2.1 Initial operation of the African Forest Forum

In the course of implementing the SFM I project 2003-2005, several senior people from all over Africa with expertise on, interest in and responsibility for forestry matters - drawn from civil services, politics, academia, private companies, international institutions, NGOs, etc. - took active part in the programmes. Some were members of the steering committee, some wrote commissioned reports or reviewed them, some where involved with the project’s support to the UNFF process, and many participated in the workshops and seminars organised by the project. The active participation by many of the scientists already connected to the AFORNET network made the number of people thus involved significant. From these very constructive interactions emerged an interest in continuing and strengthening this independent platform of analysis, advocacy and advice. A decision was subsequently taken to make the formation of an African Forest Forum (AFF) an explicit objective for phase II of the SFM project.

In January 2007, the Forum was set up by the members of the Steering Committee of SFM II, acting as Founding Members of the AFF. This followed an in-depth and wide-reaching consultation process among forestry stakeholders within and outside Africa, leading to the formulation and endorsement of a Constitution and accompanying Guidelines for administrative and financial operations for the Forum. These documents formed the basis for acquiring the official legal status of an international Non-Governmental Organisation domiciled in Kenya on December 06, 2007. The interest in the Forum among people involved with forests and trees in a very wide sense is significant, and today (June 2008) there are around 400 registered members within a period of less than two years.

The African Forest Forum and its goals, purposes, intended modes of operations, target groups, etc., are described in Appendix 1. A brief presentation of the Founding Members and members of the first Governing Council is given in Appendix 2. The Forum has the explicit or implicit support of several important regional and international organisations and processes, which see it as a potential platform for providing them with independent and high quality analysis and advice on forestry issues of relevance to the continent. Many of these organisations will also be valuable partners to the Forum. Up to now, United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF),  the African Union (AU), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have all actively requested inputs into their policy and negotiating processes from AFF. The list in Appendix 2 speaks for itself in underpinning the strong endorsement that the idea of the Forum has on the continent and beyond.

The medium-term goal is that the AFF will establish a secure funding base that guarantees its operations and independence. For that purpose, the Governing Council has established a Task Force on Resources Mobilisation that is in the process of developing and implementing a fund raising strategy and plan. However, in order to build up its secretariat and governance structure and their modes of operation, and to provide a seamless interface with the activities of the SFM II project, which will expire on 31 October 2008, and start gaining experience by addressing some key issues (below), a secure external funding for a critical minimum level and period of operations will be required.

2.2  A programme to support  forest management in Africa

The seven activities proposed in this document will form part of an initial programme to build the AFF and address some key issues identified as priorities in the SFM I/II process. The overall purpose is to strengthen the capacity for sustainable forest management in Africa so that it can support policies and actions contributing to poverty alleviation and environmental stability. The specific programme and activities in this proposal focus on the following important areas:

1.    Information generation, sharing and uptake.
2.    Good forest governance and law enforcement.
3.    Effects of, and mitigation and adaptation to, climate change.
4.    Forest-water relations and management.
5.    Strengthening Africa in international and regional dialogues on forestry and related areas.
6.    Rehabilitation of public forest plantations.
7.    The potential for collaboration between African and Swedish forest institutions.

Again, it should be stressed that there are fifteen other priority issues that have been identified in the SFM process at the four sub-regional workshops held (in Addis Ababa, Douala, Lusaka and Bamako). These have also been turned into proposals, and the AFF will link up with appropriate national and regional forestry bodies in Africa to search for funding and establish appropriate implementation mechanisms for them. The reasons why the current seven are incorporated in this proposal are that they are either both urgent and continental or sub-regional in context, and thus eminently suitable for a mechanism such as AFF to take the lead on, or, in the case of the potential links between Africa and Sweden, because the request is addressed to Sida and it is envisaged that Swedish forest institutions and expertise can play a positive role in collaboration with African colleagues and sister institutions.

2.3 Justification of specific activities

Africa continues to have serious problems with generating new information and innovations in forestry, accessing externally available information, as well as with analysing and adopting such information and innovation into practical forest management. There are pockets of information in many institutions, networks and individuals. However, a mechanism to systematically collect, collate, synthesise (where necessary) and share the information is lacking. Such information would not only enrich educational establishments, which mould future foresters, agriculturalists, environmentalists and other stakeholders in forestry, but it will also be useful for decision-makers and practitioners in forestry, environmental protection, rural development, and related areas. It will enable monitoring of the compliance of the forestry sector to international conventions, agreements and protocols, the millennium development goals, the non-legally binding forest instrument and national economic plans.

Good forest governance and law enforcement are areas that are acquiring increasing prominence in the global forest arena. Their success will largely depend on overall governance and law enforcement in individual countries. An African Forest Law Enforcement & Governance (AFLEG) initiative is already taking root in the Congo Basin countries. The SFM II project collaborates with other parties (the EAC, AFORNET, the World Bank, and the Finnish Embassy in Nairobi) on introducing FLEG to some Eastern African countries. The Southern African countries have yet to be collectively engaged in a FLEG process. Added to this process is a need to extend it to trade in forest products (FLEGT). These initiatives are crucial to safeguard any achievements in SFM, apart from making more forest resources and incomes available equitably to stakeholders. With good forest governance and law enforcement Africa could, in the short to medium term, put most of its forest resources under some form of good administration, while working on them to achieve SFM in the long term. The planned and promising FLEGT initiatives will need support from both within and outside Africa.

