Paper Defenses For Global Tropical Forests - 5% Logged "Sustainably"

[hatrack]

NEW YORK, May 25 (IPS) - Less than five percent of the world's tropical forests surveyed in a new report are being managed in a sustainable way, although this still represents a huge improvement over the situation a decade ago.

In other words, "A total area of tropical forest about the size of Germany is in good hands," according to Manoel Sobral Filho, executive director of the Japan-based International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), whose 59 member countries represent 80 percent of the world's tropical forests and more than 90 percent of the global tropical timber trade. The ITTO report "Status of Tropical Forest Management 2005", released Thursday, was four years in the making and covers 814 million hectares of tropical forest in 33 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.

The good news is that between 1988 and 2005, the total area under sustainable management -- defined as maintaining a forest without degrading its value, while allowing society to benefit from its resources -- has grown from less than one million hectares to at least 36 million hectares. Still, some 12 million hectares of tropical forests are converted every year to agriculture, pasture land and other non-forest uses, and many more are degraded by unsustainable or illegal logging and other poor land-use practices.

"The main reason forests are destroyed is for the land underneath," Alistair Sarre, one of the report's editors, told IPS in an interview from Sydney, Australia. "With logging, even when it is unchecked, the forest will eventually re-grow." The report found that ITTO members have developed plans on paper for managing 27 percent of the 353 million hectares designated as production forests. In reality, however, only about 25 million hectares, or seven percent of those forests, are being managed sustainably.

EDIT

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33365

[Peace Patriot]

1. 80% of the world's forests have been destroyed or severely damaged

over the last 100 years. There is no forest on earth that is being logged "sustainably." Our planet is LOSING its forests at an astonishing rate--and with it, their value in biodiversity, clean water, climate stability, soil richness and stability, and beauty--and those are just the things we know something about. The deforestation of the planet is an extremely radical action, brought about mostly by the greed of global corporations, and MOST of the damage is irreversible. Even if we stopped all logging today, we likely could not recover most of the millions of bird, animal, fish and other species that are being driven to extinction or are already gone forever.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't TRY to recover and restore as much biodiversity as we can, as well as all the other invaluable properties of forests that are being lost, particularly climate and soil stability, and clean water.

Private "certification" processes--wood sold under some sort of implied "green label," such as the Forest Stewardship Council--are selling you a lie, both from the point of view of what they are certifying, and the context in which it is occurring. What used to be the best of the labels--the FSC--has been taken over by the World Bank and corporate interests. They are "certifying" vast clear-cutting operations and massive pesticide use. They've "certified" a Swiss-German operation in the Amazon that doubled its rate of logging, after being "certified," and is TARGETING virgin hardwoods, and is putting in vast networks of roads into the last of the virgin forest. The "certification" guidelines are so lax they are laughable. They are encouraging a RETURN to the monoculture of logging, and undermining efforts at economic diversification. And this is typical. The "certification" is PRIVATE, and is paid for by the corporation that is being "certified"--an outrageous conflict of interest. Their treatment of indigenous populations and local communities is wretched. The secrecy of the "certification" process eliminates public participation and undermines local laws.

This bogus private "certification" is the means by which large corporations and financial interests are selling MORE logging, including rapacious logging--and the logging of the LAST unentered and relatively undamaged forests on earth--to a gullible consumer population.

We MUST stop using wood for construction and for paper products. Or we lose the planet. That's the situation. Trees may be a "renewable" resource but FORESTS are not! Humans CANNOT re-create the intricate web of life in an original or relatively untouched forest. And corporations are not even trying to. They are wiping out forests just as fast as they can, and all their biodiversity and other values with them.

It is madness, to say the least. Humans are a species that is too clever by far--with little wisdom to temper our cleverness. We are doing ourselves in. We are destroying our home, and, unless we get onto space travel real fast and find some habitable planets elsewhere--or suddenly become enlightened about Nature's chaos principle (success through wild diversity)--we are finished.

One of the reasons I'm working on election reform is that I know that Americans--like other peoples of the world--FEEL this deeply, that our planet is going down, and desperately want something to be done about it, but cannot get their will enforced, due to non-transparent, corporate-controlled, rigged elections. (The control is now quite direct--using "trade secret," proprietary programming code in the new electronic voting systems). There are many things that individuals and small groups can do, to live more sustainably, but unless we get our government back into the control of the people, we cannot control the larger financial forces that are aimed at planetary destruction, due to out-of-control greed. US corporations are the worst offenders. Only we can control them--we, the people of the US. So we must try to get our government mobilized; and we must first restore the rights that this very corporate-controlled government has taken away, primary among them our right to vote.

Change is not possible--on any front--without transparent, publicly reviewable vote counting. It is ironical that I advocate a return to PAPER ballots. But they don't have to be paper made from trees. They can be made from hemp. (Now THERE's a truly renewable resource!)

[blindpig]

2. Bravo!

:thumbsup: