Landowners of Maisin and Wanigela customary lands, in the Collingwood Bay area of Oro Province, have something to celebrate.
In May 2002, the Waigani National Court returned customary land which had been leased to the State in early 1999 under a lease-lease back agreement by Keroro Development Corporation, a local landowner company. The plan was to clear the area and plant oil palm trees. The land concerned comprises 38,000 hectares of rich volcanic soil with an extensive forest area.
Bulletin articles
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.
In 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.
In 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.
Community 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.
In 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.
A 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”.
The 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.
Brazilian military dictator Emilio Garrastazu Medici may well be considered as one of the most prominent examples of the racist and destructive approach to forests that prevailed during the second half of the 20th century in most tropical countries, where similar examples of promoters of such approach can be easily identified throughout Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America.
Since the 19th century the land rights of forest dwellers in Cameroon have not figured in the major decisions by the rulers. All forest lands, defined as vacant and without owners --“vacant et sans maitres”-- became property of the state, and many forests were then opened for timber exploitation, which closed those areas for hunting by Bagyeli, Baka, and other so-called "Pygmy" hunter gathering communities, whose presence across Southern Cameroon predates the colonial State.
On October 1, an indigenous group living in Kenya's Mau Forest is scheduled to have its case heard in the country's High Court. The hearing is the latest attempt by the Ogiek people's long effort to protect their forest homeland from destruction.
The indigenous inhabitants of Rwanda are the Twa, a ‘Pygmy’ people who originally lived as hunters and gatherers in the high altitude forests around the lakes in the Albertine Rift area of central Africa, in the present-day countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In some parts of DRC, Twa are still able to live a forest-based existence. However, in most other areas the Twa have had to abandon their traditional way of life as their forests have been destroyed by logging, agriculture and "development" projects.