The Forest Stewardship Council will be holding its general assembly this month in Oaxaca, Mexico and we wish to share our concerns regarding the certification of plantations with FSC members, particularly from environmental and social organizations.
The WRM has been campaigning for many years against the spread of monoculture tree plantations and has documented both the interests behind their promotion and the widespread social and environmental impacts they entail.
Bulletin articles
The last two blocks of continuous tropical rainforest subsisting in the Upper Guinea forest in West Africa, are to be found in Liberia. The Upper Guinean forest, recognised as one of the twenty-five hot spots for world biodiversity, comprises a belt of fragmented forests located along the West African coast. It totally or partially covers some ten countries, starting at the west of Guinea and ending at the southwest of Cameroon. Of the world's twenty-five hot spots, this one hosts the greatest diversity of mammals.
Many independent states have shown little interest in revitalizing local level systems of authority, which were purposely destroyed by past colonial regimes. The new independent governments, just like past colonial regimes do not like very much the idea of local political forces challenging its legitimacy. Thus, many forests became the property of the state, as in the case of Tanzania. This responsibility was assumed by the Tanzanian state despite other pressing problems like: governance, economic development, self reliance and political stability.
As we have already informed in previous bulletins (see WRM bulletins 36, 42), the $550 million Bujagali hydroelectric dam project on the Victoria Nile proposed by the US-based AES Corporation --counting on loans from the International Finance Corporation (IFC)-- has encountered strong opposition by local groups supported by international action. The detrimental impact of the project has been acknowledged by the Inspection Panel, the World Bank's independent investigative body (see WRM bulletin 59).
In late July NGOs wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture to request that Forest Concession Management Plans and Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs), submitted by concessionaires to the Department of Forestry and Wildlife, be released for public comment. Three and half months later, an edited version of these documents is to be released, to allow for just over two weeks of public comment. This, the World Bank has decided, is sufficient a period of time to justify the release of the final tranche of their Structural Adjustment Credit (SAC).
"Nature can never be managed well unless the people closest to it are involved in its management and a healthy relationship is established between nature, society and culture. Common natural resources were earlier regulated through diverse, decentralized, community control systems. But the state's policy of converting common property resources into government property resources has put them under the control of centralized bureaucracies, who in turn have put them at the service of the more powerful."
Until the late 1970s, the approach to community based forest management in Nepal implied community resource relations along the lines of the indigenous system of forest management prevailing in Nepal's hills.
During the 80s and early 90s, community based forest management became a government priority programme and the new policy framework set up implied an interface between communities, natural resources and government bureaucracy.
In June 2001, two teak plantations managed by Thailand's Forest Industry Organisation (FIO) were awarded a certificate as "well managed" under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) system. The plantations, at Thong Pha Phum and Khao Krayang, were assessed by SmartWood, a non-profit organisation run by Rainforest Alliance, a US-based NGO.
At daybreak on 7 November, under the leadership of the NGO, CODDEFFAGOLF and of REDMANGLAR (the Mangrove Network), over 2,000 fisherfolk and peasants abandoned their humble dwellings in the coastal wetlands of the Gulf of Fonseca, internationally known as "Ramsar Site 1000," to launch a mobilisation in protest over the destruction of the mangrove forests, lagoons, marshes and other wetlands that host a wide biodiversity, and are their source of food and income.
Bordering with the Republic of Colombia, the Province of Darien is located at the extreme East of the Republic of Panama and is one of the areas in the Central American Isthmus with the greatest biodiversity. However, at present it is undergoing resource destruction at a fast pace.
The region is inhabited by peoples of four ethnic groups: Afro-Colombians, Embera-Wounan indigenous people, Darienite peasants and settlers from other regions of the country --landless peasants seeking to improve their living conditions.
The city of Esquel is located in an enclave on the banks of the Esquel river, between hills with slopes forming an impressive amphitheatre, set off by the marginal forests of the sub-Antarctic forest region and in particular, the Valdiviana forest in the Province of Chubut, to the West of the Argentine Patagonia. Its 31,000 inhabitants live and enjoy surroundings that they describe as a city where nature surprises travellers at all seasons because of the landscapes of unusual beauty, thousand-year old trees, rivers and hundreds of pools and lakes protected by enigmatic forests.
A group of seven researchers assessed the certifications of the V&M Florestal Ltda. Company (Vallourec & Mannesman), which obtained FSC certification in 1999 for its whole area of 235,886 hectares, through the certification firm SGS. They also assessed those of Plantar Reflorestamentos S.A., which obtained SCS certification for an area of 13,287 hectares. With this certification, V&M Florestal became the company with the largest certified area in Brazil.