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Forestry experts and environmentalists meet in Geneva next week to try
to salvage the floundering Tropical Forestry Action Plan. If they succeed,
they will not only renew fading hopes that forests and forest peoples might
survive, they will also create a new strategy for the way in which development
work is carried out in Third World countries.

Aid organisations and environmentalists breathed a collective sigh of
relief when the TFAP was born in 1985. The plan promised both conservation
and sustainable development of the world’s rainforests. But, judged by its
own objectives, the plan has failed.

Deforestation is taking place on a greater scale than ever. The interests
of governments – both those that give money to the scheme and those that
receive money from it – dominate the TFAP at the expense of forest peoples
and the landless poor. Its projects are poorly prepared and implemented.
And both understaffing and underfunding have crippled coordination of the
work.

The Geneva meeting follows the publication last year of three reviews
of the TFAP. Two were commissioned by organisations that founded the plan
and the third by the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), one of the TFAP’s
harshest critics. All three recommended substantial restructuring of the
TFAP and the way it operates. The founders, critics and representatives
of donor and recipient countries are now meeting in Geneva to try to thrash
out their differences in the hope of creating a ‘new look’ TFAP that achieves
its goals of conservation and sustainable development of forests.

But balancing conservation against the exploitation of natural resources
is always difficult. In forests, where the interests of inhabitants, timber
merchants, landless urban refugees, environmentalists and governments often
collide, the balancing act seems impossible. When the TFAP was set up, it
acknowledged that there were many more claims on forests than just those
of industry. Its original guidelines recommended that ‘representatives of
indigenous peoples’ organisations, and of governmental ministries or other
agencies responsible for their welfare, should be involved in national TFAP
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The founders of the TFAP recognised the need for land reform and agricultural
alternatives to ‘shifted cultivation’ (attempts by the displaced and landless
urban poor to convert forests into agricultural land). They identified policies
adopted in certain countries – such as the practice of actually encouraging
forest clearance by financial incentives – as misguided.

But the TFAP ignored its own guidelines. Last year, the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), the founding organisation responsible for
coordinating the TFAP, commissioned the former Swedish prime minister, Ola
Ullsten, to review the operation of the plan. The Ullsten review said that,
despite its wide-ranging aims, in practice the plan had ‘too narrow an approach
to the forestry sector, especially with regard to ecological and environmental
issues, and too little attention to its linkages with other sectors’.

As for the plan’s stated aim of ‘design by discussion’, Ullsten found
that foreign experts often outnumbered local professional staff on field
missions, which cost $700 000 per country. The Ullsten review concluded:
‘The approach savours of arrogance, with foreign experts telling the country
what is good for it instead of creating a dialogue aimed at working out
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A second review of the TFAP was produced by another of its founders,
the Washington-based World Resources Institute, which researches environmental
policy. The WRI identified the same failing. They found that non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) were consulted under the TFAP in only 7 out of 25 countries
examined in the WRI review – and in 6 of these the consultations took place
at the instigation of the NGOs themselves.

Perhaps most serious of all, the TFAP has had no impact on deforestation.
In 1980, scientists estimated that the world was losing 11 million hectares
of tropical forest a year. The rate today is 14 to 20 million hectares a
year. Marcus Colchester, co-author of a third review of the TFAP by the
World Rainforest Movement, claims that the TFAP has sometimes encouraged
deforestation by promoting the building of roads through forests to serve
new forest-based industries. The roads then become a migration route for
shifted cultivators in their search for land (see This Week, 31 March 1990).

Money to save the world’s forests has never flowed so freely. Funds
channelled through the TFAP have doubled to $1.2 billion in the five years
of its existence. Developing countries increasingly view the TFAP as a way
of increasing the aid they receive and of expanding their forest-based industries.
According to the WRI review, the World Bank is tripling its investment in
forestry. Britain has pledged Pounds sterling 100 million a year to the
TFAP and the US increased its funding by $22 million from 1988 to 1989.

At the same time, public awareness of the need to save forests has never
been greater. As the aid grew so did the number of countries joining the
TFAP. Today, 81 of the 125 countries with tropical forests have joined and
more are expected to follow.

So what went wrong? A look at the history of the TFAP suggests some
of the answers. The TFAP’s roots lie in two distinct and initially competing
initiatives in the early 1980s. In 1983 the FAO’s Committee on Forest Development
in the Tropics asked the FAO to design an ‘action programme’ to identify
the key problems in the rainforests and to suggest solutions. The following
year, quite separately, the WRI in Washington formed an international task
force to develop a programme for ‘arresting and ultimately reversing the
destruction of tropical forests’. The task force began work in December
1984 and, by June the following year, it had drafted a report called Tropical
Forests: A Call for Action. The World Bank and the UN Development Programme
(UNDP), who were the other two founders of today’s TFAP, and some national
aid agencies supported the WRI’s task force. But the FAO declined to participate.

Prompted by the activities of the task force, the FAO went on to publish
its ‘Tropical Forestry Action Plan’ in October 1985 – the same month the
WRI published its Call for Action.

Nearly two years later, in July 1987, the FAO, the World Bank, the UNDP,
the WRI and the Rockefeller Foundation finally called a joint meeting on
tropical forests, at the Bellagio Conference Centre in Italy. Here, they
at last set up the TFAP in its present, amalgamated form. The Bellagio delegates
drew from both the FAO and the WRI reports to formulate a set of guidelines
for the TFAP.

