The Rainforests of Cameroon - PROFOR

4 The Rainforests of CameroonForest harvest rights are now granted in a more regulated andpublic way.The types of industrial harvesting rights and the way they are granted arefundamentally different now as a result of the reforms. Long-term rightsto forest management units (unités forestières d’aménagement, or UFAs),which are required to be harvested selectively and managed sustainably,have replaced short-term permits to harvest both small and large forests.These harvesting rights are no longer awarded at the discretion of governmentofficials. A new public auction system, overseen by an independentobserver for the allocation of titles, requires the winning firm to proveit possesses sound technical capacity to manage a UFA and to offer thehighest bid. Firms with a record of forest infractions are excluded frombidding. Short-term permits to harvest and sell timber from much smallerareas than UFAs, known as ventes de coupe, are also issued by auction.Competition engendered by the auctions has helped increase the sumsthat companies pay to access forests (the area tax) from a base of $0.60per hectare per year in 1990 (set administratively) to averages of $5.60per hectare per year for UFAs in 2006 and $13.70 per hectare for ventesde coupe in 2005. The bidding process attracted new and more environmentallyand fiscally responsible investors to Cameroon.Community and local governing councils’ rights to manage forestshave also been established within limits defined by the zoning process.The reforms have brought significant achievements.• A relatively well-conserved forest resource. With more than 60 percentof its forests under biodiversity conservation, forest management plans,and community and local council forests, Cameroon is well set to maintaina permanent forest estate of 8 million hectares. Illegal logging inpermanent production forests has been reduced, although it persistsin rural areas. The combined timber harvest from legal sources is estimatedto have fallen by about 1 million cubic meters compared with1997, following constraints imposed by the implementation of the newmanagement plans. Degradation of the permanent forest is declining.Illegal logging by small operators has emerged as a new and problematictrend. Even so, the Delivered main drivers by The World of deforestation Bank e-library to: are the expansion ofThe World Banksubsistence agriculture, insecure IP : 192.86.100.34 land tenure, and other issues outsidethe forest sector—where Mon, the 09 primary Nov 2009 solutions 17:06:18 also reside.• Deforestation has been contained. The most recent and authoritativestudies on deforestation conducted by the European Commission’s(c) The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank