Ninety seven percent of the land area of Papua New Guinea still is customary land owned by the people, who voluntarily give 3% to the government to build schools and other public buildings. This lush land with more than 700 recognised culturally and physically distinct peoples, each with their own language and traditional culture, used to have traditional landowners exercising sustainable forest management with little interference from outside.
Bulletin articles
For years forest activists have focused their attention --and rightly so-- on the World Bank's role in forest destruction. Those efforts have to a certain extent been instrumental in the introduction of a number of positive policy changes within the Bank, which have at least meant an improvement in World Bank lending.
The dense, moist forests of the Central African Republic cover about four million hectares. Although the country has maintained loan arrangements with the IMF dating back to the 1980’s, it came under increased pressure when the Central African Republic signed a three-year, $66 million loan agreement with the IMF in 1998. The IMF has encouraged the Central African Republic to increase exploitation of forest and mineral resources.
For over a decade, the Ivory Coast has been under the influence of IMF structural adjustment programs, of which intensification of exports has been a significant factor. The 1990s saw the heightened pursuit of fiscal and structural reform in the Ivory Coast. The Ivory Coast devalued their currency in 1994 and eliminated export taxes in compliance with the IMF’s adjustment program and in 1995 the country liberalised its domestic markets.
Beginning in 1983, Ghana has been implementing IMF structural adjustment programs focused on export-led growth, which has included measures to devalue the currency and remove various barriers to trade. While this has resulted in significant economic gains, it has also meant severe detrimental consequences for the rainforests and forest-dwelling people of this western African nation. Ghana’s most recent three-year, $239 million loan from the IMF was initiated in 1999, and modified in 2000.
Called the “naturalist’s promised land” by French explorer Phillippe de Commerson in 1771, Madagascar is one of the most ecologically rich countries in the world. Twelve thousand species are found on the island the size of Texas; 80 percent are endemic, existing nowhere else. Nine new species of lemur were recently discovered in Madagascar, placing the country only behind Brazil in the number of primates that call it home.
A project is in progress to build a number of roads in Kachin State in return for huge logging concessions. While improving and expanding the infrastructure in Kachin State is much needed, the impact of this deal on the environment could prove to be disastrous.
Tapping trees for resins has a long history in Southeast Asia. The traditional tapping practice involves cutting a hole in the base of the trunk and using fire to stimulate a continuing flow. Resin from Cambodia is traded throughout Indochina and to other parts of Southeast Asia and China.
As we had reported in our last bulletin (December 2001), the possibility of a moratorium on logging was looming on Cambodian timber industry’s horizon, which had previously attempted a "voluntary restructuring process" that proved to be a failure.
Last year the Vietnam Paper Corporation (Vinapimex) announced an ambitious plan to expand the pulp and paper industry in Vietnam. With a total cost of more than US$1 billion, the plan involves 15 new pulp and paper production projects. If they were all built, the projects would raise Vinapimex's annual paper production capacity from the current 171,000 tons to 419,000 tons.
The pulp and paper industry in Vietnam presently produces a total of approximately 360,000 tons of paper a year. Vinapimex hopes to increase this figure to more than one million tons by 2010.
The Belize National Environmental Appraisal Committee (NEAC) announced in November 2001 that the government has granted environmental clearance for the construction of a proposed hydro-scheme (see WRM bulletin 44) slated for an undisturbed river valley within the Central Maya Mountains near the Guatemalan border, conditional upon the development of an Environmental Compliance Plan (ECP), which will incorporate the mitigation measures identified in the environmental impact assessment, along with others recommended during the evaluation process.
The Mexican authorities themselves have recognised, through the Secretariat for the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), the seriousness of the Mexican situation in terms of forest loss.