The
struggle for paradise
Tropical forests are vanishing fast and the loss of biodiversity gives the
world plenty to worry about. But the fate of the people who live in those
forests is at least as big a concern. Not far
from Bogor, an old town an hour's drive from Indonesia's capital city of
Jakarta, there is a unique institute that describes itself
as a "global knowledge organisation committed to enhancing the
benefits of forests for all people". It was set up in 1993, a year after
the Earth Summit in Rio, and has regional
offices in Brazil, Cameroon and Zimbabwe. David Kaimowitz became its new
director last August after a career spent looking at tropical forests
around the world and a long spell in Costa Rica. Alun Anderson met him
while he was visiting London to ask him how well
the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)was doing--and even
persuaded him to climb a tree in Kew Gardens
What makes CIFOR special?
We are making a major effort to link forest and forestry issues with the
broader social issues of today, including poverty alleviation,
climate change, health issues, violent conflict,
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 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 we
call "biophysically grounded policy-relevant
research". We are trying to reach policy makers with new
ways of thinking about forest and forestry issues, but we want to
make sure that everything we say has a strong
ecological and scientific basis.
We have on staff about 60 researchers, but that's just the tip of the
iceberg as we are really "an institute without
walls". At any given time we have somewhere
between 250 and 300 researchers who are being partially
financed by CIFOR and are doing research in collaboration with our
scientists.
Have you had any successes in influencing policies?
Forests
seem under threat everywhere.
Yes, although we have only been around for a short time. We have what I
call a "wholesale" and a "retail" policy. There are only a small
number of institutions that have a major effect
on shaping the global forest agenda: the World
Bank, the FAO, the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), and the
conventions on biological diversity and climate change. So on the
wholesale level, we've been trying to influence
these institutions. We've see a big shift in the
World Bank strategy as a result of our work, mostly by getting it to
recognise how its other activities end up affecting forests. In the
GEF, most forest lending used to go to creating
core environmentally protected areas.
We've been working very hard for recognition that most of the biodiversity
in the world is and always will be outside core protected areas. We
need to give more attention to managing
biodiversity in plantations, and to secondary
thinking.
At the retail level we are working with forest communities around the world,
and trying to influence national policies. Recently we have focused
on all the different ways that forests can help to
reduce poverty. There are tens or hundreds of
millions of people who use forests as a safety net. When there is an
economic crisis, a drought, a war, they fall back on hunting,
gathering and extracting to make ends meet. If for part of the year
they don't have crops, they may go out and look
for mushrooms or rattan to sell.
Medicinal plants are very important too. For many people in the world,
plants are the main source of medical treatment.
Then we have to remember how easily these people can be hurt by climate
change. Small farmers in southern Africa won't be able to grow maize
any more because it will be too dry. People in the
north-east of Brazil will find droughts occurring
more frequently. We are looking at all these different
links and we are saying strategically how important each one is.
We think of forests as peaceful places but you
mention a link between forests and violence.
Violent conflict is very common in tropical forested areas around the world.
These tend to be remote, have a limited government presence, often have
lots of ethnic minorities and indigenous people, and lack clear
property rights. When oil is discovered or timber
becomes very important or diamonds are found or
drugs are grown, then there really isn't a governmental
framework in place that can manage how these resources will be used.
Very quickly violence erupts. This is true around the world. We can think of
Mindanao in the Philippines, north-eastern India, northern Burma,
Colombia is an extreme case, Chiapas in Mexico,
Liberia and Sierra Leone in Africa.
Are these problems being addressed?
We believe that you can either invest a relatively small amount of money
now, giving clear property rights over forest resources to local
people as well as giving them government and
social services. Or you can spend huge amounts of
money in violent conflicts in the future. Governments
haven't invested a lot of money in these areas, because not many
people are living in them compared to urban areas,
but they don't think about the multiplying effect
of violence in this areas. Take Chiapas in Mexico, where
the area directly affected contains fewer that 250,000 people. If the
government had incorporated rather than marginalised these people 15
years ago, the guerrilla war would never have begun. It has now
destabilised the Mexican financial markets and created a political
crisis for the entire country.
