Briefing note: UNFF 4 by the International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests, FERN and the Forest Peoples Programme

4th Session of the United Nations Forum on Forests
United Nations,Geneva, Switzerland
3–14 May 2004

1. Introduction

The fourth United Nations Forum on Forests took place from May 3rd to 14th in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting brought together over 600 delegates representing governments, intergovernmental organisations and major groups. The main topics of discussion at this session were: Traditional Forest Related Knowledge, Social and Cultural Aspects of Forests, Monitoring and Reporting, Criteria and Indicators and Forest-Related Scientific Knowledge. There was also a working group discussing the process of the review of the UNFF. The following is a brief summary and evaluation of the 4th session.

2. Background and context of the  4th session

The UNFF’s mandate is to ‘promote the management and sustainable development of all types of forests and to strengthen long-term political commitment to this end’. For the past 3 years, NGOs and Indigenous Peoples Organisations (IPOs) have been consistently disappointed by the UNFF’s inability to tackle the issues central to indigenous peoples, local communities and genuine sustainable forest management (see FERN and FPP briefings and reports)[1]. This session was to be the last session prior to the final UNFF 5 (to be held in 2005), where governments will review the effectiveness of the UNFF and also make decisions regarding its future and decide whether another international arrangement, such as a forest convention, is wanted.

3. Voluntary reports

The glaring lack of government national report submissions and the lack of participation of civil society groups demonstrate that the UNFF is failing to fulfil an important aspect of its mandate. [2] Under the UNFF, countries are requested to produce national reports, which they send to the UNFF secretariat prior to UNFF sessions. These reports are supposed to evaluate to what extent and in what manner countries have implemented the IPF/IFF proposals for action. A week prior to the beginning of UNFF 4 only 30 out of 191 member states had reported. More than half of these reports were prepared without the participation of civil society. [3] This lack of reporting merely highlights how little governments take their commitments to this process seriously.

4. First week

During the first week, statements on the topics for discussion were made by governments, panel discussions were held on topics such as the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and Africa and SFM, and the Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue was held. All of these events had little effect on the important decision-making and text negotiations held the subsequent week.

Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue

Indigenous Peoples and NGOs representatives at the UNFF 4 felt that the Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue was merely an exercise in window dressing by the UNFF, and that their participation was ‘ghettoised’ within this dialogue session. The Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue (MSD) established as a ‘cornerstone’ of UNFF sessions since UNFF2, is supposed to be a forum for dialogue between the various different major groups with specific interests in forests. In the past, the MSD has been extremely disappointing, with no dialogue taking place at all: instead governments would make repetitive statements about the steps they have taken towards sustainable forest management. This MSD at UNFF 4 was promoted as an improved version of the past MSDs. More time was indeed given to major groups to establish their positions, and there were a few occasions when real exchanges took place, yet the outcomes and concerns expressed never found their way into the important discussions held and texts negotiated by the governments during the second week. The feelings of IPOs and NGOs coming out of this MSD are best expressed by the Global Caucus on Community Based Forest Management[4]: “What good is a multi-stakeholder dialogue unless the input of indigenous peoples, community representatives, and other members of civil society is incorporated within the actual resolutions of UNFF? As Earth Negotiations Bulletin (#10) reports: ‘The fact that the resolution on social and cultural aspects of forests included merely a weak reference to indigenous peoples only served to reinforce the perception that UNFF does not reflect the concerns of civil society’ [5] . Therefore also this improved MSD is the smoke and mirrors clouding the reality of ‘participation’ at UNFF – it enables the illusion of participation while the real negotiations go on as usual.”

4. Second week – Text negotiations  

a. Resolution on Social and Cultural Aspects of Forests (SCAF)

The resolution on Social and Cultural Aspects of Forests was a real disappointment for indigenous peoples and NGOs. Despite this topic being of fundamental importance to indigenous peoples, and their repeated appeals to be allowed to intervene, no interventions by major groups were granted. The resulting frustration led IPOs to write an open letter to the Vice-chairman of the Working Group within which these negotiations were held, expressing their great disappointment at both their lack of voice, and the weakness of the text with regards to their fundamental concerns. [6] The resulting resolution is therefore extremely weak and mentions indigenous and local communities only once in paragraph 7 of the resolution: “Urges countries, in accordance with their national legislation, to foster a greater involvement and effective participation of their relevant stakeholders, including indigenous and local communities, particularly women and youth in the development, decision-making, implementation and practice of sustainable forest management”. The final text did not even mention key issues such as rights, land tenure, customary law and community-based forest management. The experience of working on text negotiations in a climate where the voices of civil society are deliberately disregarded, led to most of the participants representing IPOs and NGOs to reject the process as undemocratic and unrepresentative. The final text of the resolution is still unavailable on the UNFF website.

b. Resolution on Traditional Forest Related Knowledge (TFRK)

Following lengthy deliberations and despite the fact that consideration of Traditional Forest Related Knowledge is an integral part of the UNFF’s mandate, no resolution could be agreed by governments. In fact, the difficult progress of the deliberations on this topic highlighted the inability of the UNFF process to address issues of fundamental importance to sustainable forest management. Upon receiving the draft text of the resolution, indigenous peoples representatives were disappointed to find that references to rights were few, and often qualified by weakening language, and that there was no reference to the free prior and informed consent of indigenous and local communities in relation to access and use of traditional knowledge.

