Deep Divisions in Talks to Curb World Overlogging
2/22/97
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
February 22, 1997
Deep Divisions in Talks to Curb World Overlogging
By PAUL LEWIS
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
UNITED NATIONS -- With the world's forests continuing to shrink, more
than 70 governments ended two years of talks Friday deeply divided
over whether to propose binding steps to curb overlogging.
Senior environmental ministers meeting in April might yet breathe life
into the proposal when discussions continue at a commission monitoring
pledges made at the the Rio de Janeiro environmental summit meeting of
1992.
But if opponents of a forestry convention -- including the Clinton
administration and Brazil -- stand their ground, there is unlikely to
be any firm action taken on forestry when world leaders gather in June
for the fifth anniversary of the Rio meeting.
After holding 10 meetings on five continents since 1995, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Forests Friday drew up a wish-list for
preserving the planet's dwindling forest reserves. It set no specific
targets and left compliance voluntary and unmonitored.
The 15 European Union countries and Canada pressed hard for the
forestry panel to recommend an immediate start to talks on a binding
convention. They had the support of several developing countries,
including Malaysia, Indonesia, Uganda and Papua New Guinea. Such a
proposal would then have become the centerpiece of the June
meeting.
But they failed to overcome the opposition of an unusual coalition of
the United States, Australia, Brazil and some other developing
nations, united with several environmental groups, including the
Worldwide Fund for Nature, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
The Clinton administration appears as reluctant to accept a forestry
convention as the Bush administration was at Rio five years ago. But
many environmental groups, after lobbying unsuccessfully for an
agreement then, are having second thoughts today.
At Rio, world leaders adopted three conventions: to protect the
climate, protect plants and wildlife (which the United States refused
to sign), and to stop the encroachment of desert onto fertile land.
But a planned fourth convention -- now often called "the missing Rio
convention" -- was blocked by the United States, fearful of
restrictions on its lumber industry. It acted in alliance with much of
the developing world, which feared that an agreement might
limit economic growth. Instead, the summit meeting settled for a
nonbinding declaration of principles that countries should follow.
Today, many environmental groups have concluded that the record has
been so dismal that in the six to 10 years it would take to negotiate
and ratify a convention, governments would only relax their
protection of forests.
And given the depth of disagreement over the shape of a convention,
they also despair that the actual text would be geared to anything but
the lowest common denominator, amounting to little more than "a
loggers' charter."
A better approach, they now argue, is to build on the many voluntary
initiatives that have begun, including a plan to declare 10 percent of
the world's forests protected areas by 2000.
At their closing news conference Friday, the two co-chairmen of the
governmental panel, Sir Martin Holdgate, who is scientific adviser to
the British environmental ministry, and Prof. Manuel
Rodriguez-Becerra of Colombia, put the best face on their group's
inability to agree on a forestry convention.
They argued that their deliberations had led to a better understanding
of the dangers facing forests in both developed and developing
countries, and to a shared determination. "At Rio the two sides were
shouting past each other," Sir Martin said. "Now we have a real
dialogue."
But he acknowledged that the world had failed to live up to the lip-
service paid to forest conservation at the Earth Summit. "Some trends
in the misuse of forests have not been reversed, and in some parts of
the world they are accelerating" Sir Martin said. "Things have not
changed as much as we had hoped since Rio."
Many environmental groups, embarrassed at finding themselves in a
tactical alliance with the United States, tried to emphasize their
distance from the forestry panel's deliberations by denouncing its
failure to recommend forceful action within existing agreements.
"With deforestation rampant across the globe and worsening in many
countries, the IPF has failed to recommend targeted actions to
governments," said Michael Rae of the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
Instead it offers a mishmash of platitudes and weasel words."
"While the IPF has been talking, more than 66 million acres of forest
have disappeared," he said. "The Solomon Islands will be logged out
within the next decade, and the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian
Amazon has increased by more than a third since 1992."