The conservation of the world’s forests requires the adoption of a series of measures to change the current model of destruction. Now that both the direct and the underlying causes of forest degradation have been clearly identified, the next step is to take the necessary measures to address them.
Bulletin Issue 63 – October 2002
Community-Based Forest Management
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: COMMUNITY-BASED FOREST MANAGEMENT
For centuries, local communities benefited from sustainable forest use. However, centralized control over natural resources has for many years now been eroding local rights and resulting in extensive deforestation processes. The current disaster --generated by state and corporate driven activities in forests-- shows the need to change course and to put forest management back again in the hands of local communities. The industrial model has clearly failed to ensure forest conservation, while community-based approaches show that the improvement of peoples' livelihoods is compatible with the sustainable use of forests. In order to collaborate with making this message heard, we decided to facilitate a collaborative effort to share experiences in community-based forest management, by focusing this WRM bulletin entirely on this issue and inviting all those concerned to participate in its preparation. As a result, we received a large number of articles from all over the world, which reflect different --though complementary-- viewpoints regarding the implementation of this approach in diverse social and environmental realities. This diversity will certainly help us all to increase our understanding about the problems which need to be solved to make this approach viable. To all of those who either wrote articles or sent us suggestions --or both!-- our most sincere thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience with us and all our readers.WRM Bulletin
63
October 2002
OUR VIEWPOINT
THE COMMUNITY APPROACH: SOME RELEVANT ISSUES
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7 October 2002In addition to the monthly bulletin, another tool used by WRM to support and disseminate the issues on which it centres its activities is the http://www.wrm.org.uy web page. In the section on “information by subject” various categories are listed, among them, community-based forest management. Under this item, we include all the articles published in the WRM bulletin on the subject, in addition to other documents of interest and links to other pages related with this type of management.
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7 October 2002In May 2002, a number of people attending the 4th Preparatory Meeting for the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), decided to group themselves under a common banner in order to influence government delegates on the need for the global community to recognize community-based and indigenous forest management as a viable tool for alleviating poverty and sustaining the Earth's environment. After just a few days of organizing --and despite warnings that they were beginning their efforts too late-- they were successful in securing this recognition in text being negotiated by the delegates. The Global Caucus on Community-Based Forest Management was thus born.
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7 October 2002Community forestry requires secure tenure, if the local people are to have any confidence that they will reap the benefits of their efforts. Community mapping can be a powerful tool to help communities think about the lands, represent their land use system and assert their rights to the forests they seek to control. The use of geomatic mapping technologies by indigenous peoples to demonstrate their relationship to their lands and to mount land claims is a relatively recent phenomenon. In South East Asia the basic idea and the technology was introduced in the early 1990s and the technique has since spread rapidly. Community level mapping exercises are now underway in India, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Thailand.
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7 October 2002In Guatemala, in spite of the fact that 20% of the forest regions are under systems of protected areas, the continuous advance of the agricultural frontier, a result of the unequal distribution of means of production --particularly land-- has left a trail of poverty and social exclusion. This situation is more serious in rural zones where most of the population depends on forests.
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7 October 2002A groundswell of support appears to be building for community forests, if we believe the rhetoric of the World Bank, the United Nations, and NGOs all over the world. For example, Objective 3: Goal 4 in the Forest Work Programme approved by the 6th Party to the Convention on Biological Diversity reads: “Enable indigenous and local communities to develop and implement adaptive community-management systems to conserve and sustainably use forest biological diversity”.
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7 October 2002The world is losing its forests. All over the globe, many people are suffering from destructive processes that are depriving them from the natural resources on which they have sustained their livelihood. WRM as well as many organisations from around the world have long been denouncing this situation and supporting the peoples who are struggling to defend their forests and their rights.
SHARING LOCAL EXPERIENCES
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7 October 2002Solomon Islands in the western Pacific have been ravaged by nearly three years of civil conflict. The economy is in tatters, the main city Honiara is run by militant groups, and most education, health and public service functions are not working. In this climate the corruption ridden, destructive and often illegal industrial logging sector has continued unabated.
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7 October 2002The 21 Indigenous Communities comprising the Federation of Awa Centres in Ecuador (FCAE) have legal deeds for 120,000 hectares in the Northwest of Ecuador, a region of humid forests and great biological diversity, known as the Awa Territory and containing the last expanse of Chocoano forests remaining in Ecuador. The territorial struggles by the Awa to defend their communal forests from pressure from the timber and mining industries and colonisation, benefited until a few years ago from the difficult access to the North Western part of the country. Over the past years, the opening up and paving of two new highways crossing the region facilitated the activities of several timber companies and the consequent disappearance of the forest.
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7 October 2002In Chile, 25 years of implementation of the neo-liberal economy model have had a strong impact on native forests and indigenous and local communities in the South. Over two million hectares of pine and eucalyptus plantations feed a large cellulose industry, geared for export. Over this period, hundreds of thousands hectares of native forests were converted into monoculture tree plantations. An accelerated concentration of land ownership, aided by State subsidies to plantations has led to serious territorial conflicts with the Mapuche indigenous communities, still continuing today.
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7 October 2002Over the past few years, an increase in the participation of rural producers’ families and their economic and representative organisations has been noted in activities relating to management and conservation of resources in the Brazilian Amazon. Mainly for traditional peoples --whom the enormous socio-environmental deficit of the Brazilian State has left to economic subordination by capital destroying natural resources-- development alternatives based on resistance and the struggle to improve their living and working conditions, involve the appreciation of forest resources and therefore, their management.
