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| Slack Oversight of Peru's Amazon Rainforest |
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2010/7/29
LIMA, Jul 27, 2010 (IPS) - Fifty-three percent of Peru is covered with native rainforest, but the agencies in charge of protecting and monitoring this vast area are toothless and have neither the staff nor the resources to cope with the job, according to a report from the Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsperson's Office).
Each year some 150,000 hectares of Peru's Amazon jungle, out of a total of 68 million hectares, are lost to deforestation, which is responsible for more than 42 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
But the offices and checkpoints tasked with overseeing the Amazon region have, on average, only three people apiece to do this work.
For instance, at the Mazuco post in the Tambopata-Manu Technical Administration, in the southeastern province of Madre de Dios, the traffic of timber-laden trucks amounts to between 200 and 350 trucks a month. And just three staff members have to ensure that each load was legally felled.
The Padre Abad checkpoint, in the east-central province of Ucayali, holds the record: the number of trucks carrying timber is between 1,000 and 7,000 a month. Nevertheless, it is staffed by only seven agents.
Similarly, the Pucallpa checkpoint in the same province, which sees 450 to 2,400 lumber trucks a month, only has six officials, according to the Ombudsperson's Office report, "La política forestal y la Amazonia Peruana: avances y obstáculos en el camino hacia la sostenibilidad" (Forestry Policy and the Peruvian Amazon: Progress and obstacles on the road to sustainability).
The 300-page document, released Jul. 21, says that over the past year there has been a 10 percent increase in death threats, acts of aggression and intimidation reported by personnel at these monitoring stations.
But the Ministry of Agriculture's department of forestry and wildlife does not always back their complaints, the document says.
The field offices, attached to the Agriculture Ministry, and the regional forestry management bodies also lack operational resources. A survey of 38 such offices found that only three had vehicles in good working order, and only one had a boat, although river transport is essential in the Amazon region.
"Over the past few years the state has demonstrated its willingness to improve forestry laws and policies, but there are still problems with management on the ground and the lack of resources available to the offices in the field," Iván Lanegra, an environment, public services and indigenous peoples official with the Ombudsperson's Office, told IPS.
Field office and checkpoint workers say that many of the documents presented by lumber trucks are forged or doctored. They also report that the required lumber transport logs are being sold at the very regional offices that are supposed to enforce legal tree felling and extraction.
Logging and transport permits require a forestry management plan, based on an inventory of standing timber at the point of extraction and performed by the supervising agencies. But very often this prior inventory is not taken, and false information is presented instead, according to the report.
Information on changes in the number of trees in any logging area "can easily be falsified" in the transport logs, thus granting legal status to timber felled in unauthorised areas, it adds.
Staff complain that they lack the resources to do their job in more than 60 percent of the monitoring offices.
Under Peruvian regulations, on-site inspections are required in the case of species like mahogany and cedar, but the Ombudsperson's Office considers that such inspections should be extended to all kinds of trees, "in order to assess and curb the risk to the country's natural resources."
Another aspect that causes concern is that only half of the eight provincial governments with jurisdiction over the Amazon region have proved they are taking their forestry management role seriously, at a time of transition in Peru's forestry laws.
Provincial forestry and wildlife authorities are under the obligation to carry out surveillance and protection of natural resources, as well as issue forestry permits and concessions.
But the central government has not transferred financial resources to the provincial offices, which do not have funds of their own to undertake the task.
"The way to improve forest management is to strengthen the provincial governments, because they are located in the areas that have to be monitored," José Luis Capella, of the non-governmental Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, told IPS.
At the same time, most indigenous communities have not succeeded in achieving real territorial rights that would allow them to make better use of the natural resources in the forests, experts say.
Although 145 native communities have been issued permits by the Agriculture Ministry to trade in timber, only eight have contracts granting them the use of the forest in their territories, which would enable integrated management, the report says.
In Capella's view, reading between the lines of the statistics, it appears that the authorities favour lumber extraction "above formalising the rights of native communities over their territories, so that they can develop a range of sustainable projects." There are also very few facilities for the communities to apply for and obtain concessions of use.
Among its recommendations, the Ombudsperson's Office proposes that priority be given to the debate in Congress of the forestry and wildlife bill, and that the right of indigenous communities to prior consultation on logging and other activities, in line with International Labour Organisation Convention 169, which Peru ratified in 1993, should be included in the new law.
It also suggests increasing the power of the National Forestry Authority and bringing it under the Environment Ministry, instead of the Agriculture Ministry where it is now, to enable a more holistic approach to the problem.
Another of the report's proposals is to update and implement the national strategy to combat illegal logging.
"Forests are important because they provide the livelihood of forest-dwelling communities. They contain much of the country's biodiversity, for which Peru is ranked fourth in the world," said Ombudswoman Beatriz Merino. (END)
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