5.1 New Initiatives in India
5.2 New Initiatives in Indonesia
5.3 New Initiatives in Philippines
5.4 New Initiatives in Thailand
5.5 New Initiatives in Papua New Guinea
The adverse impacts of centralization have caused massive and continuing deforestation and its consequences. In the 1981-90 period, FAO has estimated the deforestation rate of 3.9 million ha per annum (FAO 1993). On the other hand, some impacts which we have called beneficial resulted in initiatives congenial to decentralization and local forest conservation. In other words, the centralization policy had in its core not only the hammer for forest destruction but germs for activating demands for the reversal of the policy. The initiatives (a summary of initiatives may be seen in Annex 1) differ from country to country but all are intended to carry out some form of devolution of authorities to the local people.
The National Forest Policy of 1988 introduced certain changes more oriented towards the local and the indigenous people. The requirement of these people of fuelwood, fodder, non-wood forest products and construction timber was considered as the first charge of the forests. A notification was introduced in June, 1990 by the Government of India providing for rehabilitation of degraded forests with the participation of the local people in and around the forests (referred to as Joint Forest Management). It has been proposed that specific villages in association with the forest department will manage specific forest blocks. In particular, the protection of the forests would be the responsibility of the people. The tenure for such management is not specified although some of the state government orders which followed the central order fixed it for variable number of years. The ownership of the forest will continue with the government. The village people through a village committee will enjoy the usufruct of the forests and a part of the final product (Annex 2).
By 1992, seventeen states of India have started JFM and by 1992 about 2 million ha of forests are being protected by 20,000 protection committees. In West Bengal state alone, as of 1991, 236,723 ha of forests (55% of the total degraded forests of the region) were being protected by 1726 forest protection committees. The number of families involved in the committees amounted to 178,985 (Roy, 1993).
The effect of the JFM is positive. In majority of places where the JFM has been introduced or it has spontaneously developed, the forests have revived dramatically. For example, in Hunsur, a village in the Western Ghats, had managed a forest in which the number of trees larger than 10 cm in diameter at breast height increased from zero in unprotected plot to 1,477 in protected plots after 14 years of protection (Rabindranath, Gadgil, and Campbell, 1996). Recent satellite imagery survey shows that the total forest in West Bengal have increased, a phenomena recorded first time in Indian forest history.
However, although the potential of JFM is high, in the overall Indian forestry situation, the impact is small. Only 2% of the forests of India have been covered by JFM so far. Only degraded forests are being offered for joint forest management. Leaving out the closed and high forests from the JFM operation is counterproductive as the degraded forests of to-day are the closed forests of yesteryear. And the fate of the present day closed forests will be the same over time unless the people are involved in their management.
Another failure of JFM is that some of the Forest Protection Committees are in paper only. The people have not participated in either planning or in management.
An important obstruction to the full development of JFM is that the people have involved in protection but have not been given enough authority to deal with management. Due to lack of clarity regarding tenure, the committees are often apprehensive of their future status (Annex 2).
Another initiative taken recently in Indian forests particularly in conservation forests is Eco-development. Eco-development is somewhat akin to JFM (i.e. a devolutionary step), the difference being that the benefits provided to the people come from financing economic development of their village and not from the cutting of the forests which are fully protected from any use. The impact of this paradigm has not been evaluated so far but our analysis is that eco-development can not substitute the benefits that the people traditionally obtain from the conservation forest. The people can be weaned away from the forest only when the economic development reaches a sufficiently high level which the financial assistance in the villages through eco-development will never be able to achieve.
