sustainability

Tropical forestry: a long history of sustainability

Contrary to prevailing politically correct attitudes, there is plenty of knowledge and experience, gathered earlier this century, to demonstrate that sustainable natural forest management is both environmentally possible and economically feasible.

The key is to concentrate on low intensity, low risk, and low investment

operations, based on a long felling cycle and the supply of small volumes of quality tropical hardwoods.

The suggested viable operations that came out from my research in the Solomon Islands native forestry areas is an operation that can yield 4,000 to 6,000 cubic metres of

export-grade quality logs every 45-days

cycle and can last for up to three (3) years operation and within 5-12 kilometres radius from its logpond area.

The modern vogue towards Reduced

Impact Logging (RIL) is re-inventing

principles of good tropical forestry practiced

extensively prior to the 19605. These themes were introduced in a paper presented by one Professor E F Bruenig at a meeting at Oxford University wherein I am a member of its sponsored and backed Oxford Club.

Bruenig suggests and I fully agree that a century of progress prior to the 1960 s towards sustainable tropical forest management is well recorded.

By the end of that period, elaborate, but practical, logging and management codes, manuals and plans were readily available (for example in India, Indonesia, Uganda, Myanmar, and Malaysia to name a few).

The problems now associated with tropical forest management resulted from a move away from planned Selection

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Silviculture Management systems towards exploitative Selective Logging from the 1960 s onwards.

During these years, strong political support for forestry faded as what happened in the Solomon Islands. Politicians and economists questioned the relevance for developing countries of keeping forests standing, arguing for liquidation and reinvestment of the proceeds in the country.

Far from helping to prevent this process, western environmentalism in the 1980 s contributed to the problem.

Environmentalists came up with the unhelpful notion that tropical hardwood boycotts would slow the plunder. Their campaigns were based on a romanticised emotional response rather than a

recognition of real problems.

They only blurred the distinction between exploitative Selective Logging and regulated Selection silviculture.

The public has been misled into

believing that tropical forests are too fragile to be managed for timber. In fact, rainforest are “robust, elastic, and resilient, exactly because of their ... diversity. Contrary to common belief tropical rainforest ecosystems are, as a result, easy to manage with commonsense and an ecosystem

compatible attitude.”

Much of the international forest policy debate during the 1990 s has provided little new insight, involving esoteric but uninformed discussions of “sustainability” and reinventing “new” criteria for

measuring sustainability.

Certification is anew and potentially useful idea, but is no panacea. It “is over

optimistic, ignores existing forestry

procedures and social and economic realities.” Certification only covers a tiny proportion of the world’s forests and demand is weak except within the European Market. Forest dwelling people in the

tropics are often adamantly opposed to

certification.

So what is the answer?

Bruenig suggests that “the transition from timber mining to sustainable management in tropical forests will certainly need more than the decade set by ITTO Target 2000.”

In European forestry, this evolution took more than a millennium.

Only three tropical countries seem to set on the road to sustainability.

Implementation of sustainability requires a complete reshaping of moral behaviour.

It also depends on public support.

Systems and ownership structures that

involve local people directly in forestry

management, like those that evolved over centuries in European countries, are essential.

Through consultation, tropical countries need to develop national and regional goals for forest management. With political and public support and adequate resources, state forest services can deliver sustainable management.

Natural tropical forest management

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should focus on the production of limited volumes of high quality hardwood like kwila, vitex, pometia, calophyllum, terminalia, dillenia and amoora, for which continued and increasing demand seems assured. Other timber grades, “lesser known species”, and non-wood forest products will

play only a supplementary role particularly

if they are having to compete with similar

products from plantations.

“Nature mimicking ecosystem management in some form of Selection Management System has the greatest chance to be the ‘least wrong’ approach to tropical forest management ecologically, economically, and socially.”

Now, the only problem being experienced by the indigenous Solomon Islanders who are forest resource owners is that there’s no real and direct support from the ministry of forestry explaining to these people that there’s an answer and a way for a sustainable tropical forest harvesting.

It was really quite surprising to read, in a previous issue of the Solomon Star, about current commissioner of forests, Peter Sheehan, making a complaint about the way that the natural forests of the country are being harvested. If there is a violation on the part of a logging company, why not cancel their logging licence(s) immediately?

Some time in September, I wrote a letter to the “Pacific Islands Forests & Trees Support Programme (PIFTSP) in Suva, Fiji, requesting information about their organisation and programmes related to sustainable harvesting of tropical forests in the Pacific.

And it’s really quite surprising that a month later, we received a faxed correspondence from Peter Sheehan

requesting our indigenous-owned Solomon

Islander company, the Island Timber’s Enterprise, provide him with details and information about our company because PIFTSP had requested it.

The best thing he could have done was just advise PIFTSP to provide the information we requested from them. Why the fuss?

Do those foreigners, working within the ministry of forests, not want the indigenous people of the Solomon Islands to run logging operations in a sustainable way? If they do, then it would be contrary to what they are publicly preaching. Why is the action against the indigenous Solomon Islanders and not against those big foreign

owned companies?

I, through the Island Timber’s Enterprise, am now invoking a crusade - to assist all indigenous resource owners, who seek our assistance, to manage their forests

sustainably and economically.

We are prepared to eradicate any obstacle and opposition that we may find on the way to Solomon Islanders fully benefitting from their God-given natural forest resources.

Ramon Jun Quitales, 11, CIF, Marketing director, Island Timber’s Enterprise, Solomon Islands