The textual changes proposed by the indigenous representatives were aimed at strengthening the language on rights and participation, and inserting language on free prior and informed consent for access to and use of traditional knowledge. This strategy was partially successful to begin with; however, at the outset of the second session of discussion, the G77 and China proposed to remove all the resolution’s decisions and replace them with a single watered down sentence, which did not substantively address the issue at hand, and did not deal with rights at all. Following this, the negotiations broke down, and after hours of discussion, the resolution was scrapped.

It became clear that the main argument between the North and the South lies in who controls the access to traditional knowledge: the G77/China wanted to delete any reference to access to traditional knowledge, since they want this to be controlled entirely at the national level by the State. The US on the other hand, backed by the EU and Canada, were pushing for the facilitation of access to TK. All of this took place, with no input from the knowledge holders themselves Discussions with individual governments within the G77 and China made it clear that their positions were highly divergent, and that the more progressive governments were forced to drop to the lowest common denominator. The government’s polarised positions on this topic highlighted the fact the development of an effective and participatory international arrangement on forests will require governments to be informed and flexible, and that without the genuine participation of civil society groups with an understanding of and interest in the issues at stake, deliberations may simply break down, and important topics may be left unaddressed owing to their difficult nature. In addition, the difficulties surrounding the discussions of access to and use of traditional knowledge at the UNFF 4, highlighted the problems in addressing this topic at the international level, evident already at the COP7 of the CBD, held in February 2004 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.. Indigenous representatives at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues now recommend that such discussions be held in a human rights forum rather than a biodiversity or intellectual property rights forum. [7]

c. Resolution on Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting (MAR) and Criteria and Indicators (C&I)

The resolutions on Monitoring Assessment and Reporting (MAR) and Criteria & Indicators (C&I) dealt with the monitoring, assessment and reporting of the state of the forest and criteria and indicators for such monitoring. However, nothing was resolved regarding the monitoring, assessment and reporting of the implementation on the IPF/IFF proposals for action at the national level although governments agreed that it was important. The topics of MAR and C&I were combined into one resolution, since these two themes were deemed so closely linked. Only one weak paragraph of the entire resolution addressed Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting of the implementation of IPF/IFF proposals for action. NGOs tried to keep this paragraph in the resolution, but governments wanted this paragraph in the resolution on the UNFF Review (see below). However, this review is only a year-long process to evaluate the UNFF, and it will not be pursued beyond its year-long mandate. The IPF/IFF proposals for action go further; they should be supported and implemented within other arrangements on forests, and governments are encouraged to monitor, report and assess their implementation. Although some governments (UK, Dutch, US) agreed on this, during the text negotiations others refused this, and finally this paragraph on MAR was deleted. The final agreed text therefore concentrates largely on the Criteria and Indicators with a few sections on the MAR of the state of the forests. It was a great disappointment for the NGOs to have no paragraph at all concerning MAR of IPF/IFF proposals for action, because this is the only way in which governments can be held to account, and this approach would provide the basis for the effectiveness of the International Arrangement on Forests.

d. Resolution on the Review of UNFF

Although the Review was not one of the main topics of UNFF 4, a working group was held and a resolution was negotiated concerning the process to facilitate the review of the effectiveness of the International Arrangement on Forests at UNFF5. In order to facilitate country reporting for the Review, a questionnaire for governments to complete has been developed. The criteria, developed at UNFF 2 will be used for the questionnaire. The questionnaire will not replace the voluntary national reports, and will be a voluntary exercise as well as to be developed with due regard to the state’s capacity. G77 held fast to the position of these questionnaires being voluntary and ‘within the capacity of the country’. It is unlikely therefore that the UNFF will obtain a global view of the implementation of the proposals for action, since voluntary reporting has proven to be of little use [8] . The final text of the resolution on the Review also provides for Collaborative Partnership on Forests members and other relevant organisations and forest related processes to submit reports on the implementation of the IPF/IFF proposals for action and they can submit a completed questionnaire to the UNFF. It is important that NGOs and IPOs seize this occasion to hold governments to account, and if they decide to use this space, reports and completed questionnaires have to be submitted to the UNFF by 30 September 2004. [9]

5. Conclusions

Overall, this 4th session of the UNFF was a disappointment for IPO and NGO representatives. It seems that the effort and time spent for the past 4 years to improve the UNFF in both its format and its outcomes has changed nothing, and civil society participation is still a sham. Or as the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (#11) [10] put it: “One point of clear consensus in Geneva was that the UNFF has failed to deliver on its stated aims, and that continuing the arrangement in its current form is neither politically viable nor desirable”.  The last statement delivered to the plenary was by IPOs and NGOs and highlighted their fundamental concerns regarding both the process and resulting outcomes of this session of the UNFF. [11]

[11] The statement is available from www.forestpeoples.org and www.fern.org