Developing countries are increasingly relinquishing control of tropical forests to their inhabitants in a trend that is helping to preserve endangered forests, a new report by Forest Trends, a Washington-based non-profit group, says.
The study was published just before delegates from 59 countries meet in Geneva on Monday to renegotiate the International Tropical Timber Agreement, a United Nations treaty first agreed in 1984 in response to concern about the destruction of tropical forests.
The report criticized the new draft agreement for not mentioning local communities efforts to protect tropical forests. It called on negotiators to give indigenous people a larger role in policy-making as well as strengthened rights to produce and sell forest products.
– Ownership rights seem to be one of the big factors explaining why national parks created by governments are not faring as well as community-policed areas, said Arvind Khare of Forest Trends. The Forest Trends report calls for a move away from a model of “wilderness” preservation borrowed from the US to one in which communities have increased control over their resources.
Meanwhile in a piece on preserving tropical forests, The Economist writes that the worlds rainforests are owned by the mainly poor countries they cover – but at the same time they are a global asset. Cutting them down for profit, or to free land for farming, is a tempting source of income for their owners.
Left intact, on the other hand, the forests are sinks that withhold carbon from the atmosphere, mitigating the problem of man-made global warming; and they are rich storehouses of biodiversity, another global resource, as well. Plainly, a balance between local and global interests must be struck. At the moment, such mechanisms barely exist.
The Amazon Reserves and Protected Areas project, a partnership between Brazils government and international organizations such as the World Bank, is supposed to invest 400 million US dollar over ten years in protecting forests. The plan should safeguard 14 percent of the rainforest, but mainly in areas remote from the front of deforestation.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
