Restoration
Plantations and tree crop commodities
Enhanced nutrition and food security
Biodiversity, safeguarding and conservation
Nationally determined contributions
Bioenergy and biomaterials
Blue carbon and peatlands
Climate change adaptation
Landscape governance
Gender
Silvopastoral systems
Market-based agroforestry-forestry
Farm-forest policy interface
Agroecology
Livelihood trajectory modelling and assessment
Inclusive finance and business models
Innovating finance for sustainable landscapes
Public and private commitments to zero deforestation
Orphan tree crops
Effectiveness of approaches to sustainable supply
Quality of FTA research for development
Sentinel landscapes
Foresight
Seeds and seedlings delivery systems
Smallholder tree-crop commodities
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Posted by
FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM |
A national policy dialogue cohosted by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) on July 13 brought together more than 200 policy makers, scientists, business owners, craftsmen and more to discuss the potential benefits of Forest, Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) licenses for small and medium enterprises in Jakarta, Indonesia. The event was also supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA).
Originally published at CIFOR.org.
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Posted by
FTA |
By Leona Liu, originally posted at CIFOR’s Forests News
A recent study presents the most comprehensive scientific analysis of illegal logging to date. Its findings indicate that one third of tropical timber traded globally comes from illegal deforestation.
“Forestry crime including corporate crimes and illegal logging account for up to $152 billion every year, more than all official development aid combined,” said Erik Solheim, Head of UN Environment, one of the partner organizations supporting the assessment.
More than 40 scientists around the world, including several scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), produced the report. The study was coordinated by the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) in association with the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF).
Researchers found that bilateral trade agreements between producer and consumer countries- like the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan (FLEGT), which requires timber products imported into the EU be legally sourced – have prompted shifts in the timber trade from industrial export-oriented markets to small-scale logging operations for the domestic market.
This pattern can be observed in Cameroon, Africa’s largest exporter of tropical hardwood to the EU, most of which is sawn timber that goes to Italy and Spain. Due to a lack of government regulation concerning the domestic wood sector, approximately half of the country’s timber is sold on the black market.
Timber produced for domestic consumption is generally absent from official statistics and produced without a valid permit. But now, under a voluntary partnership agreement signed with the EU under FLEGT, Cameroon is developing the systems needed to control, verify and license legal timber.
This video documents the challenges facing small-scale loggers in Cameroon. The country’s entire domestic timber sector is marked by informal practices, from felling trees to selling sawnwood. Although informal methods do not respect all the national regulations, they do not necessarily break the law either. This is why researchers prefer the word ‘informal’ to ‘illegal.’
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Posted by
cifor |
This paper discusses how participatory policy-making processes such as the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) negotiations are and should be organised to foster political legitimacy and support. The VPAs are bilateral agreements between the European Union (EU) and timber producing countries. VPAs constitute a cornerstone in EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) programme, the most important tool for the EU to address illegal logging problems. The EU requires that national VPA negotiations include participation by the relevant stakeholders. Based on primary data, we compare the VPA negotiations in Cameroon (2006–2009) with three different ‘ideal’ models of participatory policy-making: the rationalist, the communicative incremental and the mixed model, which we expect have different implications for legitimacy. We conclude that the Cameroonian process is closest to a rationalist model with elements of the mixed model, and that this has increased legitimacy and support only to a limited extent. For future processes in other countries, we recommend stronger elements of the mixed model, and more careful considerations about stakeholder identification processes; how to adapt policy-process to specific contexts; and how to strengthen communication and information flows. Considerations about these elements could also strengthen the applicability of the ideal models.
Source: CIFOR publications
