Forest Certification in Developing and Transitioning ... - UTas ePrints

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forest certification in developing and transitioning countries
interesting. Perhaps because of the small size of the domestic market, industrial
logging in Gabon continues to be oriented towards international export markets,
mainly Asian and European markets. The major logging companies themselves are
multinationals that bring with them foreign capital to Gabon’s resource sectors. Most
of Gabon’s exports are in the form of industrial raw logs, though it does sell a limited
amount of processed timber products, mainly lumber, veneer, and plywood.
Gabon is the country of the Congo Basin that has made the most quantifiable
progress towards forest certification. Nevertheless, the impacts of forest certification
appear to be more indirect and more related to the debate on forest certification than
to the actual field implementation of forest certification. It appears that if the
potentials of forest certification as a market-driven system that gives incentive to
sustainable forest management are to be realized in Gabon, there must be a stronger
synergy between forest certification and governmental agencies, because in Gabon, all
permanent forests are under state ownership.
background factors
Historical Context
Forestry Problems
As part of the tropical Africa region, Gabon faces a number of forestry-related
challenges: the progressive reduction of forestland areas (deforestation) and the
degradation of existing forests characterised by the loss of biological diversity. These
problems are especially important in Gabon, which is part of the Congo Basin, the
second largest block of tropical forest in the world.
In general, deforestation and forest degradation are closely associated with
population pressure and poverty (ITTO 2003), which are the underlying causes of the
current situation. Although there is little deforestation due to low population density
in Gabon, there is, however, a problem of degradation of forest resources. The direct
causes of forest degradation are:
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poor capacity of the forestry administration, resulting from the low
financial resources made available;
inadequate institutional and policy frameworks related to the low political
priority given to the forestry sector, above;
inadequate control, monitoring and enforcement of logging activities,
resulting in excessive harvesting and caused by lack of trained staff and
equipment and low salaries of staff, limiting recruitment of high-quality
professionals and encouraging corruptive practices;
lack of necessary preconditions (e.g. poor governance) for long-term
investment by the private sector at macro and sectoral levels;
insufficient access of local actors to information about forest management
and the involvement of these actors in the decision-making process;
yale school of forestry & environmental studies