The initiatives that promoted devolution are few and their scope limited to certain areas only (Annex 1). An important one however is that the government has recognized the local rights on rattan (cane) exploitation. Another is that the central government encourages informal agreement between the concessionaires and the local adat right holders whereby the former grants certain facilities to the locals for using the forest products. Few such agreements made have been followed more in their breaches. In Java, Perhutani (State Forest Corporation) which manages 2 million ha of forests, has launched from 1986, thirteen social forestry projects with support from Ford Foundation. The local people are allowed, as in the taungya system, to cultivate between planted forest seedlings. They have to however move away when the trees grow its canopy and cast shade. The experiment has had disappointing results so far. In the outer islands, a few pilot projects under the aegis of the Director General of Forest Utilization have shown the capacity of the local people to undertake forest protection work and to isolate the area from outside encroachment (Wangsadidjaja, 1993). In 1993, the government has agreed that the people can harvest trees in concession area if the concessionaires and the government permit them. But no such authorization has been granted by 1995. Forest Land use by adat (customary) right holders has also been permitted with consensus (called TGHK). In a series of studies done on the subject in Kalimantan and Jaya (ibid), TGHK has been found to result in problems between individual claims, land problems when roads are constructed, scale of compensation for the crops standing on the area where road is being constructed, and also between local people, neighbouring communities and concessionaire. There is a strong NGO lobby in Indonesia trying to influence the government to allow more legal rights to the communities and to legislate in its favour. The response so far is extremely limited.
Of the group three countries, the Philippines has the best record of policy changes in favour of the people particularly the upland dwellers. A government order in 1989 has specifically promoted the facility of upland dwellers to acquire legal rights of using forest products within the areas of their traditional domain (Fox, 1993). Even otherwise, the Philippine government has sponsored several community forestry programmes. These include: The integrated social forestry programme (ISFP) (World Bank, 1989); the National Forestry programme (NFP) and subsequent amendment of the programme Forest Lease Management programme (FLMP); Ancestral Land Delineation Task Force (TF-AD). With some variations these programmes are all aimed at providing incentives to the communities living in the public forest land and the upland communities to acquire legal rights to the forest land and its products (Annex 1). An in-depth look however makes it clear that extensive areas are prohibited from the programmes. In addition, in some programmes, only the denuded areas with less than 10% stocking are allowed to be transferred. Besides these two problems, the people have to cross many of the bureaucratic hurdles before they can establish their legal rights. On top of it, there are many Forest department (DENR) officials who are not convinced of the usefulness of the programme.
In 1975, the Thai Cabinet approved granting amnesty to the residents of the public forests so that they in their turn improve the degraded forests. The villagers were assisted with forest village development (FVP) funds as well. Another similar programme called Sit Thi Thamkin (Right to Harvest: STK) was introduced in 1979. The difference of this programme with the earlier one was that no funds for village development was made available (Chamruspanth, 1993). As of 1990, under FVP, 119 villages covering 55,344 ha have been involved. The STK programme of 1979 has benefited 709,395 families on 1.15 million ha of land (Attanotho, 1993).
The PNG have enacted a Forest Act in 1992. The Act repeals the Private Dealings Act which provided for the concessionaires to have direct dealings with the local headman. (Lynch and Talbott, 1995). The Private Dealings Act was so permissive that the local headman could do away with any discussion with and consent from the co-owners of the resource. The 1992 Act recognizes the customary rights of all the owners of the forest resources. So, the Act is an immense improvement of the situation prevailing before the Act. But the customary owners are allowed to have an agreement with the PNG Forest Authority only, for tree cutting or removal. This means that the Act recognizes the rights in one hand and removes the option of using the rights by another. This is tantamount to usurpation of rights of the customary owners of the resources by the government. The second problem is that in spite of a ban on the export of logs, the export continues. Further, the private owners, to improve their financial position have in the past sold their timber rights which resulted in denudation of these forests by the buyers. Complete freedom of the owners of the right holder of the resources has got thus big pitfalls as well.
In 1989, an independent commission of enquiry into the forest problems found lax law enforcement, widespread corruption, weak political will and other failures a the major problems. The Forest Act has been one of the responses of the report but that alone can not eliminate the problems emphasized in the report. The corruption is accentuated because of the ignorance of many owners of their rights to resources.
