In September a second Earth Summit will be held in Johannesburg to assess the progress governments have made on environmental issues since the first in Rio 10 years ago.
In the run up to the Johannesburg summit the media are carrying more articles and features on environmental matters. Naturally environmental groups are setting out their stalls too, highlighting their concerns over a range of issues, from fish stocks and air pollution, through global warming and biodiversity, to waste disposal and forest preservation.
The timber trade is one of a number of sectors to be targeted by the headline-grabbing green activity in the lead up to Johannesburg.
One example reported in the national media was the Greenpeace demonstration over hardwood joinery bought for the refurbishment of the cabinet office (TTJ April 13). The protestors alleged that the wood used included uncertified sapele from Cameroon. As part of its action, Greenpeace wrote to tropical hardwood importers, the Timber Trade Federation and others focusing on the Thanry Group of timber companies in Cameroon as one of the suppliers.
Thanry sells into the UK market through NHG Timber Ltd and the latter’s immediate reaction to the incident was to invite a number of its timber importer customers and TTF head of environmental affairs Dr Penny Bienz on a fact-finding visit to Cameroon. Six days of travelling and questioning took the eight-strong group into the far south-east Cameroon, flying over hundreds of miles of forest to see logging, to be given complete freedom to question members of the Thanry Group, particularly about the issues raised by Greenpeace, and to assess the situation at first hand.
The group had discussions in Yaounde with the World Bank, the WWF, the Ministry of the Environment & Forests, the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the German aid organisation GTZ. In Douala they met the independent inspection organisation, SGS.
Forest regulations
Two years ago Thanry was fined for transgressing forest regulations, not as persistent offenders but for specific errors. A wrongly calculated base line led to a logging team moving beyond the approved felling area and into a neighbouring national park. A mistake by company tree fellers saw 30m3 of logs felled which were below the permitted minimum diameter. The situation caused the Thanry Group to review its total culture and it decided that a fresh approach was needed. A general manager and a significant number of other influential managers were sacked. New men put in place included a specialist, who had previously worked with WWF, whose task is to set up a department dedicated to forest management planning.
New forest laws were introduced in Cameroon in 1994 which included the creation of forest management units of 250,000ha to be worked on a 30-year rotation and tree selection and minimum diameter regimes. Concessions have to be auctioned in order that the process should be transparent and to break through any dubious links between government and industry. Detailed forest management plans have to be drawn up by the timber companies using specialist advisers. These are submitted to the Ministry for approval. In reality, only two such plans have been passed and the others rest in bureaucratic limbo. Thanry’s new forest management expert Jean Pierre Fines says that if the Ministry would either approve the plans or reject them for specific reasons, then the process could move forward.
Huge and ambitious
Thanry’s operations in south-east Cameroon are within the area of a huge and ambitious social and environmental project, extending over 2.8 million ha (in the language of NGOs, an area larger than Wales) encompassing community forestry, production forests, licensed hunting, agriculture and village regions and specific conservation areas.
Thanry has laid down rules to try to stop unlicensed hunters coming into its concessions, but it is not an easy task when the population depends on the forest for meat supply. It has set up a shop to bring in and sell meat to some of its workers.
Cameroon as a whole is having to change from the old cultures and methods. It has forests extending over about 24 million ha (the UK has under 3 million ha) with an average 0.9% loss per year. It has worked on the development of principles, criteria and indicators which are the essential elements for certification, and it has seen the departure of Asian loggers who felled indiscriminately. Numerous international and foreign aid bodies are putting in money and effort to get sustainable forest management in place nationwide. Among those noted are the Dutch Tropenbos, CIRAD of France and CIDA of Canada.
The UK party could see that progress is taking place, but had the opportunity to emphasise the need for the government to demonstrate a more dynamic role in forest management and to speed the rate of change in order to minimise the risk of overseas buyers in environmentally sensitive countries turning their backs on Cameroon hardwoods.
