Development & Aid, Environment, Tierramerica

The Fight to Put Forestry Law in Action

LA CEIBA, Honduras, Oct 27 2007 (IPS) - Who will draw up the standards for the recently passed Honduran forestry law and how it will be done are key questions for the fate of the country's forests, say environmentalists.

The battle started decades ago in Honduras about illegal logging has now shifted to establishing the legal framework for the new Forestry Law: Protected Areas and Wildlife, long delayed in Congress.

Three days after approval, a law must go through the revision and correction commission, and then it is signed by the president and published in the official gazette. In this case, the National Institute of Forest Conservation and Development (ICF) is to draft the law's standards within a period of three months.

The bill was passed by Congress on Sep. 13, so there is no explanation for the delay, Aída Romero, of the Democracy without Borders Foundation, told this reporter.

According to Ana Lanza, of the congressional Secretariat General, the delay is due to the fact that there are nearly 200 articles to codify in this piece of legislation.

Behind the slow-moving process is pressure from the timber industry, which is why it took eight years to get the law passed, said an activist who requested anonymity.

The declared annual exports of timber to the United States total three million dollars, but true sales reach 6.8 million dollars, or 226 percent more, according to Andrea Johnson, who monitors illegal logging for the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

Great Britain and Spain import Honduran timber worth 100,000 and 1.3 million dollars, respectively, but the real sums are 1.6 million and 2.6 million dollars — another illustrative case of illegal logging and sales.

The participation of communities in forestry consultative councils, the regularization of forested lands — with demarcation of areas of protection, conservation, community management, water resources — and prison sentences of up to 15 years for environmental crimes are some of the noteworthy items in the controversial law.

Establishing the law's standards is essential because that is where it can either be implemented correctly or have its spirit completely changed, according to the Democracy without Borders Foundation, leader of the Coalition for Environmental Justice, involving eight Honduran environmental groups.

Faced with the delay in the process, the Foundation presented the Congress-approved text to the correction commission along with some suggestions so that the process would not be further bogged down, says Romero.

The Coalition plans a dissemination campaign so that the communities take on the role that has been given them in the consultative councils.

It will also keep an eye on the law's codification process, which will be in the hands of the executive director of the ICF, created by the law to replace the much-challenged COHDEFOR, the forest development agency.

But the Coalition will abandon the process if the ICF post goes to Ramón Álvarez, current general manager of COHDEFOR, whose term has been the subject of corruption complaints, said Romero.

Álvarez himself invited the Coalition to participate in setting the law's standards, when as head of COHDEFOR he opposed reforming the forestry legislation, stressed Romero.

According to a 2005 EIA study, there is a network in Honduras that forges permits, hands out bribes, issues false land titles and uses intimidation tactics, and which implicates politicians, COHDEFOR, timber companies, sawmills, truckers, loggers, police and other officials.

Companies like José Lamas SRL, Maderas Noriega, Sansone, Serma, Derimasa and Yodeco are the main lumber suppliers for buyers in the United States and Europe, including Aljoma Lumber, Home Depot and Intergro, according to the EIA report.

The text states that most illegal trade involves pine and mahogany species, among others, which come from the Olancho and Mosquitia departments and the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, in the Honduran north and east.

The EIA says that 80 percent of the mahogany trees and 50 percent of the pine logged in Honduras in 2004 were cut illegally. In the 1990s, the country lost 10 percent of its forest cover.

Honduran biodiversity, concentrated in107 protected areas that cover a total of 27,000 square kilometers, is threatened by deforestation.

In 1996, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) declared the Río Plátano Biosphere “threatened”.

Meanwhile, the Olancho Environmentalist Movement (MAO) and the Campamento Environmentalist Movement await implementation of the new forestry legislation. Their conservation work has been met with threats, intimidation and the deaths of eight members since 1997. The most recent were two activists murdered Dec. 20, 2006.

Víctor Ochoa, of MAO, said in an interview that “the government institutions have remained passive and complicit in the illegal logging in Olancho. The forestry law is not obeyed. Institutions like COHDEFOR are corrupt, and their work has been to legalize what is illegal.”