WWF Works Behind Scenes for African Forests
9/25/99
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Title: World Wildlife Fund works behind scenes for African forests
Source: Earth Times News Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: September 25, 1999
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is working the quiet way to save the
Central African rainforests, and it needs all the help it can get. In
particular its ally, the World Bank, needs to follow through on a key
role in what looks like a strong model for other efforts in the
developing world.
In Africa the WWF suspects that the broad public pressure campaigns
it has used in the West, under the logo of its cuddly panda symbol,
won't work. Shrewdly, the group fears that the Central African
countries are still too isolated from conservation sentiment and
conscientious Western markets for mass publicity to change behavior.
And so the WWF has adopted another strategy to stop the logging:
"discreet arm-twisting" as The Economist recently called it.
WWF's approach turns on a key pact with the World Bank. Under this
deal, when the bank considers the financial qualifications of
countries like the Congo or Cameroon for loan assistance, it will
consider also whether logging is being carried out in a sustainable
manner, and whether contracts to cut have been handed out to
responsible companies or just the president's cronies. Since the
monitoring and data will be supplied by the WWF, the effect is
clever: The arrangement neatly, and properly, inserts
environmentalists into economic decision-making in the region.
This is a slick move that ought to be extended on other ecological
topics to other regions that remain immune to public pressure. Dam-
building in China, for instance, ought to receive World Bank
scrutiny, as should clear-cutting in Latin America and Southeast
Asia. But for now what seems most important is that the World Bank
hews to the WWF arrangement. Central Africans will bridle at the new
ecological stipulations. But there is no doubt that the new
requirements remain in the Africans' best interests, as well as the
world's.
Deforestation, wherever it happens, correlates with poverty and poor
economic performance. Let the World Bank stay the course and take
seriously the need to make sound forest policy a central criterion
for financial assistance in Central Africa. Should it do that, it
will give real substance to an intriguing approach to saving the
rainforests.