Monday, September 14, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
ENVIRONMENT: New World Bank Plan Fails to Protect Forests – Groups
Emad Mekay
- Environmental activists have assailed the World Bank’s newly unveiled forest policy, saying it actually removes bans on logging in some areas and fails to promote measures that will reduce poverty..
The criticism comes only weeks after the Washington-based Bank released its global forest policy, a set of rules and guidelines it has trumpeted as revolutionary in the fight against poverty and in protecting the world’s endangered forests.
The angry reaction also coincides with the visit of World Bank President James Wolfensohn to Brazil to discuss development of the Amazon region – which contains the world’s largest remaining tropical rainforest – under the new strategy.
According to the Bank, the world’s largest public development agency, the new policy, approved late in October, aims to strike a balance between poverty alleviation and forest protection.
The institution now promises to only finance ”commercial harvesting” in areas where strict environmental assessments or "authoritative scientific surveys" have been completed.
Poverty reduction will result from clauses in the new policy that promote "community forest management" and "agro-forestry", it says.
But civil society groups, who say they contributed detailed comments on the proposed policy to Bank staff during the lengthy four-year consultation period, say the strategy is a serious setback.
They say it will not achieve its aims and may even undo some of the benefits of the 1991 policy, in effect until the Bank passed the new policy on Oct.. 31.
”It’s negligent at best,” said Jaya Ramesh of Greenpeace USA.
”It offers no protection for the environment. It doesn’t offer any protection for the people. It doesn’t provide any conservation zones and it does nothing to alleviate poverty. It’s a weak policy that clearly disregarded public participation, concerns and interests.”
The critics, particularly irked at what they see as a false two-pronged promise to end poverty and to preserve more forests, accuse the Bank of ”green-washing”, or hiding harmful activities behind the guise of conservation rhetoric.
David Cherry of Environmental Defence said members were discouraged by the Bank’s environmental track record and had anticipated ”them (Bank staff) doing the wrong thing, which they proved to do” by passing the new plan.
The activists fault the new policy on many counts, including the lack of clear language on protection of indigenous people, its lack of links with countries’ economic structural adjustment programmes – often implemented at the Bank’s behest – and, most importantly, lifting a ban on logging.
”They have effectively lifted a ban on logging in green forests and primary moist rainforest,” said Mark Helm, spokesperson of Friends of the Earth.
Ramesh agrees, saying that the Bank is primarily concerned with promoting commercial interests.
”It’s now free for all,” she said. ”Anybody can go in and log. And we know when foreign countries go into developing countries – there is no accountability for them,” she added.
”How is that supposed to protect the interest of the people there?”
The Bank denied lifting the ban. ”There’s no way the Bank is going to walk up and say ‘we are throwing away a ban on certain activity and we are replacing it with nothing’,” said Forest Adviser Jim Douglas. ”That would be absurd,” he told IPS.
Douglas said the Bank replaced the ban with ”a complex series of provisions that includes bans, targeted bans and constraints”.
”It hasn’t just been taken out and thrown away,” he said.
Two years ago, the Bank’s independent operations evaluation department (OED) concluded that the Bank’s policy and its ban on logging in tropical forests had failed to slow down deforestation during the previous decade.
The review also said that destructive and illegal logging practices continued to expand in many developing countries.
The ban aside, Ramesh says the policy is also not clear about how the Bank will lift 500 million people out of poverty, without even touching the wide-sweeping structural adjustments programmes, which are marked by trade liberalisation, export-led growth and privatisation.
Such policies pressure countries to slash funding for environmental programmes, and have led to a hike in logging exports and cuts in government spending on forest protection.
The groups say that the draft policy also does not articulate clear standards for determining acceptable certification systems. The lack of clear standards may allow the use of certification schemes that lack teeth and credibility, they add.
The Bank insists the standards are clear.
Many groups, including The World Rainforest Movement, the Forest Peoples Programme, and Environmental Defense spelled out their concerns in letters they sent to the Bank just before it released the final policy. They say their comments were disregarded.
”The Bank should not be in the business of logging or any other projects in rare tropical rainforests,” said Helm of Friends of the Earth. ”Now, there’s no place on earth that is sacred and safe from the chainsaw and tractor.”
World forests are important for many reasons. The economic growth of many developing countries, for example, depends on exploiting forest resources, and local communities in tropical rural areas depend heavily on forest resources for their livelihood.
More than 1.6 billion people depend to varying degrees on forests for their livelihoods, the Bank says. About 60 million indigenous people are almost wholly dependent on forests and some 350 million people who live within or adjacent to dense forests depend on them to a high degree for subsistence and income.
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ENVIRONMENT: New World Bank Plan Fails to Protect Forests – Groups
Emad Mekay
- Environmental activists have assailed the World Bank’s newly unveiled forest policy, saying it actually removes bans on logging in some areas and fails to promote measures that will reduce poverty..
(more…)
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