Forestry Conservation
Background
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Forest conservation efforts have achieved significant successes in Uganda over the last 10 years. These include increasing the variety and number of protected forests, enhancing the visibility of forest issues, both nationally and internationally, promoting new national and international policies and partnerships in support of forest conservation and working with communities, consumers, and producers to foster sustainable forest management and
logging practices.
These achievements, however, have not stopped the world from losing forests—particularly tropical forests at alarming rates. Hence the questions: Are we doing all we can? Should we do more of the same? Is there room to add new perspectives? We should certainly do more of the same, but I would submit that there is room also for reviewing some approaches and adding new perspectives.
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The Poverty Alleviation - Forest Conservation Nexus
One of the areas where review and additions seems warranted is that of the forests–poverty nexus. First and foremost, worldwide concerns about poverty alleviation and the need for new strategies to address poverty are putting the onus on the conservation movement to show that forest conservation helps rather than hinders poverty alleviation. If we do not step in with convincing proposals to support this contention, we may witness further attacks on forests in the name of poverty reduction.
Second, there is growing frustration among conservation and social development practitioners with policies that have not lived up to their claims of being able to deliver both poverty alleviation and forest conservation. These include many market-oriented reforms, agricultural intensification programs and integrated conservation and development projects.
Third, we must reopen discussion on this issue because the current state of affairs, in which a rich urban world demands that the poor rural world embrace what is essentially the environmental agenda of the former, is not sustainable. The situation will continue to be unsustainable until the needs and concerns of the poor rural world are brought on board and until its role as steward of the world environment is duly acknowledged and rewarded.
ARUD's New answers to pressing questions
The conservation movement has for several decades viewed the forests–poverty nexus with a vicious circle conceptual framework, within which population growth, limited environmental carrying capacity, natural hazards, and market failures combine to perpetuate poverty-cum-environmental degradation traps. This diagnosis led to the implementation of local integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs), which were viewed as a win-win strategy that could deliver both environmental conservation and poverty alleviation.
(Left) Farmers digging trenches to control water and soil run-off.
(Right) Napier grass planted along a trench for water and soil protection.
This practice has increased farm yields where it is implemented.
ARUD officer handing over tree saplings to youth and farmers after sensitizing them on alternative conservation and income generation.
One alternative to the vicious circle theory is the pro-market approach. Sometimes complementing and sometimes competing with the vicious circle theory, this approach blames insufficient markets and a lack of property rights for deforestation and rural poverty, and has been used to justify the drive by international development banks and development agencies for land titling, for the scrapping of price controls and subsidies, and for the opening up of rural production to international competition, on the assumption that expanded markets and private ownership would foster rural development and protect natural resources. In some cases, such as in China, these initiatives have paid back in terms of rural poverty alleviation; in others, such as in Africa, they have not. Nowhere have they fostered forest conservation.
These failures suggest that the conceptual approaches used in the past were deficient, or at least incomplete, and in the last decade new answers and strategies have been proposed to address four basic questions:
1. What are the immediate, intermediate, and root causes of deforestation?
2. Are the rural poor a threat to forests?
3. Are forests an important source of current or potential income for the rural poor?
4. How might the conservation movement better mainstream forests–poverty issues into
its policy and activities?
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