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No
Forest for the Trees
Gustavo
González
SANTIAGO, (IPS) - A tree plantation is
not a forest, says forestry engineer
Rodrigo Herrera, of Greenpeace-Chile,
one of many environmentalists in Latin
America fighting to preserve native
forests as integral ecosystems -- with
many frustrations and relatively few
advances to show for their efforts.
Africa and South America were the
regions of the world that lost most
natural forest in the 1990s, when
deforestation reached an average annual
rate of 16.1 million hectares, 15.2
million hectares in tropical regions,
according to a report from the United
Nations Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO).
The problem affects all Latin America,
but Argentina, Brazil and Mexico were
among the countries with greatest loss
of forest coverage in the 20th century,
alongside Burma (Myanmar), Congo,
Indonesia, Nigeria, Sudan, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.
In Chile, after 11 years of tedious
bureaucratic back-and-forth in Congress,
just now is the possibility emerging for
a Native Forest Recovery and Forestry
Development Act.
The government, environmental groups and
logging companies have hammered out
positions that are closer to each other,
despite seemingly irreconcilable
demands.
President Ricardo Lagos announced that
in early June he would send to the
Senate a set of guidelines agreed by the
Forestry Panel, a dialogue group that
was on the verge of breaking up in May,
when environmentalists accused the
government of failing to comply with a
protocol accord signed in June 2001.
The presidential guidelines will give
footing to the final step to be taken by
Congress to approve the law, and could
reopen legislative talks on mechanisms
for designating subsidies for native
forest recovery projects, said Hernán
Verscheure, of the National Pro-Defence
of Fauna and Flora Committee (CODEFF),
in an IPS interview.
”The Treasury Ministry wants those
funds to be competitive, which would
limit access to them for small and
medium farmers who own native forests in
remote areas. The citizen groups are
asking that these funds be designated
directly,” said Verscheure,
coordinator of the CODEFF Forests
Programme.
The mechanism the environmentalists are
asking for is the same applied by
dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990)
when he expedited Decree 701 in 1974,
which used subsidies and tax exemptions
to foment large-scale forestry
plantations, turning the country into
one of the world's leading exporters of
lumber and wood pulp.
But unlike the intentions of the new
law, the Pinochet decree proved to be an
incentive to cut down natural-growth
forests in order to plant fast-growing
exogenous species, like the radiated
pine and the Australian eucalyptus. This
became yet another threat to the
survival of Chile's native forests, in
addition to logging for firewood, the
expansion of farmland, and forest fires.
Between 1985 and 1994, the area in Chile
covered by autochthonous forests shrank
from 7.5 million to 5.2 million
hectares, according to a 1996 report by
economist Marcel Claude, then director
of environmental accounting for the
Central Bank. He said that if that pace
continued, the country's native forests
would disappear within 30 years.
The government and the CORMA lumber
company rejected the study, and the
Central Bank fired Claude. And a
subsequent report by the governmental
National Forestry Corporation (CONAF)
stated that the area covered by natural
forests, on the contrary, had expanded
in the period studied from 7.5 million
to 13.4 million hectares.
CODEFF, Greenpeace, Defenders of the
Chilean Forest, Terram Foundation
(created by Claude) and other
environmental groups objected to CONAF's
version of the land-use register because
it included areas of native vegetation
such as bushes, which do not officially
qualify as forests.
Technically, to be considered forests,
the plant species growing in the area
should be a minimum of two metres tall.
Environmental groups issued a
declaration in July 2002 stating that
the decline of autochthonous forests in
Chile was occurring at a faster pace
than even Claude had reported in his
controversial study for the Central
Bank.
In neighbouring Argentina, the authors
of a 1914 inventory calculated that
there were 106 million hectares of
natural forests. By 2002, the total
tree-covered area in the country had
been reduced to 33 million hectares,
according to an official study, which
underscored the rapid deforestation in
the northern provinces in particular.
There are numerous protected forests in
Argentina, but national and provincial
forestry laws have been reformed based
on criteria that give priority to
economic development and investment. As
a result, cultivation of areas with
non-native tree species expanded from
20,000 hectares annually in 1992 to
100,000 hectares in 2001.
In the north of the South American
continent, the Colombian government
issued a decree in October 1996 to
promote reforestation, a law that lifted
the environmental licensing requirement
for tree plantations.
In Venezuela, a country that in 1976
became the first Latin American country
to establish a Ministry of Environment,
48 percent of the national territory is
protected. But only this year was a plan
initiated to take inventory of the
Venezuelan forests, an endeavour costing
eight million dollars and slated to
conclude in 2007.
Brazil, the South American giant, has a
Forest Protection Law establishing that
large rural properties in the Amazon
region must preserve 80 percent of their
forest coverage.
But where laws to protect forests and
promote reforestation are lacking is
along Brazil's Atlantic coast, home to
60 percent of the Brazilian population.
Only seven percent remains of the
original Atlantic forest.
In Mexico, the Vicente Fox government
enacted the General Law on Sustainable
Forest Development in February, unifying
a range of different forestry
regulations. Most importantly, the law
upholds the ban on logging in protected
areas, which cover most of the country's
native forests.
The Lacandona jungle, in the southern
Mexican state of Chiapas, in the past
two centuries lost 75 percent of the two
million hectares of humid forests. The
constant pressure of expanded human
settlement lies behind the region's
prolonged conflict, as well as the
poverty and violence it suffers, say
experts.
In Chile, says activist-expert Herrera,
the expansion of massive plantations of
pine and eucalyptus over the past 25
years has contributed to poverty and
migration of peasant farmers and
indigenous peoples, due to the reduced
production or deteriorated soils of
their lands.
The fragmentation of native forests has
also taken its toll, as it entails the
destruction of ecosystems, loss of
biological, genetic and ecological
diversity, and an alteration of the
landscape that cannot be compensated by
tree plantations, said the Greenpeace
representative.
The ”native forest law”, which began
its long path through the Chilean
Congress in 1992, will allow
autochthonous forest recovery and
management programmes to develop in
harmony with government plans to reduce
rural poverty, says CODEFF activist
Verscheure.
According to the Lagos government, the
legislation will provide benefits in the
form of preservation, recuperation and
development of more than two million
hectares of native forests in the hands
of small and medium rural landowners.
”The long absence of legislation means
that there are not very many people
interested in working and managing
native forests. What this law does is
establish the game rules,” Juan
Eduardo Correa, executive vice-president
of CORMA and active participant in the
Forestry Panel, said in comments to IPS.
”With clear rules, the private sector
will be interested in managing these
forests in order to aid in their
recovery, and to look ahead to a future
in which it is not only a natural
resource that produces lumber, but also
has other uses,” such as eco- tourism,
said the lumber company official
* This report includes contributions
from Diego Cevallos (Mexico), Yadira
Ferrer (Colombia), Humberto Márquez
(Venezuela), Mario Osava (Brazil) and
Marcela Valente (Argentina).
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