ENVIRONMENT-COLOMBIA: Forestry Law Only Sees Timber, not Trees

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 8 2005 (IPS) - A controversial forestry bill whose critics complain that it subordinates the protection of nature to commercial interests is likely to be passed by the Colombian Congress next week.

Experts agree that a solid legal framework is needed to unify the current hodgepodge of statutes and laws and to regulate plantation forests and natural jungles that are extraordinarily rich in biodiversity.

Colombia, a country twice the size of France, with Caribbean and Pacific shorelines and Andean mountains and Amazon jungle, has between 56 and 60 million hectares of forest.

But the bill, expected to be approved next week, sees the country’s forests "merely as timber," an indigenous leader said at a meeting organised by the National Environmental Forum in Bogota last March.

For some the bill has major flaws, while for others it is "short-sighted."

Colombia’s 90 indigenous groups and the country’s traditional black communities, meanwhile, stress that forestland is a habitat, not something to be exploited.

According to the Colombian constitution and national legislation, it is up to these ethnic groups to decide what should be done with the forests in their reserves and ancestral territories, although it seems unlikely that Congress will respect that provision in this case.

Colombia’s indigenous groups complain that they were not consulted when the bill was in the process of being drawn up, but were only contacted once it was already drafted.

Colombian lawyer and indigenous rights specialist Roque Roldán said that was a violation of the constitution, which grants indigenous and black communities rights over the natural resources in their territories, to administer, use and manage them as they see fit.

Tomás Román of the Huitoto people, who live in the Amazon jungle, said the forestry bill violates indigenous tradition and law, "which existed long before the Colombian constitution."

Indigenous people account for nearly two percent of Colombia’s total population of 44 million, while the inhabitants of black rural communities that have kept African traditions alive number around 100,000.

The bill, which was initially designed to establish rules and incentives for plantation forestry, was later expanded to regulate the management of native jungles, which cover a total of 26 to 28 million hectares that are collectively owned by indigenous and black communities and can never be sold or held in lien.

The right-wing government of Alvaro Uribe is keen on promoting plantation forestry and the economic exploitation of forests, arguing that the sector is underdeveloped.

Adolfo Aristizábal, with the Fedemaderas logging association, agrees with that view, and said he hopes the new forestry law will put an end to illegal logging and the smuggling of fine woods.

But an open letter to the country’s legislators signed last month by 10 Afro-Colombian, indigenous and campesino (peasant) organisations, warned that "the bill disregards a number of international treaties ratified by Colombia referring to forests, biodiversity and the environment."

These include the Convention on Biological Diversity, International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, the Andean Community’s decision 391 on access to genetic resources, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification.

According to the campesino and indigenous groups, the new law will benefit the timber business – which already owns 140,000 hectares of plantation forests – by creating mechanisms that will allow the companies to gain control over natural forests.

The letter adds that the bill contains "no equivalent provisions for the conservation and sustainable management of natural forests."

Forty percent of the traditional indigenous territories in Colombia also form part of the National System of Protected Areas.

The new forestry law creates "mechanisms that would legitimise de facto occupations of areas considered uncultivated, vacant land, many of which have been left unoccupied by the forced displacement of the local residents" in the four-decade civil war, says the open letter.

Since 1985, according to the Human Rights Consultancy (CODHES), 3.2 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes, mainly in rural areas.

"Approval of this law would run counter to efforts in favour of peace, and would lead on the contrary to major conflicts over access to and control over natural resources," said the Afro-Colombian, indigenous and campesino groups.