Technical Feasibility of SFM for Moist Tropical Forests

Technical Feasibility of Global Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) for Moist Tropical Forests

FAO6 depicts natural tropical forests cover as some 1,700 million hectares, of which around 900 million hectares are in Central and South America, 500 million hectares are in Africa and about 300 million hectares are in Asia and Oceania. Tropical forests comprise the most biologically diverse ecosystems on earth, containing more than half and possibly as much as 90 percent of the earth’s known living species (World Resources Institute, 1989). No tropical forest has been managed for long periods of time and nobody knows for sure whether even the best management practices are truly sustainable.

However, experience suggests that there is enough technical knowledge to considerably improve the current management of this type of forest, or at least to avoid the most blatantly unsustainable practices. Moist tropical forests probably also present the greatest technical challenges to implementing sustainable forest management.

Many experiments to examine sustainable forest management have taken place. Unfortunately, most were marred by nontechnical obstacles and events that occurred before conclusive empirical evidence of the technical feasibility of sustainable forest management could emerge. Most of the obstacles were related to several economic, institutional, and social factors, including:

• the length of time required for tropical trees to achieve commercial size. • the use of inappropriate harvesting systems. • economic pressures to repeatedly log areas in which regenerated trees have not yet matured • encroachment pressures from migratory communities that survive by practising slash and burn agriculture. In areas with scarce population, there are large reserves of forests that are not threatened. Protected areas in these places have a low opportunity cost and forest plantations are generally not an economically viable option. Furthermore, indigenous peoples frequently utilize forests in a sustainable way. In many cases, there is no need for drastic interventions to ensure sustainable forest management.

Circumstances may change rapidly if roads open-up remote areas, if mineral or oil deposits are found under the forests, or if high value species become more accessible.

But in areas of high population density, the proliferation of unsustainable practices is a major problem. In such areas, the total area of moist tropical forests is shrinking, and some forest types are extinct. Frequently, the forest has been converted to a mixture of primary and secondary forest. Logging in accessible areas of these moist tropical forests is intense and

6 FAO 1999 Towards Sustainable Forest Management: an examination of the technical, economic, and institutional feasibility of improving management of the global forest estate.