Illegal Logging

Law Enforcement, Livelihoods and the Timber Trade

Luca Tacconi, Luca Tacconi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136563362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Forstwirtschaft

'This book carefully blends conceptual insights with extensive empirical evidence to navigate the reader through an issue that is still poorly understood [and is] a valuable reference for the development practitioner to understand the fundamental causes of illegal logging, its myriad consequences and the policy choices available to address the problem' Nalin Kishor, Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Coordinator, The World Bank

'An excellent resource for those working to conserve and sustainably manage forests worldwide. It offers an extensive and comprehensive study of illegal logging, bringing together the knowledge and views of experts who examine its roots and social, economic and environmental implications. One of its important contributions is to show that, unless coupled with reform of forestry regulations to take into account local people, law enforcement to curb illegal logging can negatively impact them. Therefore, any effective and fair approach to the problem needs to involve governments, forestry operators and local communities alike' Gonzalo Oviedo, Senior Social Policy Advisor, IUCN In many countries illegal logging now accounts for a large share of the harvest. Once cut, illegal logs feed an insatiable demand for exotic hardwoods in developed and developing countries. The result has been loss of both revenue and biodiversity, and consequently the issue has risen to the top of the global forest policy agenda as one of the major threats to forests, and donors and national governments are starting to develop initiatives to control illegal logging.

Yet for such a massive illegal trade, there is surprisingly limited knowledge available as to the major causes of illegal logging and its impacts on biodiversity, people and livelihoods and national economies, and thus plenty of speculation and action without evidence. It is clear that while illegal logging does have negative impacts, it also, controversially, and perhaps paradoxically, benefits many stakeholders, including local communities.

This book, written by the world's foremost experts, examines the key issues including law and enforcement, supply and demand, corruption, forest certification, poverty, local livelihoods, international trade and biodiversity conservation. It includes key case studies from forest-rich hotspots in North, South and Central America, equatorial Africa and Indonesia. While there are clearly no easy answers, this book sorts fact from fiction and explores the many dimensions of the causes, impacts and implications for forests, people, livelihoods and forest policy.

Published with CIFOR

1

The Problem of Illegal Logging

___________________________

Luca Tacconi

Introduction

Illegal logging has become one the most prominent global forest policy issues. The G8 Illegal Logging Dialogue was launched at the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Singapore in September 2006. This initiative will bring together legislators from the Group of 8 (G8), China, India and other key timber producer countries, such as Brazil, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Republic of Congo and Peru. The Dialogue is one of several international initiatives on illegal logging, which include regional ministerial conferences on forest law enforcement and governance (FLEG) in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) have issued statements on illegal logging, have organized meetings and prepared reports on the issue, and have included illegal logging in their work programmes. The European Commission has adopted a European forest law enforcement, governance and trade (FLEGT) action plan. Japan and Indonesia have launched the Asian Forest Partnership, which has illegal logging as one of three focal areas.

Global awareness about the need to address weak governance to support economic development spilled over into the environmental field during the 1990s and contributed to the rise of illegal logging as a major policy issue. Awareness and concern about illegal logging was raised particularly by nongovernment organizations (NGOs) such as the Environmental Investigation Agency (1996) and Global Witness (1999). Other environmental NGOs such as Friends of the Earth (Newell et al, 2000), Forests Monitor (2001), Greenpeace (2000a), the World Resources Institute (Brunner et al, 1998) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, 2002) have further raised public awareness about the problem and contributed to propelling illegal logging centre stage in the global forest policy arena. Illegal logging and trade is not, however, a new issue, as demonstrated by a closer look at the history of human use of forests, wonderfully told by Williams (2003, p171) in 1700s France:

An underpaid bureaucracy of foresters accepted bribes to cut and sell wood illegally; Louis XV wanted quick revenues and alienated 800,000 acres of royal forest; a growing population needed more grain and therefore cleared agricultural land; the peasants claimed their rights to use the forest to a degree greater than good silviculture could withstand; and mining and industry stripped some areas.

And in New England:

The years between 1722 and 1776 are muddled with illegal cutting on the part of the woodsmen, duplicity on the part of the Crown agents, and conniving on the part of the contractors. New England merchants carried on a thriving trade in masts and timber with Spain and Portugal even though these countries were officially at war with Britain, because better prices were to be had from those countries. (Williams, 2003, p231)

These examples point to the probability that illegal logging is not a result of the confluence of recent events that have led to a possible increase in its frequency. The latter statement is somewhat tentative for good reason. Despite the global interest in illegal logging, there has been limited rigorous work on the types, extent and causes of illegal logging. Therefore, this book devotes particular attention to clarifying the causes of illegal logging and the implications for policy-making, and it also considers issues and gaps in knowledge concerning the types and extent of the illegal logging. Let us consider the meaning of illegal logging, possible extent and some of its assumed impacts and causes before discussing in detail the scope of the book.

