Let us protect our forest wealth

SPEAKING at a recent conference, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse admitted that we have failed to strike a balance between the needs of increasing population and forest management.

This resulted a reduction of our forest cover from 80% to a 20% within a century. He added that the decreasing forest cover had created many problems in the country.

Sensible people like the PM will agree that preserving natural forests and their species is a desirable goal. The huge variety of species they contain may be our future food, sources of medicines or other products. The genetic variety of species is yet a largely untapped reserve of possibilities.

But our virgin forests are worthy of protection in themselves: those lucky enough to visit them are often profoundly affected, returning with a strong commitment to conservation. I believe that the extinction of our forest loss is not a threat to be put off for worrying about some time in the future: It should be thought of and planned now.

Broader social issues

We should be making a major effort to link forest and forestry issues with the broader social issues of today, including poverty alleviation, climate change, health issues and macroeconomics.

These are topics that people don't normally think of as being related to forests, forestry and forest-dependent people. But they are linked in very important ways.

That means we must make a special effort to bring together biologists, ecologists, foresters, anthropologists and economists, which is really the only way you can work on these problems.

It's what scientists call "biophysically grounded policy-relevant research'. We should try to reach policy makers with new ways of thinking about forest and forestry issues, making sure that everything we say has a strong ecological and scientific basis.

Only a little over 20 per cent of our country's land area is covered by forest. Yet despite the many efforts made by governments, even this little portion of the landscape continues to be characterized by problems of unsustainable forestry, deforestation and illegal logging.

After many years of dedicated attention to these problems, and to forest management generally, government, NGOs and communities have learnt that real and lasting improvement requires progress on more fundamental, structural issues underlying the forest sector.

In recent years, two principal approaches have been used to conserve tropical rain forests: strict protection and sustainable development. World Wildlife Fund have launched a movement at the end of the 20th century for all countries in the developing world to set aside 10 per cent of their forests in protected areas.

Yet protecting these designated areas is costly, and even impossible in some areas. Communities living near the rain forests may rely on the forest for food and subsistence. When restricted from using forest land, these communities find it more difficult to meet their primary needs.

Community-based programs

To lessen these adverse effects, I believe, we can develop community-based programs that provide sustainable economic alternatives to destructive harvesting and land use.

One alternative for some forests is sustainable rain forest logging, in which the trees logged can be carefully selected to ensure a minimal impact on the forest ecosystem.

The forest communities can also harvest and sell sustainable rain forest products, such as seeds from palms. Still others can explore medicinal plants and drug development as ways to strengthen and diversify their economies.

Many forest communities can host eco tourists-vacationers who focus on nature study and outdoor activities that have minimal ecological impact-as a way to attract economic influx to their region while still preserving their fragile rain forest homeland. The ideas are endless.

Evidence from Mexico and China, two countries that have taken important steps in this direction, demonstrate that when communities and local people have clear rights to manage their trees and forest resources and to trade in their products and services, forestry plays a central role in enhancing their livelihoods.

It is also important to recognize that these are issues that fundamentally concern national sovereignty, where the Government has exclusive rights to establish property and governance systems to fit its own national agenda.

However, it is unlikely that large-scale conservation will be achieved without engaging local people in marketing their forest products and services.

If we look at the current world forest picture, we realize that rural communities and indigenous peoples are successfully asserting control over forestland, now owning or officially administering at least 25 per cent of the forests - nearly 300 million hectares.

That trend is expected to accelerate over the next several years. This is especially important in light of the fact that forest communities are motivated to protect their forest assets when they have opportunities to generate income by marketing forest products and services.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who live in our forested areas who need land rights, not only to improve their livelihoods but to give them a strong incentive to conserve and manage those forests. There is some good news from other countries. For example, in Latin America, around one million square kilometres of land has been titled as indigenous territory.

In India some 35,000 village organisations have received increasing access and rights to about 8 to 10 million hectares of forest.

In China and Vietnam they are turning over degraded lands to communities so they can reforest them. But in Sri Lanka, we are still losing considerable amount of forest every year, so we need to work faster and harder.

Let us pick up the pace and save more of the forest before it's too late. We have this unique forest that is still intact, we have this unique opportunity as Sri Lankans and I think that also means we have a responsibility to plan for it, for all time.