A push by several governments for a U.N. convention to protect forests is ill-timed and could actually pave the way for a legal instrument that does harm to forestry conservation, dozens of environmental groups are arguing.

As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) prepares to kick off a two-week session Tuesday to discuss proposals for a forestry convention, more than 80 environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have come out against the idea.

“Our organisations, representing millions of people worldwide, believe that a forest convention negotiated at this time not only will fail to effctively safeguard the world’s forests, but could actually threaten them,” the groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), say in a joint statement issued here Monday.

The groups do agree with the United Nations’ view that there is a crisis caused by deforestation. The United Nations warns that as much as 1.8 billion cubic metres of wood is consumed every year just to provide fuel in poor regions. And a report issued last month by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) reports high rates of forest loss in Latin America and Asia since 1980.

But some environmentalists now disagree that the time is ripe to address the issue with a convention governing forest management.

“It is bad timing, bad politics, and at the end of the day, it will be bad conservation,” Lambert Okrah, of Ghana’s Green Earth Organisation, says of the proposed convention. Any convention now “would bring into being weak standards” that favour commercial forestry and mining interests at the expense of people and the environment, he argues.

The chief problem, Okrah says, is that the IPF talks are being staged at a time when very little has been achieved in determining how to prevent forest degradation. After two years of debate on a possible convention, he sa, many key issues — including agricultural reform, the prohibition of subsidies that promote unsustainable forest management and involvement of NGOs and local groups — still have not been part of the discussion.

Instead, the supporters of the joint statement claim, a convention now will only undermine existing U.N. or national legal instruments to protect forests and provide an opportunity for big business to revise those rules to their benefit.

“It’s going to be a chainsaw convention,” says Ian Fry of Greenpeace. He noted that some of the industrialised nations most keen on a forestry convention — such as Canada and Finland — are those with strong timber industries and poor regulations for protecting forests. Those standards, the NGOs criticising the IPF plans argue, could be imposed as a low preservation standard globally.

Not so, Canada’s natural resources minister Anne McLellan said in a recentspeech to the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. Canada, she said, planned “to pursue aggressively a global forest convention on sustainable forest management.”

cornerstone of Canada’s approach, McLellan said, is a push for an “eco-label” on products like paper or lumber, which would certify that the practises involved in their production were environmentally sound.

The eco-label idea has in turn worried businesses, in such countries as the United States and Brazil, that fear a competitive disadvantage if the standards of nations like Canada become the norm. “We’re a bit suspicious about a binding treaty,” says Henson Moore, president of the pro-industry American Forest and Paper Association, in an interview with The Ottawa Citizen last week.

In that fight, U.S. paper and lumber interests have found allies among environmentalists, many of whom are unimpressed by the environmental record in Canada and other convention backers.

“It’s hard to see how this (convention) could be successful even in Canada,” Aaron Schneider, of the Nova Scotia Envirnment and Development Coalition, told IPS. “In Nova Scotia, protected areas which have been widel acclaimed are now being dismantled by the premier (Jean Chretien), to the advantage of small mining interests.”

Indigenous groups also fear that a new convention passed by governments, which would affect forest areas crucial to the survival and livelihood of indigenous peoples, could ignore the social importance of forests.

Any such agreements, said Joji Carino of the International Alliance of Indigenous Tribal Peoples, “should include all ajor groups: citizen’s groups, NGOs, youth and women.” Right now, however, governments have dominated the process, leaving all other participants — including indigenous groups, many of whom have a considerable stake in the world’s forests — unclear about what a new convention would look like, she added.

“The real substance and issues haven’t been discussed,” agreed Steve Howard, a WWF spokesman. Even many of the U.N. eber states are in the ark about the details of a forestry convention, he said.

That confusion, however, is expected to give way to a burst of activity in coming weeks. Over the next two weeks, the IPF will consider the idea of a forestry convention, with many important developed nations — notably Canada and the European Union bloc — pushing it strongly.

After that, the IPF is expeted to recommend a convention to address the problems of deforestation and environmental degredation to its parent body, the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development, when that organ estry convention now are the sae ones which urged that a convention to protect forests be created in the follow-up to the Earth Summit. Some of the groups that signed the Monday statement also pushed the idea dring the past two yearsof IPF talks, only to become dismayed at the lack of progress since then.

Now, some of them actually want to give the status quo a chance. “We are not convinced that the instruments we have now are not enough,” Okrah said. The battle now, he argued, mst be to enforce existing mechanisms to protect the forests while developing new ones only after many differing groups have debated the issue.

As a consequence, many environmental groups which have called for urgent action to protect forests are now insisting on the need for more time to devise better guidelines. “Once we have a convention, we’re not going to get a second chance,” warned Howard.