economic resources to finance operations, and pressure on governments to abandon such methods and exploit forests for more immediate benefits. Experiences with SFM in moist tropical forests in South and Central America Moist tropical forests in South and Central America have a lower species diversity and smaller tree diameters than the moist tropical forests of Africa and Asia. The density of stems is higher, but the lower volume of commercial species in these forests generally results in harvests of only 5 to 30 cubic metres per hectare. There have been few attempts to implement sustainable forest management techniques in the region and documentation of the few attempts that have been made is poor. Some attempts have been made by private enterprises, but the results of these attempts have not been made public. It appears that none of these experiments have been conducted over long periods of time. In Trinidad and Tobago, the Periodic Block System was designed but it does not appear to have been fully implemented. Results were never published and much of the data was lost. Similarly, in Surinam, the CELOS Management System was developed based on several years of forest research, but the system was not implemented on a large scale. It was abandoned because of political conflict and insecurity in the area. Other examples of experiments with sustainable forest management systems exist in Mexico (Quintana Roo and Sierra Madre projects), Peru (Palazcu Valley), Brazil (Tapajos, Minas Gerais Cerrado and Caatinga, Mata Atlantica, IMAZON Paragominas and others), Costa Rica (Portico, BOSCOSA and FORESTA projects) Bolivia (Chimanes, MACA-IDB Project) and French Guyana, but these have all suffered from similar problems of implementation or are too recent to derive definitive conclusions (Kirmse, Constantino and Guess, 1993). Therefore, the overall experience with the application of sustainable forest management systems in this region is very limited, too recent, or poorly documented. Ball surmised that by the end of the 1980s, the sustainable management of tropical moist forests appeared to be almost non-existent, and the permanency of the forest estate, the basis of sustainable management, was often threatened. The ITTO report No Timber without Trees (Poore et al. 1989) showed that a very small area was even in theory under sustainable management. However, by 2005, ITTO reported (Status of International Forest Management. ITTO 2005) described a more encouraging picture, where some 25 million hectares were being sustainably managed with India and Malaysia accounting for 40 % of that total.
12