If forests are to be treated as carbon sinks, it is crucial that their value to developing countries is understood. For a lot is at stake.

Forests in the South are quite different from those in the North. They are not wilderness areas. Nor are they plantations of one or two species. They aren’t passive carbon receptacles. In the tropical regions, where most Southern nations are located, forests are dynamic. Millions of indigenous people across the world live inside forests, depend on them for food, medicinal preparations, pastures for livestock, and a million other articles of daily use. Their lifestyles have been sustainable — the forest has taken care of their needs, and they have limited their use of the forest to a level that doesn’t harm it. And now, the future of these people — and the forests — is once more at the mercy of governments and corporations. This time, CDM-struck.

Forests of the people
In India, the forestry debate is at least 30 years old. It has two main elements: the rights of villagers living in and around forests; and the role of industry. It first came to the fore in the early 1970s in the form of the Chipko movement, which acquired international fame. Women in villages of the Garhwal region of the Himalaya began protesting against the timber lobby walking away with trees from forests where the villagers had traditional rights. The movement was not about protecting trees but using them — the villagers’ livelihood was tied up with their access to the forests. It was, quite simply, an issue of survival.

Management of forests and wildlife has been very controversial because it has refused to take into account the needs of people living in and around the forests. Almost all national parks and sanctuaries witness violent conflicts, as a matter of course, between villagers living in or around the forest. That is because the state-controlled forest departments do not recognise their rights to the forests. Forest-dwelling communities have a stake in the health of the forest and can invaluably contribute to protect and conserve it. And when their rights are not recognised, they cannot be prevented from poaching upon and so chopping up this wealth by any means. (India’s most wanted man is a sandalwood smuggler/poacher called Veerappan. Two state governments as well as the Central government — employing an array of forces including specialised commandos — have failed to catch him for more than 20 years.)

The question is: how do you regenerate the forests? Forest departments in India own 70 million hectares of land. India’s forest policy calls for one-third of the total land to be covered with forests. Yet forest cover is alarmingly sparse, even as communities keep getting thrown out. The government has come up with joint forest management (JFM) projects to involve communities. But this hasn’t taken off. The forest department dictates how involved communities can be. This has reduced JFM schemes to tokenism.

Even today, India’s pulp and paper industry gets about half of its raw material from government forest lands. About a quarter comes from farmers and a growing proportion (about 10 per cent at present) is imported. By 2005, wood requirements for pulp, paper and newsprint are projected to rise to 28 million cubic metres (cum) per year. Forestlands yield only 4 cum per hectare per year. Plantations yield 10 cum per hectare per year. But private land accounts for 150 million hectares, with another 1.5 million hectares of degraded forest being regenerated by villages under JFM. Wood markets can benefit industry and villages. But unlike the governments, farmers need assured markets if they get into the long-term business of plantations. The biggest threat to this win-win situation is allowing industry access to forestland for plantations. Conservationists are strongly opposed to this long-standing demand of the industry.

For industry, therefore, flexible mechanisms like CDM are a gift from heaven. Using now the rhetoric of globalisation, they can gain inroads into forest department land. The lure of revenues generated from these companies is something governments and forest departments in India are unlikely to resist. In the past, industry never bothered to involve communities in its plantation schemes. Now it is making politically correct noises about their participation.

Essentially, the question is one of forest ownership and management. If the flexible mechanisms are going to be used to deny forest dwellers their traditional rights to forests and allow private companies to profit from it, it would undermine a very basic tenet of sustainability: providing livelihood to the most vulnerable people through moves to mitigate climate change. Negotiators from the South have to remember that they have a duty to defend the entitlements of the poorest of their poor. They have to ensure that the flexible mechanism funds are not used only for corporate lucre. It isn’t a task that they can’t achieve.

Ten years ago, in the Rio Summit, there was a move from the North for a legally binding convention to manage the world’s forests. Western NGOs like Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth supported this demand. But the South, especially India and Malaysia, successfully opposed the forest convention. They saw it for what it was: an effort to dictate forest management in the South for the benefit of the timber industry of the North. But the forest convention came back to haunt the South in 1997, when the IPCC recommended negotiations for a forest convention. While the EU and Canada supported the move vociferously, the US and Brazil opposed it. G77 was a divided house over the issue. The disagreement between the governments was over control of the global timber market.

The Southern NGOs came up with a remarkable stand on the issue. Under the stewardship of the Centre for Science and Environment, they signed a statement denouncing the move for the forest convention — this was quite a departure from the previous support for the convention from several Southern NGOs. The convention would, they argued, lead to toothless policies. It would approve of the lowest common denominator as the determinant of sustainable forest management practices, centralising forest management in cities at a time when forest management desperately needed to be decentralised to communities.