World Bank Launches Internal Investigation Into Cambodian Logging Fiasco

[hatrack]

Editorial note - this is a press release so I have included the entire piece.

"Global Witness warmly welcomes the recent decision by the World Bank board to authorise an Inspection Panel investigation of its Forest Concession Management and Control Pilot Project in Cambodia (FCMCPP).

For five years, the Bank has used the FCMCPP to promote a system of logging concessions that has demonstrably failed Cambodia economically, socially and environmentally. In the face of overwhelming evidence, the Bank has nevertheless clung to the notion that the mafia-style logging syndicates which have ravaged Cambodia’s forests can be reformed.

In 2004 an independent forest sector review commissioned by international donor institutions and the Cambodian government concluded that the logging concession system should be scrapped. Just two months later, however, the Bank’s project recommended that the government approve the forest management plans of six companies which have a long history of illegal logging and contractual violations.

A group of Cambodian villagers who have previously suffered at the hands of these companies lodged a complaint against the project with the Bank’s Inspection Panel in February this year. In March the Panel recommended to the Bank’s executive directors that it undertake a full investigation of the FCMCPP.

“The Inspection Panel process provides the opportunity to hold the Bank to account for five years of blunders in Cambodia,” said Global Witness Director Simon Taylor. “The Bank must, at a minimum, renounce its project’s endorsement of companies whose operations are a parody of sustainable forest management. Furthermore, it should use this investigation as the basis for a fundamental revision of its approach to forest management in post-conflict countries.”

The Inspection Panel investigation in Cambodia is all the more relevant given current challenges facing the international donor community in other post-conflict countries, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). DRC possesses the second largest tropical forest in the world and 40 million of its 58 million people depend on it for survival. Indications from the initial stages of the Bank’s work in DRC suggest that the lessons of Cambodia have not been learned.

“The Bank is over-ambitious in its estimates of potential timber revenues and makes the basic assumption that industrial logging is the best use of DRC’s forests. It has an unrealistic expectation that policies and commitments will be matched by political will and good governance, and all this in a vast country just emerging from full-scale civil war. This is exactly how the Bank approached its work in Cambodia; however it is not too late to salvage the situation in DRC given commitment, the necessary resources and, above all, some original thinking.” said Global Witness Director Patrick Alley.


For further information, please contact Simon Taylor (tel. [phone], [e-mail]); or Mike Davis (tel. [phone], [e-mail])."

http://www.globalwitness.org/press_releases/display2.php?id=286