Illegal logging: The extent, its impacts and causes

What is illegal logging?

The term illegal logging is commonly used in policy forums and in the literature to refer to a range of illegal activities related to forest ecosystems, forest industries, and timber and non-timber forest products (NTFPs). The international debate on illegal logging has focused particularly on the illegal harvest of logs, possibly as a result of at least two factors. First, environmental NGOs are concerned about the ecological impacts of illegal logging. They regard illegal harvesting and illegal deforestation as having significant negative environmental impacts. Second, statistics on harvest volumes are more widely available than other information on forest management – for example, the number of infringements of harvesting regulations. Estimating illegal harvest rates is therefore easier than assessing other types of illegalities. This focus on the illegal harvest has led to the widespread use of the term illegal logging to denote the whole problem of the existence of illegal forest activities. This common use is maintained in this book given that the term is familiar to many readers and decision-makers. Nevertheless, it is important to keep sight of the fact that there are various types of illegal activities encompassed by the term. They need to be clearly recognized because they may have different impacts, causes and implications for policy-making.

These illegal activities range from acts related to the establishment of rights to land, to corrupt activities to acquire forest concessions, and to unlawful activities at all stages of forest management and the forest goods production chain, from the planning stage, to harvesting and transport of raw material and finished products, to financial management.¹ The different illegal activities summarized in Box 1.1 may be linked to each other in different ways; but two of the most significant links are worth stressing. First, violations of indigenous peoples’ rights may result in the establishment of forest operations that have a legal appearance. Timber extracted by these operations may seem legal to unaware traders and consumers unless schemes aimed at verifying legality (discussed in Chapter 11) also assess that due process is followed in the allocation of forest concessions. Second, all violations can occur as the result, or at the prompting, of public officials’ corruption. Corruption can affect the allocation of forestland, monitoring of forest operations and law enforcement.

It is also worth noting that the occurrence of violations does not necessarily imply that the focus should necessarily be on their prevention and repression. It is plausible that in some instances a revision of the legislation may be warranted. An example of this point is a situation in which the legislation favours large-scale industrial harvesting operations and, as a result, smallscale rural operations find themselves operating illegally. This aspect receives particular attention in this book.

Finally, the typology of illegal activities presented in Box 1.1 highlights the fact that the various infringements tend to have different impacts on the environmental, economic and social spheres. For example, infringements of forest harvesting regulations have environmental impacts,² whereas infringements of timber transport regulations do not normally impact on the environment, and infringements of land laws that dispossess communities of land have greater social impacts than infringements of forest harvesting regulations.

The extent and impacts of illegal logging

Illegal logging appears to occur in many countries around the world, and estimates point to some 70 countries that may be affected (WWF, 2002). Most country-level estimates of illegal logging focus on the rate of illegal harvest, and it has been reported that these rates are above 50 per cent of the total harvest in many countries (Contreras-Hermosilla, 2002; SGS Trade Assurance Services, 2002; WWF, 2002; Tacconi et al, 2003; Seneca Creek Associates and Wood Resources International, 2004). Reported statistics appear to be, however, rather uncertain and show a large degree of variation, partly because different definitions are often used and confusion arises. For instance, Brack and Hayman (2001) reported that in the mid 1990s illegal trade irregularities were estimated to be 15 per cent of the total trade. More recently, Seneca Creek Associates and Wood Resources International (2004) reported that about 5 to 10 per cent of the value of global wood products trade can be traced to roundwood of ‘suspicious’ origin. That there may be significant problems with the statistics reported so far became evident as the writing of this book was coming to a conclusion, and parallel work indicated that the illegal harvest in Cameroon may not be as significant as previously thought (Cerutti and Tacconi, 2006). Rather than reporting statistics from various countries to show how significant the problem is, which in any case are available from the sources reported above, we note that current knowledge indicates that the size of the illegal harvest may be significant in many countries, but that there may be (considerable) problems with available estimates.

