o Reinforce the mandates and resources of enforcement agencies, as well as the motivation and training of their personnel; ando Legally recognize customary land-tenure systems or provide assistance in cases where these are no longer sustainable. Multilateral aid and investment programs should give higher priority to assisting developing countries in these respects. Mandates of forest departments in the case-study countries frequently overlap or conflict with those of other institutions. Enforcement agencies are often severely understaffed and lack the required equipment (too often, inspectors depend on transport and accommodation facilities provided by logging companies). Their personnel, especially field inspectors, are underpaid, poorly trained, and of insufficient rank to exert effective authority. 4. The battle against illegal logging and illegal timber trade calls for an effective international monitoring and reporting process. It also calls for continuous, independent monitoring by NGOs with suitable expertise and with localcommunity participation, and it calls for donor support to provide these NGOs with the necessary resources. However, NGO involvement should not become an excuse for governments to abdicate their responsibilities. Because of the international dimension of the issue, international networking is necessary. The goal of such networking is to exchange information on illegaltrade flow patterns, effective countermeasures, success stories, and internationally active agents implicated in illegality and malpractice. Networking between neighbouring countries is essential because of the higher incidence of illegalities in border regions, especially when laws and regulations differ considerably between countries. The FoEI project shows that for NGOs to be successful in monitoring, it is essential that they identify and cooperate with allies within government, parliament, the judicial system, enforcement agencies, the industry, and the press. It is also essential that they form coalitions with other NGOs and affected communities opposed to such illegal practices. Regional networking would enable NGOs to campaign more effectively against internationally active agents involved in illegalities, who force countries in the same region to compete against each other by progressively lowering their environmental, social, and financial standards. 5. Improvements are urgently needed in national-level implementation of existing international environmental agreements. Countries should give priority to defining concrete national targets, strategies, and timetables; strengthening sanction mechanisms; ensuring transparency in the national drafting and negotiation process; and providing adequate resources for enforcement. CITES, CBD, and the ILO’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention are of particular importance. For the Latin American countries, the 1940 Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere (also known as the Western Hemisphere Convention) is relevant, as it includes an article on restrictions in international trade of protected fauna and flora (PAU 1943). For the African countries, the 1968 African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (OAU 1977) must be mentioned. 6. International terms of trade, national legislation, tax systems, and land-tenure arrangements in the project countries contain many technical disincentives and lack incentives for sustainable land use, and for SFM in particular. An example of a tax incentive is land-use taxation that applies lower rates, or even negative rates (= subsidies), for land uses that maintain nonmarket values (for example, biodiversity conservation, watershed protection) or that restore ecosystems (for example, natural-forest regeneration). The opposite is more often the case in the four case-study countries, and this represents a serious disincentive. An example of a trade incentive is discriminatory taxation on imports or sales of wood products, according to harvesting or processing methods; for example, a zero tax on certified products would be an incentive. Channeling forest-related charges and taxes into the state treasury without earmarking them for effective forestry control on the ground or for investment in SFM acts as a disincentive. Small-scale farmers’ acquisition of de facto property rights by turning forest into productive farmland acts as a disincentive for logging companies to practice longterm forest management, because the concessionaire has no guarantee of second and further harvests. 7. Independent certification of timber and wood products is an indispensable market mechanism to discriminate between sustainably and unsustainably produced goods, and — as is inherent in the first principle of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC 1996) — to guarantee that the product has been legally harvested, processed, and traded. Although certification is primarily a market mechanism, any government that is serious about SFM can play a role by creating a favourable legislative and tax framework for certified products (see previous conclusion). The rationale for this approach is that it is unacceptable to have a buyer of a sustainable product pay for internalized costs while the buyer of an unsustainable product unloads these costs on society or on future generations. In other words, it is unfair to expect responsible producers to depend on green ethics alone to persuade consumers to buy their products. An additional criterion to be incorporated into certification schemes is reference to an effective national forest policy with a balanced allocation of the entire forest estate to various land-use categories (biodiversity conservation, timber production, nontimber-product extraction, indigenous territories, etc.). 8. Illegal logging and illegal timber trade are often interwoven with other illegal practices. This poses a threat to human rights, nature conservation, and the overall credibility of legislation and enforcement agencies. Examples from the project are the violation of indigenous land rights, exploitation of workers in the forest and wood industries, illegal land ownership and speculation, cross-border smuggling of other goods, poaching, and wildlife trade.RECOMMENDATIONSON INTERNATIONAL LEGAL INSTRUMENTS 1. Trade provisions in international environmental agreements should be given sufficient status to prevent them from being undermined by international trade agreements such as GATT and by regulations such as those of the WTO.o The WTO regulations should be reviewed and, where necessary, reformed to protect trade provisions in environmental agreements.o WTO regulations should be reformed to allow for trade restrictions in case of illegal-trade practices. 2. An interagency task force should be established to review existing environmental and trade instruments with provisions applying to the trade in forest products to determine their potential to eliminate illegal practices and the constraints on their effective implementation. NGOs with suitable expertise should be allowed to participate on the task force to help prevent the review from being paralyzed by political sensitivities. This task force should be given access to all relevant sources of information so it can make a global assessment of the extent of the illegal international trade in forest products, and then it should present concrete recommendations for improving these instruments. Among the mechanisms that should be reinforced or added to these existing instruments are the following:o Internationally recognized forest-product chain-of-custody tracking systems;o Reciprocal import bans (by importing countries) to support the export bans of individual exporting countries;o Prohibition of the import or export of forest products harvested or shipped in violation of the laws of the product’s country of origin or in violation of the recognized customary property rights of indigenous and other forestdependent communities;
o A mechanism establishing international legal liability of private companies involved in violations; and
o Incentives for the active involvement of local communities in monitoring and curtailing illegal trade. 3. The status of the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention should be raised, and more countries should be persuaded to become signatories. The recommendations made to the ITTO in the 1992
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