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No more greens
JUL 09 -
About a month ago, the Trishakti Community Forests Users Group (CFUG) in Baliya VDC of Kailali district decided to cut down about 2,000 cubic feet of immature sal trees and distribute the wood amongst themselves.
According to local consumers, however, some executive members, along with local representatives of different political parties including Nepali Congress, CPN-UML and UCPN (Maoist), decided to distribute the wood to the families of Maoist martyrs. The other members users protested the board’s decision, and while a high level monitoring team was supposed to visit the area for investigations, the tree trunks were buried in the ground.
It was only after further investigations found 129 cubic feet of freshly-cut trunks being smuggled out of the community forest on the night of May 20. Six persons, including the chairman of the community forest, were detained in connection with the incident. They were released in two days after an all-party meeting was held in haste to prove the innocence of those arrested.
This incident is just an example that surmises what is wrong with our much-feted community forests today: interference from political parties; rampant corruption; irregularities in management; and rapid deforestation.
In Kailali alone, 30,000 cubic feet of trees were reported to have been cut down in at least three dozen community forests this year alone. Government-owned forests don’t do much better; during the same period, around 150,000 cubic feet of timber had been cut down. Other districts that report increasing deforestation inside community-owned forests are Bara, Parsa, Rautahat, Nawalparasi and Udaypur.
The year 2010 has already seen deforestation of around 100,000 hectares in 25 districts. What has hastened this trend is the involvement of political parties in illegal timber trade—parties have begun appointing their own representatives to lead the CFUGs, thus raising doubts over the management of the forests.
Officials involved with the Community Forestry Programme agree that despite being successful in recognising the rights of local communities over forest resources, some community forests need institutional reforms.
“Due to vested interest of some members, there are reports of irregularities inside these forests. We have already started investigations and any one found involved in such illegal activities will be suspended,” says Ghanashyam Pandey, former executive director of Federation of Community Forests Users’ Nepal (FECOFUN).
However, deforestation inside community forests is less than in government-owned forests, he argues. According to him, out of the total 25 percent of forests under communities across the country, only three percent is owned by communities in the Tarai and inner Tarai districts, while the rest are in the mid-hill districts. “Hardly one percent of the destroyed forests are inside community-owned forests,” Pandey says.
The Community Forestry Programme was formally launched in 1978 and set the example of how local people could manage and protect their rights over their resources. CFUGs represented a community of locals who used forest produce and were legally authorised to take management decisions. The Forest Act 1993 provided full authority to the locals to manage the forests under them and utilise the benefits for community development.
According to Pandey, due to the failure of the government to hand over the forests of the Tarai to these communities, deforestation is rapidly increasing inside the community forests there, as they are not registered under FECOFUN.
“We want the government or any other monitoring committee to identify who the actual culprits involved in forest degradation are. But they have failed to identify and take action against the culprits; instead, they have only exaggerated the situation stating that there is rampant deforestation in the forests recently,” Pandey says.
Environmentalist Tirtha Raj Shrestha says self-interest is the major reason why deforestation and illegal use of other natural resources like sand, boulders and stones, particularly in inner Tarai and the Tarai, has been rapidly increasing. “Community forests will not be as successful in the Tarai as it is in the mid-hills,” he says. Shrestha says the community forestry mechanism requires local communities to be directly involved in protecting the trees from the very beginning. “Local communities (in the hills) had a shared sentiment and commitment to protect the trees that they managed from the beginning. But the forests in the Tarai were already mature and provided huge monetary benefits for government authorities as well as for the locals.” Besides, transportation facilities and a porous border with India have also promoted the illegal timber trade. “The government mechanism should be strong enough to effectively monitor the forests inside the country. A collaborative approach which involves both the government and the communities to manage the forests should be implemented in the Tarai,” Shrestha says.
One thing is clear: despite the blame-game, community forests in Nepal are being rapidly uprooted, and unless the state takes immediate steps to stop this trend, the slogan Hariyo Ban Nepal ko Dhan will remain only a slogan.
Posted on: 2010-07-10 08:43
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