An investigation into forest ownership and customary land ... - Fern

‘So who owns the forest’
for each class of forest (or zone, if retained as a single forest estate) have been
devised.
7. Mobilising communities as economic partners and agents of
conservation
Technical assessment of community decisions as to whether its forestland is or
is not suitable for award of concessions is a logical next task. It would fall on the
community to devise appropriate conditions of access, benefit share, and applicable
rules. The law needs amending to ensure that no contractual agreements
are made by the FDA with logging or salvage companies without community
representation and signature.
In practice, companies would in time not bother applying for licences in these
areas without first engaging in preliminary negotiations with these communities.
This need not interfere with FDA proposals to auction logging rights. This
would not proceed without the FDA already having worked with communities
to determine the viability of their areas to participate having secured provisional
consent from the FDA to proceed.
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Land rental agreements should ideally all be signed directly with communities,
under FDA supervision, such as already possible where the current law recognises
the land holder as land owner.
Mechanisms to ensure that community roles are underwritten by majority
community approval are necessary. The function of the FDA (among many
others) as controller of revenue collection and shares remains practical. FDA
may implement a tax on community profit from its share of stumpage to cover
costs of facilitation and advisory fees.
In practice, the FDA already has priority areas it wishes to see commercially
harvested and is able to systematically target affected communities to arrive
at workable agreements and to put the basic institutional community forest
governance frameworks in place. Again, such a shift in people-state relationship
is not momentous to the extent that its logic is already showing tentative signs
of delivery in the significantly altered intentions of still early draft regulations
under the NFRL 2006. At this point the text of the law threatens to truncate and
trivialise such beginnings and should be amended to allow for a genuine partnership
approach to commercial exploitation of the resource.