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By Maricel Sequeira SAN JOSE, Dec 9 (IPS) - A new method designed to guarantee forest conservation is gaining momentum around the world: the certification of forests, a mechanism that allows consumers to make their concerns felt through their pocketbooks.
Close to 200 million hectares of forest have been wiped off the face of the earth in the past decade, and roughly 17 million hectares of tropical forests disappear yearly, in spite of the commitments assumed by the world's governments at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
The most effective tool found over the past few years for protecting the world's forests has been 'certifying' that products have been legally obtained from sustainably managed forests.
The certification procedure is carried out by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private companies, and takes into account social, ecological and economic criteria, as well as national forestry laws.
More than three million hectares of forests have been certified worldwide by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), created early this decade by 130 participants from 25 countries.
In the future, Latin America will become one of the world's leading suppliers of tropical wood for industrial uses.
But the certification process has not yet taken hold in the region, according to a two-day regional conference on Progress and Outlook for Forest Certification in Latin America and the Caribbean which closed Tuesday in Costa Rica after assessing the situation of the region's tropical forests and measures taken to protect them.
The conference, sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Nicaragua-based Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE), drew experts from the Americas and Europe, as well as representatives of consumer groups from industrialised countries.
Certification of forestry products basically provides a green- friendly stamp of approval demanded by consumer organisations in industrialised countries guaranteeing that wood by-products have come from sustainably managed forests.
Certification ''is seen as a form of power given consumers that allows them to decide how the world's forests are to be managed,'' said Jose Joaquin Campos, coordinator of CATIE's Forest Management Unit.
The mechanism is also one of the instruments used by the WWF in its global campaign to curb destruction of the forests.
WWF's goal is to set up a regionally representative network of legally protected areas covering at least 10 percent of the world's forests by the year 2000. Of the world's remaining 3.3 billion hectares of forests, only six percent are protected today.
Meanwhile, with World Bank assistance, WWF aims for at least 10 million hectares of sustainably managed forests to be independently certified by 1998.
But certification has not been wholeheartedly embraced by all NGOs, some of which argue that it could become a new non-tariff trade barrier to be applied by industrialised countries against wood by-products from the developing South.
WWF counters that international trade is one of the main culprits in the destruction of tropical jungles. ''Commercial logging is the greatest threat faced today'' by tropical forests, which are the richest in flora and fauna, the international environmental organisation warns.
But other environmentalists and NGOs contend that international trade in timber and by-products is not a major cause of deforestation in tropical areas.
According to Julio Cesar Centeno, a Venezuelan expert, 80 percent of all the wood cut down in the tropics is used as fuel in the country of origin, while only 20 percent goes to industrial processing. And four-fifths of that 20 percent is also consumed in the country of origin, he underlined.
Centeno argues that the real causes of deforestation in tropical regions lie in poverty, pressure from expanding populations and the inequalities inherent to an international economic order that often runs counter to the interests of developing countries.
He also asserted that there was tacit discrimination against wood and by-products from tropical jungles, which are considered a product of irrational, ecologically-harmful logging techniques until a certification process proves the contrary, while products from northern hemisphere forests are treated as green-friendly unless it is clearly demonstrated otherwise. (END/IPS/TRA-SO/MSO/AG/SW/97)