With the possible exception of biodiversity conservation and exploration, where international and regional wildlife and conservation NGOs such as WWF and IUCN are active, the continent has yet to develop effective and efficient ways of taking up and continuously monitor new and emerging issues on environmental impacts, threats and opportunities related to forests. This applies to climate change and carbon trade. There is, for example, no consolidated African forestry response to climate change as the issue is gaining momentum on the international scene – the risk is imminent that strategies and plans related to these issues will be totally dominated by opinions and considerations from outside the continent. The African forestry sector appears to take a back seat in the debate on climate change and how to adapt to it (through species choice and management techniques), mitigate its effects (carbon sequestration), and benefit from emerging potentials (e.g. certification, carbon trade and clean development mechanisms).

The world is increasingly becoming conscious of the growing scarcity of clean water. Forests play crucial roles in assuring water quality and availability. At present, it is obvious that increasingly larger regions on the African continent are affected by water shortages. As mentioned earlier, most important rivers in Africa originate from forest areas (dry, moist and mountain forests), with major river basins of significance to agricultural production found in the African dry forest ecozones. However, little attention is paid to forest-water relations so as to ensure sufficient supplies of quality water to the African people, its animals and plants. Like with climate change, the tendency has been to act at times of crises. Water and climate issues cannot always be fixed in the short term, especially when the situation is relatively bad. In addition, Africa has yet to develop mechanisms to mitigate against adverse effects of external policies that have a potential to impact the forestry sector.

The absence of a collective African opinion on the above and many other forestry and related issues would appear to weaken Africa’s response to them and could jeopardize their containment on the continent. Galvanising the African voice and opinion on forestry issues is an area that is still in its infancy in terms of development. Both SFM I and SFM II gave some limited support to this, specifically with respect to the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF 5-7), where the project mounted a Technical Support Team to the African delegations, a team that operated under the umbrella of the African Union (AU). The “African Group” emerged at UNFF 5, after the collapse of the G77 and China negotiating group, and Africa has since spoken with one voice in UNFF sessions. But that is only one step. There is a need to strengthening the African unity of purpose beyond UNFF negotiations. There is need that such unity be given form and structure. The African Forest Forum has been established with this as one of its many explicit tasks and it needs strong support for contributing to a continued strengthening of the African voice in international and regional forest-related processes and negotiations.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, substantial areas of forest plantations, mostly of exotic species such as pines, eucalypts and cypresses, were established in many countries of Eastern and Southern Africa with limited natural forest resources. The main purpose of these plantations, most of which were established and run by state forest departments on Government land, were to provide a sufficient supply of timber to sawmills and other wood processing industries, and, through these, affordable forest products to the growing populations. Initially, these plantations, even if many lacked planned integration with the product chain through industry to consumers, were well managed and many countries became more or less self-sufficient with industrial wood from rather modest areas of fast-growing plantations. For example, in Kenya an estate of just over 150,000 ha of plantations provided all industrial wood required in the country. From the late 1980s, however, the plantation estates in most countries went into a period of accelerating decline – due to corruption, land conflicts, external funds moving their focus from industrial plantations to agroforestry and social forestry, weakening forest departments and management capacities, unrealistically low prices charged to sawmillers for timber, etc. Today, the plantations in most countries are in a poor shape and only supply a fraction of national wood needs. At the same time, market and consumer demands for affordable wood products continue to grow exponentially with rapid urbanisation and growing middle classes. There is a rapidly increasing industrial wood deficit in these countries. This therefore calls for an urgent look at innovative ways of improving and accelerating plantation forestry in both public and private sectors, as well as through other means, with a view to match supplies to market requirements and evolution of more appropriate plantation management/tenure models (see Appendix 3).

During the SFM I project, studies were made on the relevance to Africa of Sweden’s experience in the last 100-150 years to become a successful forestry country. Although ecological and economic conditions are obviously different, it was concluded that many Swedish lessons related to the processes and mechanisms of developing and administrating forest policies and legislation, strengthening institutional capacity for supporting mechanisms to SFM, e.g. within areas of research, education/training, resource inventories and statistics, extension services, certification and market intelligence, etc., and in organising and empowering stakeholders in the use, management and conservation of forest and tree resources, could be of relevance, in adapted forms, also to Africa. A proposal for developing a collaborative umbrella programme between African and Swedish forest stakeholders around these aspects was prepared and extensively discussed and endorsed at sub-regional workshops in Eastern and Southern Africa. The current proposal incorporates the 2-year “planning and inception” phase of this programme, and involves studies, workshops and reports leading to concrete recommendations of how to establish and implement collaborative activities between African and Swedish institutions. It will include forest policy-makers, primary producers (farmers, communities and other tree growers/managers), secondary producers (industry and market operators), consumers, and environmental and other groups with special interests in forest resources (see Appendices 3 and 4).