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Logging in Ecuador
Logging in Ecuador
Cut down
Oct 30th 2003 | QUITO
From The Economist print edition
The courts versus the rainforest
SPANNING the Amazon rainforest, the Andes, coastal lowlands and the Galapagos islands, Ecuador is the world's most biodiverse country in relation to its area. Its forests are home to bears, jaguars, a profusion of birds and many rare plants. Yet Ecuador is also losing its trees faster than anywhere else in South America. Deforestation looks set to continue apace: on October 28th, the country's Constitutional Tribunal, under pressure from timber companies and their champions in Ecuador's Congress, struck down an innovative and effective scheme to outsource the regulation of logging.
According to official figures, 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) of primary forest are felled each year; unofficial sources put the figure twice as high. This means that half of the forests have been lost in the past three decades, much of them to illegal logging. Ecuador's Wood Industry Association reckons that 70% of all timber sold in the country is illegally felled.
The government is always short of cash, and forestry control has never ranked high among its priorities. So four years ago, the Environment Ministry, with help from the Inter-American Development Bank and the German government, came up with a scheme to delegate control of logging to the private sector and civic groups.
The first stage involved setting up a body called Green Surveillance, comprising five non-governmental organisations, the police, the army and the ministry itself. This body was given responsibility for policing the transport of illegal timber. The team, which financed itself from the sale of confiscated wood, captured almost six times as much illegal timber last year as the ministry had when it acted alone.
This angered some loggers, but the real problems started when the government hired Soci�t� G�n�rale de Surveillance (SGS), a Swiss company, to administer logging licences in return for a tax on legal sales of wood. SGS has been the target of violent protests: staff have been attacked, offices ransacked and computers stolen. Despite repeated requests, the government has provided no protection, nor has anyone been arrested. The loggers also staged protests and unleashed a wave of lawsuits.
The timber industry claims to be in favour of controls on illegal logging. But in practice, it has been the main opponent of the new system. Timber companies claimed that it breached the constitution, by handing over a government function to a private firm. Environmentalists say that the timber companies buy illegal timber through middlemen, and in some cases themselves fell timber without permits.
Opponents reckon that the Constitutional Tribunal's decision was not based on jurisprudence. Ecuador's judiciary is notoriously political, and corrupt. Its latest decision will hamper the attempts of President Lucio Guti�rrez to modernise government. Repeated attempts to open Ecuador's flagging oil, telecoms and electricity industries to private investment have foundered partly on political opposition, but also on the fears of investors that they would not be protected by the courts.
Ecuador was judged to be the second most corrupt country in Latin America in the annual ranking published last month by Transparency International, a pressure group. Mr Guti�rrez has repeatedly promised a clean up, and that the laws will be upheld. That is easier said than done.
Source: The Economist
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