PERU: Peasants and Big Business Fight Forestry Law
[c] 2000, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
August 14, 2000
By Abraham Lama
LIMA, Aug (IPS) -- Peru's new Forestry and Fauna Act, which Congress approved to protect the Amazon region and promote sustainable development, has come under fire by logging companies and peasant organisations, but has the support of environmentalists.
The Amazon forests cover nearly 60 percent of Peru's 1.3 million square km area, but less than five percent of the country's 26 million inhabitants live in the region.
The idea behind the Forestry Act, passed in July, is to attract transnational logging corporations to the region in order to take advantage of their contacts in the world market, while at the same time promoting the industrial processing of the timber in the same areas where it is extracted.
The legislation bans foreign sales of cut Peruvian mahogany and cedar for the next 10 years. Both species have been subject to over-exploitation in the drive for exports of value-added products.
There is also a 10-year ban on logging of cedar and mahogany in the Putumayo, YavarĄ, Tamaya and Purus river basins, near the Colombian border, where smuggling of these types of wood had been flourishing, according to reports by environmental groups last year.
The Forestry Act establishes 5,000 hectares as the minimum area of the tracts of land set aside for lumber concessions, and 40,000 hectares as the maximum. The transnational corporations say the upper limit is too low, while the small-time loggers say the minimum is still out of their reach.
The concessions are to granted for a 40-year period and will be decided in public bidding. Thirty percent of the area in each zone awarded to the big logging operations must be designated for small and medium-sized lumber companies, whose authorised plots will range from 5,000 to 10,000 hectares.
Beginning in 2005, only forest products originating in forests managed under this law will be permitted for sale and export. Thus, logging and reforestation can only be carried out according to projects approved by the authorities.
This is ''the most modern forestry law enacted so far in Latin America and the Caribbean,'' stated Antonio Bragg, an expert at the non-governmental Peruvian Foundation for Nature Conservation.
Roger Rumrill, an Amazon specialist, said the law ''contains guidelines that will allow logging activity to leave the realm of informality and corruption that now characterise it, and opens the way for building a modern, competitive and sustainable forest industry.''
However, Rumrill criticised some aspects of the new law and stressed, for example, the need to democratise forest management.
The implementation of the law, slated for early September, should incorporate ''mechanisms that allow the participation of all actors in the process: loggers, peasants, native communities and civilian experts,'' he stressed.
Logging transnationals, in alliance with the smaller local industry, unsuccessfully pressured Congress in an attempt to prevent the designation of limits to the size of the concessions, said Rumrill.
''The 40,000 hectares established by the law take into account the physiology and dynamics of the forest and the minimum harvesting cycle, and confer a prudent horizon for the natural or artificial replacement of the extracted trees,'' he said.
But the logging companies, big and small, reject the opinion of the environmentalists.
''The law increases requirements for lumber exports. Instead of giving the sector a boost, in the short term it will reduce its income, just when the international market is offering better prices,'' complained Eduardo Giannoli, owner of a small logging company.
Luis Lopez, president of the National Forestry Chamber, said the law ''will have a harmful effect on commercial activity in the Amazon because the lumber sector is the principal social support in the region and the greatest legal source of income and employment for its population.''
Lopez maintains that there is no existing map in Peru of the forest areas that may be granted in concession, and that the government should have foreseen this before passing the law.
Bragg and Rumrill, meanwhile, said that postponing enactment of the forestry law would have been dangerous because the transnational corporations had already launched a race against time to log as much as possible before the new rules go into effect.
''The first impact will be a slowdown in production. In the first five months (of this year), before the law was passed, lumber exports grew 18.3 percent. But by the end of this year, they are expected to fall 20 percent compared to 1999,'' according to the consulting firm Maximixe.
In its preliminary study of the Forestry Act's potential impacts, Maximixe calculated an even greater decline for next year, falling to 40 percent less than the income lumber exports generated in 1999.
The National Agrarian Confederation, (CNA), which represents the nation's small-scale farmers and loggers, petitioned the government to reduce the minimum area of logging concessions from 5,000 to 1,000 hectares.
The minimum area established by the new law is too large given the financial and operational potential of the migrant peasants, pointed out Julio Cantalicio, CNA president.
''The existing concession contracts of up to 1,000 hectares, signed by 25,000 migrant peasants based on previous legislation, will only be in effect until 2002. After that, the 5,000 hectare limit will be the minimum,'' he explained.
Cantalicio also demands that the government's forest development programmes must take into account the territorial rights of the indigenous communities living there.
The National Institute of Natural Resources is studying ways to facilitate small-scale logging operations' access to 5,000 hectare concessions and of assuring that the rights of the forest-dwelling communities are respected, says the agency's highest official, Josefina Takahashi.
The implementation of the Forestry Act will require that all heavy equipment used in extraction and transport of lumber be equipped with global positioning system (GPS) devices so that authorities can track their locations.
''With this system, the transnationals will not be able to go beyond the area of their concessions or surreptitiously invade protected lands,'' Takahashi explained.