Story, Louvier Kindo Tombe
The bill No. 2058/PLAN on the forest and wildlife regime submitted to parliament for examination and adoption in its current state still poses some major problems according to the civil society experts. Their position was made public through a press conference Friday June 27, 2024 in Yaounde at the Head Office of Green development Advocate (GDA).
According to the organizations, “the text encourages forest conversion by rendering the terms of declassification of permanent forests flexible”. Ghislain FOMOU, Program Officer at SAILD explained that if adopted, it will permit the declassification of forest zones even for private projects.
Alain Fabrice Mfoulou Bonny, land and forest expert at GDA said such a provision tends to weaken Cameroon’s commitment to maintain 30% of its territory under permanent forest covers (art. 23).
To the organizations, there is need to restore the rigidity of forest conversion modalities or strengthen them, establish geo-localization of inventories, and create a forest regeneration and renewal fund.
With the new version of the law, participatory management is not well organized, as some actors are left out like civil society organizations, while communities are rather considered as collaborators. The terms of co-management of protected areas with local communities (MoU) are not formalized. As solution, the CSOs demand that indigenous populations should be considered in the UN sense in the text.
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 T). The CSOs propose the creation of a distribution grid in the texts, in accordance with the explanatory memorandum.
Local communities are excluded from sharing the annual forestry royalty (art. 142 al. 2), the benefits of environmental services (art. 144) and the benefits from genetic resources. Development operations seem to focus only on the exploitation of wood when they should concern the entire permanent forest domain.
Furthermore, the exclusive competence of the State over the monitoring of forestry exploitation must be affirmed and the competence to carry out inventories or to control it if it is done by other natural or legal persons must be entrusted to an independent administrative authority like ANAFOR. Moreover, the thirty-year rotation of forest management no longer seems suitable and adequate for the current context.
Worth noting is the fact that the reform of the forest and wildlife regime was initiated in 2008 in Cameroon to improve Law No. 94/01 of January 20, 1994, which is already 30 years old. Among the new features seen in the text submitted to parliamentarians, are the ban on the export of logs (art 97 al. 2), the requirement for logs to be fully processed by local industry(art 97 al. 1), the completion of forest decentralization with the creation of regional forests (art. 29), the recognition of certain territories and rights for the benefit of local communities, plus a desire to improve the protection of the sector.
The civil society organizations that came together to take a critical look at the bill are APED, CODLA, CERAD, FLAG, GDA and SAILD. The results of the work of the group of multidisciplinary experts from civil society mobilized were presented to a network of parliamentarians in Central Africa.