Box 1.1 Types of illegal forest activities

• Violations of indigenous peoples’ rights and public or private ownership rights may involve acts against constitutional, civil, criminal or administrative law.

• Violations of forest management regulations and other contractual agreements in either public or private forestlands are acts against forest legislation; this is the category that includes most of the acts that may be most appropriately referred to as ‘illegal logging’.

• Violations of transport and trade regulations include acts that violate forest legislation; but they may be related to legally or illegally harvested forest products. This category is referred to as illegal forest trade.

• Timber processing activities may be regulated by industry and traderelated legislation, as well as forest legislation. In this category, a violation directly linked to illegal logging is the use of illegally harvested logs.

• Violation of financial, accounting and tax regulations may involve acts related to legally and/or illegally harvested and traded timber. This category is referred to in this book as illegal financial activities.

Source: adapted from Tacconi et al (2003)

There is also a considerable lack of knowledge about the impacts of illegal logging. The debate has focused mostly on the perceived negative impacts. According to Global Witness (2001), Contreras-Hermosilla (2002) and Seneca Creek Associates and Wood Resources International (2004), illegal logging may:

• cause deforestation and loss of biological diversity;

• result in government revenue losses of billions of dollars;

• foster a vicious cycle of bad governance (corrupt individuals gain power through illegal revenues and then may support bad governance to maintain revenues and acquire more power);

• contribute directly to increased poverty when people lose their resources, and indirectly as a result of a reduction in government revenues, which could in turn be made available for poverty reduction programmes;

• contribute to funding national and regional conflicts, thereby exacerbating them;

• distort forest product markets.

It needs to be recognized, however, that illegal logging has a positive side for some of the stakeholders:

• The establishment of alternative land uses on illegally deforested land may provide benefits to those involved.

• National or local governments may receive higher revenues as a result of illegal or legalized land conversion and increased timber production from illegal logging.³

• Military and police forces derive income from illegal logging and may be more willing to support the government.

• Many people, including the poor and unemployed, derive an income from illegal logging.

• Lower timber prices increase the competitiveness of national industries.

• Consumers may benefit as a result of lower prices (Tacconi et al, 2003).

The negative and positive aspects of illegal logging receive particular attention in this book because they are fundamental to explaining why and how illegal logging persists despite so many governments and international organizations having declared their commitment to combating it.

The causes of illegal logging

Contreras-Hermosilla (2002) recognizes that understanding the causes of illegal logging is a precondition to designing effective counter-initiatives. He also notes that the causes have not been studied in detail. This situation persists despite a number of initiatives aimed at stopping illegal logging. Because of this situation, this book devotes significant attention to the causes of illegal logging. Let us summarize the main causes of illegal logging highlighted in the literature. The organization of causes under the various headings is not necessarily attributable to the sources cited under them. It is my characterization of the main causes reported in the literature.

Institutional problems

There is a range of institutional problems that may affect illegal logging. The key ones relate to the political and the property rights spheres.

Tacconi et al (2003) noted that whether a state is weak is relevant to illegal logging because such a state has, by definition, limited capacity to develop appropriate governance processes, to develop legislation, to enforce the law and to guarantee fairness in the exercise of power. A weak state may also find it difficult to control or to fund its security forces, which are then able to profit from the legal and illegal extraction of timber or simply need to rely on it to fund their operational needs. It is worth noting that apparently strong states, too, may allow security forces to profit and fund operational needs from timber harvesting, such as in the case of Indonesia during the Suharto regime (Barber and Talbott, 2003; Obidzinski, 2003). It could be argued that this is, indeed, a weakness of the state because once the regime changes from dictatorship to democracy, the state may find it difficult to stop illegal logging because the security forces still rely on it. Illegal logging in weak states needs to receive further attention, as noted later.

In relation to property rights, there is often an imbalance between government claims on forest resources and their capacity to administer it. In fact, states claim control, at least de jure, over most of the forested land (White and Martin, 2002). In many countries, forestland ownership rights are unclear or inexistent and, in some cases, the boundaries of public forestlands are not demarcated either on paper or on the ground (Contreras-Hermosilla, 2002). As a result, Contreras-Hermosilla (2002) remarks, those who trespass on public lands may not even know they are actually on public lands. In this respect, it is important to note that in some countries, for example Indonesia (Fay and Sirait, 2002), public ownership of land is actually disputed by local communities, who claim that their traditional land rights have been violated by the state.

Lack of government capacity

Lack of government capacity to stop illegal logging is perhaps the cause that has received mos...