IPS Post: Treat Illegal Logging as Organize Crime

World Bank has recently release a report: Justice for Forest, Improving Criminal Justice Efforts to Combat Illegal Logging.  About 2 to 3 weeks ago, Alert Net has reported an annual loss of up to USD 15 billion was caused by illegal logging in developing countries. With that amount of money, it can be use to develop these countries for better infrastructure or economics. And this post I read last week that talks about the World Bank report, which I agreed that preventive and public awareness are not just enough to curb illegal logging to the minimal risk for contributing to forest loss.

Such efforts should complement preventive measures, including educating consumers about the problem, promoting legal reforms governing forest tenure and timber rights, and using certification and related methods to make it easier to differentiate between legal and illegally logged timber.

While preventive efforts have enjoyed a sharp increase in international and public attention and support in recent years, they have until now had relatively "little impact" in curbing the problem, according to the report, "Justice for Forests: Improving Criminal Justice Efforts to Combat Illegal Logging".

While "preventive actions against illegal logging are critical," said Magda Lovei, the Bank's sector manager, "we also know that they are insufficient."

In another word, law enforcement such as investigation, prosecution, imprisonment, and the confiscation of illegal proceeds should be implemented, integrated as part of the solution to curb illegal logging.

Some environmentalist has raised the issue that in this report, World Bank should have evaluate their own operation that may indirectly finance illegal logging. 

"While it is a step in the right direction for the World Bank to look at what actions are needed to curb illegal logging, what is really needed is for the Bank to look at its own role in financing industrial-scale operations that benefit from legal and illegal clearance of rainforests," Lindsey Allen, forests programme director at Rainforest Action Network, told IPS.  "When we follow the money and look to stakeholders who have reported on these issues, as the report recommends, we find that the World Bank and IFC are bankrolling the infrastructure and expansion of destructive sectors such as pulp and palm oil.

"Rainforest Action Network would echo many of the recommendations in this report, while adding the recommendation that the World Bank Group specifically look at its own financing of operations that fail to engage stakeholders and incentivise forest clearance at any cost as has been our observation of World Bank Group projects in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia," she said.

Besides that, enforcement should not only focus on catching illegal loggers on the ground, rather to catch the ones that are behind the scene, the "top and untouchable" that are brain storming the ideas. For example; Ali Jambi. Illegal loggers on the ground are often the victim as they are poor and usually hired to do the job in the forest.  

 "Indiscriminate arrests or needless harassment of poor people – even of those who might, because of exploitation and manipulation, be involved in illegal activities – undermines the credibility of forest law enforcement by ignoring the organizations and 'masterminds' in control of the illegal activity,"

Going after corrupt officials, including high-ranking politicians who may benefit from illegal logging, was critical, he stressed. "No forest sector reform (of the kind the World Bank has promoted) is going to be successful if you're unable to tackle high-level corruption and the political economy of the forest sector. Though the Bank acknowledges these issues on paper, it has historically been weak in integrating them into its forest sector work."

Greenpeace's Breitkopf agreed, noting that in some Congo Basin countries, "it is quite common for ministers and other high-level politicians to be directly involved in the logging business."
"From what I have observed, the World Bank has so far largely failed to support the criminal-justice system in its forest programme and relied too heavily on soft reforms, voluntary schemes, and the private sector," she told IPS, citing a decade's worth of Bank-backed forest-sector reforms in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  

The report noted that Western countries, including the U.S. and the European Union, are taking important steps to bar illegally logged wood from entering their markets, primarily through certification mechanisms, and urged that other countries follow suit.  

Such initiative has influence the ASEAN countries such as  Malaysia and Indonesia the leading countries to comply to the EU FLEGT regulation, busy setting up their TLAS system to trace wood products to the forest origin, and Vietnam, Laos and Thailand are tagging along developing their first stage of VPA negotiation. This initiative, although it does not curb illegal logging to a minimal risk to forest loss, at least it has reduce illegal logging by a quarter around the world.

I have not read the report yet, and this post actually gave me a rough idea what to expect from the report. 

~Just quoting for my reference~

  *Picture for illustration purposes, not related to this post*