This dossier was produced for the International Agricultural Show (SIA) in Paris, February 2011.
CIRAD and the International Year of Forests
News
Questions for:
"From natural to planted forests: a continuum of situations"
Alain Billand : "Forest development involves both social and economic issues"
All about tropical forests
The issues
Forests are at the heart of a wide range of activities, investments and issues which have become of global interest. Each country, each community and each profession has its own particular approach to ‘their’ forest. Farmers, loggers, charcoal producers, livestock producers and hunter-gatherers: a billion of our planet’s inhabitants make their living directly from forests, while administrations, non-governmental organisations and investors are involved in their management. Conservation and sustainable management of tropical forests is necessary to ensure that these activities can continue, but the different stakeholders have different priorities and can be in competition for the resources that forests offer. Coordination, achieved through negotiation between all the stakeholders, is therefore essential to ensure this inheritance can be passed on to future generations. Simply ensuring effective legal access to the goods and services forests offer is not enough; there must also be fair distribution of the potential benefits.
How can we avoid deforestation?
Tropical forests provide environmental services for the entire planet but also depend on Sovereign states, for whom forests represent an economic resource. They are also used by millions of people who enjoy access thanks to individual or collective common law rights. Consequently, it quickly becomes apparent that the idea of transforming tropical forests into sanctuaries, preserving them just as they are, is impractical…Unless a means can be found for compensating fully and fairly those stakeholders concerned for the loss of their property or access rights, while allowing the poorest members of society to substantially improve their living conditions.
Finding sustainable management solutions
The challenge is to find a way to preserve forests while supporting local social and economic development and avoiding the gradual diminution of forest resources. This means finding good compromises between production and strict preservation, and therefore protecting the interests of different stakeholders. Promoting ‘sustainable forests’ which preserve the environmental services provided by forestry ecosystems can be achieved in a wide range of ways and can use a number of different instruments: sustainable forestry techniques, certification schemes for management methods, promoting the environmental services provided by forests, planning land use and innovative financial mechanisms (some of them negotiated at a global level).
An international regulatory scheme for forests?
There is in fact an international approach to forests but it is fragmentary, drawing on a number of formal and informal regulations and standards of behaviour which influence the practices of the stakeholders involved. However, the various principles and institutions around which international debate is organised address only a limited set of themes concerning the world’s forests. The absence of any international convention on forests represents one facet of this problem, but it is not the only one. Tropical forests are a territorial resource supporting a range of activities and are therefore ill-suited to a single regulatory regime.
Essentially the difficulty rests primarily on what we can describe as ‘forestry policies’ in developing countries. These policies have limited scope compared to other policies, notably those concerned with finance, agriculture and social affairs. These other policies are an expression of a number of collective choices made by the societies concerned, and are based on their expectations of economic growth, justice and sovereignty.