The Rainforests of Cameroon - PROFOR

A Summary of Impacts 71resources, and participate in forest decisions. These issues received scantpolicy attention before 1998. Progress has been significant but mixed,and an ambitious agenda remains.The adoption of management plans in production forests and protectedareas has generally consolidated the customary rights of forest and indigenouspeople, but efforts must be made to expand and further secure theserights. It is especially important to improve indigenous peoples’ involvementand representation in local governing structures and to develop bettermechanisms for them to benefit from the use of forest resources.Through community forests, considerable progress has been made informally linking communities to forest land over which they have rightsunder traditional law. Less progress is evident in linking these rights tosecure flows of revenue. Excessive regulation, technical and economicconstraints, insufficient knowledge of the social setting, and vested interestsmust be overcome if more communities are to establish, manage,and sustain forests on their own, to support their own priorities. Similarissues affect the development of local council forests.Local markets and small-scale enterprises are the source of numerousjobs—precarious but essential—for the poor, yet little effort has beenmade to assess the potential impacts of reforms on local employment,supply chains for the local timber market, and revenues. The decision tosuspend small titles between 1999 and 2006 successfully limited illegallogging by industrial groups but revealed obstacles to the legal operationof small-scale timber enterprises.Impacts on poverty and livelihoods may improve as progress in decentralizationand local governance continues. It is encouraging that forestcommunities now participate in government and industry processes thathad long failed to engage them. Local people’s issues are increasinglytaken into account in forest-related policy decisions.Note1. For example, the analysis also considers how the forest sector wasaffected by significant economic changes occurring over the sameperiod, such as the evolution of export markets for Cameroon’s timber(especially in Delivered China by and The Western World Bank Europe) e-library and to: the impacts of theThe World Bank1994 devaluation of the CFAF. IP : 192.86.100.34Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:06:18(c) The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank