Forestry and wildlife draft law: CSO consortium highlights limitations, urges lawmakers to ameliorate before adoption.

It is in this regard that a consortium of some Civil Society Organisations, CSOs, led by the Green Development Advocate, GDA, and Support Service for Local Development Initiatives, known as SAILD, have called for a deeper reading before its adoption. 

The consortium made the appeal during a press conference in Yaounde June 28. According to the Programme Officer at SAILD, Ghislain Fomou, the Bill No. 2058/PJL/AN on the forest and wildlife regime submitted to parliamentarians is to improve the Law No. 94/01 of January 20, 1994, considered as outdated.  

He said a group of multidisciplinary experts from the civil society, took a critical look at the draft law and noted some progress but also made proposals to certain major concerns in the bill. 

Innovations

The civil society leader explained that some of the innovations include a ban on the export of logs, the requirement for logs to be fully processed by local industry and the completion of forest decentralisation with the creation of regional forests. 

He added that it also recognises certain territories and rights of local communities and takes into account certain environmental and ecological aspects.

Also, the draft law, he said, demonstrates government’s desire to improve the protection of the forestry sector with the exclusion of the transaction for certain offenses, increased the number of offenses, and cases of aggravating circumstances.

Highlight major shortcomings

While stressing that the civil society organisations are not against the law, he said their desire is for certain issues in the bill to be adjusted, prior to its adoption by the National Assembly and Senate, before it is sent to the President of the Republic for enactment.

According to Fomou, some of the major worries, stem from the fact that the bill still encourages forest conversion, the non-adaptability of the forest management to local context, limits community access and collection rights of the forest as well as sharing of benefits of forest with communities not arranged.

“The text made more flexible the terms of declassification of permanent forests which leads to the conversion of forests. This is visible through the admission of an exception to the principle of prior classification of an equivalent forest before declassification (art. 26 al. 2) in the case of expropriation for reasons of public utility. Such a provision tends to weaken Cameroon's commitment to maintain 30% of its territory under permanent forest cover (art.23),” the SAILD Programme officer explained.

He went on to add that: “We have noted the defection of the administration in the operational implementation of the development, which in no way corresponds to the principle of attribution of competence for the development of state forests to their owners (State, Regions and Councils). Likewise, development operations seem to focus only on the exploitation of wood when they should concern the entire permanent forest domain”. 

On the sharing of benefits with communities, he elucidated that “the text establishes the general principle of sharing benefits with neighboring communities (art. 141), but in practice no distribution grid for these benefits is specified either with regard to profits from the exploitation of wildlife (art.151) and profits from litigation (art. 148)”. 

He argued that local communities are excluded from sharing the annual forestry royalty, the benefits of environmental services and the benefits from genetic resources.

On community access and collection rights, the land and forest policy analyst at GDA, Alain Fabrice Mfoulou Bonny, indicated that the commercialisation of usage rights provided for in the definition of this term is not respected in article 6 paragraph 1 which reduces it to personal use. 

“These rights are restricted to the national domain only, while in practice they are admitted to protected areas through MoUs,” he said. 

CSO proposals

After a critical look at the draft bill, the CSOs proposed that that the law need to be amended to include the restoration of the rigidity of forest conversion modalities, the establishment of geolocation of inventories, and creation of a forest regeneration and renewal fund.

The GDA jurist also insisted that the law has to formalise co-management agreements as methods of participation of local communities in the sustainable management of forest and wildlife resources, create a distribution grid in the texts in accordance with the explanatory memorandum and consider indigenous populations as spelt out by the United Nation.

Mfoulou Bonny also averred that the draft law should be in harmony with other legislation on natural resources. 

This story was first published in The Guardian Post issue No: 3156 of Tuesday July 02, 2024