Have you had any direct personal experience of
violence in forests?
In Nicaragua, I went to a meeting that we organised to try to help resolve
the indigenous Meskito people's fight over land.
You may recall the US administration armed the
Meskito Indians as part of their effort to overthrow
the Sandinista government in the 1980s, but of course the Meskito
were mostly concerned about their land and keeping
out people who wanted to exploit its timber and
minerals. After the Sandinistas left they still had the
same concerns. I rode out to find some commanders of the Meskito who
were supposed to come to the meeting and was detained by several
dozen heavily armed guerrilla fighters. The
amusing thing was that after hours of
discussion they asked if I could guarantee their safety from the army if
they came into town for the meeting. And I said: "Look
you are the people with the automatic rifles, I am
standing here with nothing. If you can't guarantee
your own safety, there is nothing I can do."
Did they come to the meeting?
Yes, the meeting went very well. Nicaragua is discussing a law on
indigenous people's territorial rights. It is absolutely central to
bringing peace to the country for the government
to recognise indigenous people's right to their
own lands.
Are there any signs elsewhere in the world that
forest rights are being recognised as essential to prevent conflict?
There are hundreds of millions of people who live in 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. For
example, in Latin America, around one million square
kilometres of land, an area the size of Bolivia, 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 we are still losing 10 to 15 million hectares of forest
per year, an area about the size of Greece, so
we need to work faster and harder.
Scientists tend to think of conserving forests and biodiversity as
requiring pristine biological reserves free from any people. But you are
saying that we should be conserving forests by giving
rights to the people who live from them.
First, modern ecological, anthropological and archaeological work is
showing that there is much less pristine forest out there than we formerly
believed. Most of the tropical forests have been shaped by human
presence. Most of the natural mahogany in the pristine areas of Latin
America has grown up alongside shifting cultivation. In areas that were
thought to be untouched by humans we are finding archaeological remains of
large populations of indigenous peoples.
Then it has recently been estimated that something like a billion people
live in the world's 25 areas of greatest ecological diversity. If we are
going to maintain that biodiversity in the long
term, then we need to get the people to manage it. Undoubtedly, there are
species that will only be able to survive in
large pristine areas, which means that protected areas will always play a
major role in any conservation strategy. But much more could be done to
protect diversity in disturbed landscapes and landscape mosaics.
It's important too to ask why we are protecting this diversity. One of the
main reasons is because there are thousands of
species out there that local, poor people depend on, and they have a real
need to maintain those species
and the ecosystems that support them.
When CIFOR scientists go to look at forest
communities isn't there a risk that you'll be seen as outsiders imposing
your own values?
We have to think about what is valuable to people in those communities.
What do they think is important in terms of the
health of these forests?
Some
people in our biodiversity programme, for example, have developed
new
methods of assessment which basically involve sitting down with local
people and trying find out what species are important to them, why, and
what priority they give to them.
What is the role of scientists in projects that
are ultimately designed to set policy?
Science has a very important role to play because it is only with good
scientific research that we will be able to show that many
traditional ways of managing the forest are in
fact environmentally sustainable, and that many
of the things that small-scale foresters are doing out there right now
have advantages compared to some of the more forester-driven or
large-company-driven forestry activities.
What sort of young scientists join your
programmes, and do they get overwhelmed by the enormous economic and
political dimension that complicates ecological questions?
We look for people who are serious researchers, but have a sense of
wanting to make a difference. And we look for people from developing
countries or who can collaborate well with developing countries'
scientists and local communities. We are not
looking for loners but people who can be good facilitators.
We often find that people from biology and forestry begin to think that to
make a difference they need to abandon their training and become a
political scientist or economist, but I think
that is quite wrong. There is an incredibly
important role for ecologists, biologists, hydrologists and meteorologists,
but what is very important is that they do their
work in a way that helps create better policies.
And as an economist by training how do you feel
about science?
I am still working hard to catch up!
You can find more about CIFOR at
www.cgiar.org/cifor
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