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7 October 2002The National Network of Forest Practitioners (NNFP) is a grassroots alliance of rural people who are striving to build an ecologically sound forest economy whose benefits are accessible to communities that have traditionally depended on the forest for their well-being. NNFP’s 500 members include community-based non-profits, small businesses, indigenous groups, forest workers, researchers, agency officials, and landowners. They are engaged in a variety of activities, including watershed protection and restoration, ecotourism, job training, non-timber forest products, and value-added wood manufacturing.
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7 October 2002Recently some forty locally based community practitioners, academics, graduate students, and NGO heads (see http://www.nnfp.org and http://www.ncfc.org for more information) met for four days at the Federation of Southern Co-operatives ( http://www.fsclaf.org ) in Epes, Alabama, USA, in order to discuss trends in community forestry (CF) and community-based ecosystem management (CBEM) in the United States. The annual gathering serves as the keystone meeting of the Community Forestry Research Fellowships Program for graduate students involved in CF in the United States, and receives support through the Ford Foundation ( http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/community_forestry ).
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7 October 2002The Department of Rio San Juan is located near the southern frontier of Nicaragua, bordering Costa Rica, and the municipality of El Castillo is on the river between the Lake of Nicaragua and the Caribbean. During the eighties, the United States attacked us with a low intensity war that eroded the economy and uprooted Nicaraguan families. At the end of the war, during the nineties, twelve thousand people from Costa Rica and other parts of the country, immigrated to the Municipality. This mass migration made it even more necessary to adequately plan management of the scant community resources: its population and its forests.
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7 October 2002The Central American Community Agro-forestry Indigenous and Peasant Co-ordination Association, known as CICAFOC, operates in Central America --involving Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama-- and is a community-based social, non profit-making organisation, gathering organised associations, co-operatives, federations and community groups of small and medium sized agro-forestry producers, indigenous people and peasants. These groups are working to achieve access, use and management of natural resources, seeking community food security and economic sustainability in harmony with the environment.
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7 October 2002More than ten years of negotiations between government officials, local community groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have led to a draft community forest bill which would be Thailand’s first legislation recognising the legal status of communities living in and around Thailand’s National Forest Reserves to use, manage and protect their forests in co-operation with the Royal Forestry Department.
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7 October 2002The rapid depletion of Filipino forests by logging, mining and settler encroachment was officially acknowledged as requiring a policy response in the late 1980s. The need to limit and regulate logging and to promote community forestry alternatives was accepted by government by the end of the decade. In 1990, the government adopted a Master Plan for Forestry Development which entailed an attempt to ‘scale up’ previous community-level initiatives in forest management.
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7 October 2002The Indonesian NGO movement has been supporting CBFM start since 1995. The main message of the start-up phase was that most of the CBFM models that developed in a sustainable way were based on community wisdom, culture and custom.
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7 October 2002Forests in Indonesia have been rapidly depleting since the 1960s when the practice became prevalent of handing out logging concessions to military commanders. Logging quickly expanded to supply cheap logs to the Japanese timber industry principally to produce plywood. Under heavy pressure from government-directed colonisation programmes forest loss escalated, a process further exaggerated by large-scale schemes, some developed with foreign assistance, to expand tree crops in ‘conversion forests’. In the mid-1970s, the Indonesian government restricted and then banned the export of unprocessed logs which had the effect of providing a protective market for a domestic plywood and timber processing industry, which developed a voracious appetite for timber.
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7 October 2002India’s experiments with Joint Forest Management (JFM) grew out of attempts by forestry officials to accommodate ‘tribal’ demands to manage their own forests. [The indigenous peoples of India are officially referred to as ‘Scheduled Tribes’]. Under JFM forests remain the property of the State under the jurisdiction of Forest Departments but local communities are contracted to manage the forests and retain a portion of profits from the sale of harvests. The extent to which profits are shared with the communities varies considerably from state to state in India, as does the degree of forest department intervention.
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7 October 2002The seed for the initiative on Good Forest Governance (GFG) in Asia was planted at the Forest, Trees and People Program (FTPP) meeting held in Daman, Nepal, April 2000. Partners at that meeting recognized the need to involve civil society more actively in community-based forest management (CBFM), as well as the possible roles of a regional association to support this process. Two years later, the GFG seed began to germinate with the support of a Ford Foundation grant to the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC) aimed at testing:
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7 October 2002Recent changes in the Forest Policy of Tanzania (1998) and the forthcoming new Forest Act which further operationalises that Policy, have paved the way for several changes in the way that forest conservation might be achieved in Tanzania, including guidelines on the development of Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) and Joint Forest Management (JFM). These changes also mean alterations in the potential roles of the Forestry Department, the local communities and various conservation NGOs.
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7 October 2002Community forests are a new kind of mechanism of progressive local community responsibility for forest and forest resource management. So far, thirty-five community forests have been allocated by the Ministry of the Environment. The results of management models developed so far have been discrete and limited, and experience is fairly recent. Most of them are still at a learning stage. On a social and cultural level, the model developed in community-managed forests in the region is one of partnerships. Following some questioning, this model has recently reached a certain degree of stability, with the exception of the Bimboué forest, where it is subject to conflicts that are progressively being solved.
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7 October 2002In most of the African countries, claims concerning community-based forest and natural resource management have arisen as a reaction to the repressive nature of natural resource laws inherited from Colonial times. Forestry laws in force in the post-Colonial period compromised local community rights to forest ownership. Licences and other forms of taxes so far unknown to local communities were imposed to control the exploitation of forest products that the local inhabitants had had free access to previously, either for their domestic consumption or for marketing.
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7 October 2002Key trends among the plethora of early participatory forest management (PFM) developments have been observed. These include increasing empowerment of local communities in forest management, and emergence of these populations as a cadre of forest managers in their own right. It has been noted that this stems in part from local demand, crystallised through participation. It also arrives through recognition by forestry administrations of the heavy and perhaps needless time and investment incurred through sustained operational roles themselves and/or supervising community roles.