Le Rapport du caucus des forêts

Le bulletin du Caucus des forêts du Réseau canadien de l'environnement

Industrial Forestry
Jessica Dempsey, POLIS project on ecological governance

It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe the World Forestry Congress as an expert, government and corporate dominated event. With registration fees at an astounding 800 dollars and an exhibition hall crowded with slick publications and million-dollar exhibits (the word on the street was that the Canadian booth cost our fair government a cool million bucks), there was certainly no shortage of white men in suits.

A word in the congress title and the FAO department sponsoring the congress helps partially explain this. That word, of course, is forestry. Forestry, as the congress came to implicitly represent, is a particular (particularly narrow) socio-economic way of humans relating to forests – one that largely focuses on the technical cultivation of individual trees for extraction and surrounding technologies of mass consumption/production.

Although there was a whole lot of talk about sustainable forest management and benefit sharing at the congress, industrial forestry continues to perpetuate an inequitable sharing of resources and continued forest loss, supporting unsustainable consumption in the North (including the vulgar production of carbon gases) and the profit margins of transnational corporations. Forests continue to be largely controlled through centralized (and undemocratic) power structures under the guise of scientific and bureaucratic Forestry – often overwhelming the rights, needs and desires of indigenous peoples and local communities.

But the sights and sounds of active resistance and redefinition were visible at the congress. Inside the congress, speakers like Kaji Shrestha from Nepal and William Street from the IFBWW spoke in the plenary of the need for increased democratic rights for forest communities and forest workers. Outside the official congress there was (amongst many things) the Indigenous people’s forest forum, an ad hoc protest in support of Grassy Narrows First Nation by the Taiga Rescue Network, new FSC standards for the boreal, and hundreds of green t-shirts adorned with “forests justice community”.

It is clear that alternative ways of relating with forests exist – ones that open up space/power for other actors beyond experts and economists; ones that provide opportunities for real solutions to deforestation and overconsumption and perhaps most importantly, for new types of truly sustainable democratic management and governance. We need to say goodbye to Forestry, and hello to forestries – and this means displacing the industrial core that exists in many places like Canada with creative forms of tenure, harvesting, planning and overall management; forms that go far beyond the platitudes of consultation and the UNFF-style of “sustainable forest management”.

1 In fact, the UN FAO Forestry Dept actually cut their community forestry unit and are even refusing to allow the World Bank or other foundations continue the production of the popular and very important Forest, Trees, and People journal. This seems to indicate FAO’s orientation despite all of the UN ‘sustainability’ rhetoric.