and types of activity to an area like forestry where the results will often be felt only by the next generation. By the next generation I mean the next generation of politicians. This can often be quite an agonizing decision, but it is the kind of policy change which the Bellagio meeting is advocating.
What about international organizations?
Here, the recommendation is addressed primarily to those that are financing large investment projects, such as the World Bank and the regional development banks. There has been widespread public criticism that major investment projects have been designed and carried through without adequate study of their environmental impact. This is an old story; it has been going on for at least 20 years. However, the pitch and tempo of public criticism have recently been greatly increasing. The World Bank has responded by setting up elaborate arrangements to study the environmental dimension of its projects. In this sense, the Bellagio recommendation is pushing at an open door.
Another recommendation called for greater participation of the private sectors. What sort of initiative and activities would this envisage?
You will have noticed the plural. It doesn't speak about the private sector but the private sectors. When the phrase is used in the singular, we generally tend to think of industrial organizations, and we think in large-scale terms. Here, the situation is rather different. The large-scale private sector does have a highly significant role to play: for instance, in industrial activities based on forest products. However, private initiatives of all shapes and sizes can make a major and, in some circumstances, perhaps a decisive contribution toward bringing about a healthy forestry environment.
To take one simple example: the use of trees in farming systems - agroforestry if you will - can serve many purposes at the same time. It can help to conserve soil and, to some extent, water resources; it can provide fuelwood and material for housing and other uses; it can provide food, and possibilities of browsing for livestock. This is just one example of an activity involving small farmers and small enterprises, which can be supported by government but where, in the last resort, it is the initiative of private economic groupings that is going to determine what happens to the trees, the landscape and the people.
... the principal objective in Bellagio was advocacy.
The principal policy needed by many governments is to give a higher priority to forestry in their national development plans.
What do you see as me role of NGOs in addressing the tropical forestry crisis?
NGOs are not a single, homogeneous group. There are many types of NGOs just as there are many types of governmental institutions. I would recall that two non-governmental organizations were cosponsors of the Bellagio meeting itself: the World Resources Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation. The potential role for NGOs extends into practically every aspect of the TFAP, but I would like to mention one in particular. I am referring to the role of NGOs at the local level in developing countries in mobilizing popular support, popular participation, in efforts to tackle forestry problems.
Non-governmental organizations of this type may be very simple, rudimentary; they would not, in an industrialized country, perhaps appear in any register of recognized NGOs. However, without some sort of organization at local, provincial and regional levels in developing countries, it can be very difficult to mobilize effectively the physical, and to some extent the financial, resources needed to introduce rational change. Change will take place in any event. However, changes that may have been rational over the short term but are irrational over the long term have produced some of the most serious problems relating to deforestation.
NGOs - and this we recognize very strongly in the Bellagio statement - have a key role to play in catalysing, sparking off, organizing, promoting, supporting and generally helping to bring about rational change in the poorer areas in the developing world.
The Bellagio Statement also recommended quantifying the costs of inaction on a country-by-country basis as a first step toward generating political commitment in support of me Tropical Forestry Action Plan. Why is this important?
If we accept the assumption that forestry is generally a long-term endeavour, it may be very difficult to justify, on a project-by-project basis, the allocation of resources to individual undertakings. Other forms of activity may show a much higher cost/benefit ratio or rate of return. However, the analysis of rate of return does not look at the broader implications of not doing anything about forestry.
If you don't tackle your forest problems, you may well find your hillsides denuded of soil, populations exposed to extreme instability in food production; you may even find that whole populations need to be resettled to other areas because the soil has been carried away as a result of the destruction of tree cover. We are saying that the analysis of any such project should include the cost of not addressing the problem. In the instance I cited, you would have to look, in theory, at the cost of resettling entire populations, and you would find that the cost/benefit ratio of the project was, in fact, extremely favourable.
What is needed, perhaps, is a set of very general guidelines as to how to appraise projects for forestry so that they can be viewed in a somewhat wider geographical, and longer temporal, framework than would happen under the classical processes of economic analysis. We need to show that it will pay the government to carry out the project, even if, in order to prove that, you start the other way round and show that it will, at some stage, have to face a disaster if it doesn't.
None of the statement's recommendations directly address the issue of increased funding for tropical forest programmes. Why is that?
At the time the TFAP was set up, there was a hope that the flow of aid funds to the forest sector could be doubled over a period of about four years. The available figures are somewhat fragmentary, but it does appear that the flow has been rising rather strongly. Certainly, there is a strong degree of commitment to the TFAP in many aid programmes. We have recently been working out more accurate figures for the current level of aid to forestry, and perhaps we should think about a new target for a few years ahead.
It is, perhaps, easier for an aid programme to set a target of doubling the flow of funds to forest projects than it is for a national planning office to do the same. For a start, the rhythm of change at national level tends to be slower: it is essentially the cycle for formulating national development plans, the average period being around five years. As individual developing countries come to recognize the need to give a higher priority and more resources to the forest this recognition has to be translated into practical action. That is what takes time. We expect that developing countries will gradually, over the next five to ten years, give the higher priority to forestry which is advocated and which they recognize as being necessary.
Earlier you mentioned the importance of follow-up. The Conference statement calls for an international task force to draw up recommendations on strategies to be discussed at a further Bellagio meeting. Has the task force been established?
As of today (mid-September) we are only at the stage of preliminary thinking on how the international task force would be established, what its work would be, and how this work would relate to the idea of another meeting in Bellagio. Together with the other co-sponsors of the Bellagio meeting, we shall be coming up with ideas and a work programme in the next few weeks.
What would you say was me main message from the Bellagio meeting for a) national governments, b) development assistance agencies and c) the public?
For national governments - and I am thinking here of developing countries - the message is: look at the role of the forest in your national economy and then look at the role of the forest in your national development plan. Are you giving forestry the priority it deserves?
For development agencies, including bilateral programmes, I would say the central message is: keep up a steady expansion in the flow of funds to forestry, and remember that an across-the-board approach through the TFAP is going to have a far, far greater impact and is going to be much, much more effective than isolated activities by individual organizations and programmes.
As for the general public, here I think one has to differentiate between the public in the developing world and the public in the industrialized nations. To the public in the developing countries, the basic message perhaps is: a healthy forest can be essential if there is to be a healthy future for you and your descendants.
For the public in the industrialized countries, I think the message could be: many of you are already deeply concerned, for your own reasons, about the depletion of the world's tropical forest cover. Your own forestry problems - such as acid rain - are far from being resolved; there is not even general agreement as to their fundamental cause. In the developing nations, however, there is little doubt about the causes and there is little controversy over the cure; furthermore, efforts by governments and individuals are needed on an enormous scale. You should recognize this, and you should push actively for increasing support to developing countries as they tackle the problems of the tropical forest.
EROSION FROM OVERGRAZING what are the costs of inaction?