The delegates now assembling in Geneva who watched the confused birth
of the TFAP in 1985 must feel a sense of deja vu. The publication of the
Ullsten and WRI reviews within a month of each other mirrors the disunity
and duplication of effort that was apparent in 1985. Robert Winterbottom,
who wrote the WRI’s review, notes that in 1987 the Bellagio delegates had
divergent expectations of the TFAP, and these persist today: ‘The FAO and
the various aid agencies viewed the TFAP primarily as a mechanism to harmonise
development assistance in forestry, while the WRI and others saw the TFAP
as a vehicle to launch a broadly based programme to address the root causes
of deforestation.’

The architects of the plan are now going back to the drawing board.
This time, they will take account of the opinions of the reviews and other
TFAP watchers in an attempt to solve the TFAP’s problems. The reviews concluded
that the TFAP has insufficient representation from citizens’ groups, forest
peoples and conservationists. They identified the FAO as part of that problem,
but their proposed solutions differed widely.

The FAO’s Ullsten review recommended new guidelines that make involvement
of NGOs mandatory. Winterbottom, however, thinks this dodges the real problem.
‘The issue is not about new guidelines versus old guidelines. If we had
adhered to the old guidelines the TFAP would have achieved more. But we
are not sticking to them.’ And Marcus Colchester of the WRM will point out
in Geneva that many communities of forest peoples have not yet organised
to form NGOs and so will remain unrepresented. ‘The TFAP has still not recognised
that local people must have control over their own resources,’ he says.

The Geneva meeting will also have to discuss the sensitive issue of
whether the TFAP should move out of the FAO. The plan suffered from having
its coordinating unit housed in the forestry department of the FAO. The
unit has at no time received adequate funding. Nor has it enjoyed the independence
it needs to work effectively.

Even if forestry were given a larger slice of the FAO’s budget, it is
not clear that the head of forestry would have allocated more to the TFAP
coordinating unit. The TFAP seems to have been the FAO’s lowest priority.
Two people ran the unit for the first year, hiring consultants to help them
out. Yet by the end of the second year, 40 countries had joined the TFAP
and the plan has been snowballing ever since.

There are other problems in being part of the FAO. The FAO’s main job
is to provide technical advice, training and equipment for development work.
The TFAP was meant to address much more than technical issues but, because
the FAO viewed it as a way of attracting and focusing forestry aid, it paid
scant attention to non-forestry issues. For example, the WRI recommended
in 1985 that at least 30 per cent of the $8 billion proposed for funding
the TFAP’s first five years should be spent on agriculture-related items,
such as support for land reform and sustainable farming practices. This
recommendation was simply never carried out. In practice, 32 per cent of
the funding has been invested in forest industries.

Despite the drawbacks, the Ullsten review recommended that the TFAP
should stay within the FAO. However, Ullsten said it should leave the forestry
division and be made a separate division. This, said the review, should
ensure the right status, autonomy and funding for the TFAP. Matt Heering,
who heads the TFAP’s coordinating unit, agrees with the Ullsten recommendation,
but senses difficulties ahead, not least the problem of deciding who has
the last say in decisions concerning the TFAP.

Turning to wider issues, the Ullsten review said the TFAP’s outlook
is too short-term. It proposed that the meaning of the ‘P’ in ‘TFAP’ be
changed to ‘programme’ instead of ‘plan’. The policy of the programme should
be made and moni tored by an international, multidisciplinary steering committee
– although, again, the team failed to clarify who would report to whom in
the new structure.

One of this steering committee’s first jobs would be to create ‘capacity-building
projects’ to satisfy certain preconditions which the Ullsten review identified
as essential if the TFAP is to work. These include establishing a forest
administration, immediate measures to stop deforestation, the setting up
of protected areas, a database on forest information, a framework on forestry
law, making maps and inventories of forest resources, carrying out ecological
studies and forestry research and obtaining demographic data on forest dwellers.

In addition, Ullsten recommends that the new TFAP division should grow
to about 30 staff and that a code of conduct for donors and recipients be
drawn up.

The WRI wanted more radical change. The new structure should be independent
of the FAO and consist of international and national steering committees
with separate secretariats. The WRI’s international steering committee would
be a multidisciplinary team that met annually to decide policy changes,
monitor progress and quality, and report to the public. The national steering
committees would ensure that forest dwellers and citizens’ groups, as well
as industries, get a chance to contribute to national forestry plans. Being
outside the FAO would make the plan less accommodating to the interests
of existing governments and more forthright in attacking politically sensitive
issues, such as land reform.

The TFAP is based on the optimistic premise that there need be no conflict
between prudent exploitation and the conservation of forests. What is now
needed is for governments, citizens’ groups, forest dwellers, conservationists,
timber companies and foresters to put their heads together to devise, for
their country, a management plan that satisfies all who have an interest
in the forest. But until now, achieving that all-important dialogue has
proved to be almost impossible.

How to bridge the gulf that separates forest peoples, government forestry
departments, forest industries, UN organisations and donors will prove to
be a central theme of the meeting in Geneva.