Mr Huguet Antoine
Head of Forest and Wood Department
EUROCERTIFOR - BVQI
60 avenue du Général de Gaulle
92046 Paris
La Défense Cedex
France

Eurocertiforbvqi@fr.bureauveritas.com
Antoine.huguet@fr.bureauveritas.com
Caroline.duhesme@fr.bureauveritas.com

Dear Colleagues,

Ref: FSC Certification of Wijma logging concession UFA 09-021, Cameroon

I last wrote to you on June 13, 2005 to ask about the social research that Wijma carried out in UFA 09-021 in Cameroon, in relation to the criteria for FSC Principles 2&3. My letter was in response to your invitation to FPP to contribute to the public consultation culminating with the June 7 meeting in Douala.

On January 20, 2006, after Wijma received the FSC certificate, and in a response to a question put to him by Marcus Colchester of FPP at the RIIA meeting in London, Mark Diepstraten from Wijma promised to send FPP information backing up claims that corrective actions to ensure compliance with Principle 3 had been undertaken as explained in the Eurocertifor 2005 public report for UFA 09-021.

In particular the corrective action request (DAC 11) required Wijma to:

• Establish the customary rights of the indigenous peoples in the area;
• Revise the social impact assessment based on a field study, and;
• Carry out mapping to take into account the rights of the Bagyeli.

In their last email exchange Mark Diepstraten suggested to Marcus that we direct further questions about Wijma compliance measures to Eurocertifor-BVQi directly. In the interests of transparency and a credible FSC certificate, we would therefore be grateful for answers to the following 5 questions:

(1) Will you please explain in more detail what measures Wijma has undertaken to ensure compliance with these corrective action requests, and with FSC Principle 3?

We are in particular interested in the new social studies that the updated January 2006 public report says were carried out in UFA 09-021 to address the requirements of DAC 11.

(2) Can you please send us these reports?

Your original public report from 2005 acknowledged that Bagyeli lived in or near UFA 09-021, and used forests overlapped by the concession - hence the reason for DAC 11. The January 2006 report cites additional work carried out by local consultants CEPFI to address DAC 11 requirements, and it mentions brief visits by them, for example to Awomo, to the northwest of the concession, where I know from local informants that some minor work was done to a school. The January 2006 report also mentions a visit to nearby Bidjap. In neither case does the report explain the nature of consultations with the Bagyeli communities concerned. Our information from the field is that no proper consultations with Bagyeli concerning the UFA management plan have so far been undertaken. After the follow-up research by CEPFIL you concluded that Bagyeli would not be affected by Wijma logging operations in UFA 09-021.

(3) Along with the information requested above, can you please include details of the consultations with Bagyeli that the January 2006 public report suggests were carried out?

The January 2006 public report contains no explanation about why only these two Bagyeli communities were chosen as the focus of the follow-up work to comply with DAC 11. This needs to be clarified, since the bulk of the area UFA 09-021 is very far from there – separated from Awomo, for example, by a national park.

(4) What about indigenous and local people from the north, south and east of Ma’an, along the southern periphery of UFA 09-021, and on the other side of Campo Ma’an National Park? Have you considered their forest use as well? If so, what has been done to ensure their rights are protected in the management plan for UFA 09-021?

With our local partner CED and since 2001 we have been supporting Bagyeli communities across the Campo UTO to document their forest use, including in Awomo, as well as in and around UFA 09-026, also mentioned in the updated public report. Our research shows clearly that Bagyeli subsistence forest hunting and gathering in Campo UTO is:

1. crucial for the maintenance of Bagyeli family livelihoods;
2. widespread, i.e., it is happening almost everywhere;
3. extensive, with individual community-use zones commonly overlapping forests areas over 30 kilometres wide, and;
4. periodic, with a seasonality of forest activities linked both to the availability of forest goods in different places and at different times of the year, and to agricultural planting and harvesting seasons at the forest margins, in which many Bagyeli participate.

Our findings are backed up by all other social research so far available for Campo UTO.

Most social experts familiar with hunter-gatherer forest use know that not seeing hunter-gatherers working in a big forest is not an indicator that they do not rely upon it, especially for periodically mobile, forest-dependent populations such as the Bagyeli or Baka.

(5) Can you please explain therefore why Wijma is certain that their logging operations will not affect Bagyeli communities, or their rights, in other parts of UFA 09-021? In your response can you also please indicate when the relevant research cited in the January 2006 public report will be put into the public domain?

In order to ensure increased protection for local and indigenous forest community rights in line with international human rights standards FPP is committed to supporting strong and credible certification processes in Central Africa. We appreciate this open dialogue with you over FSC certification in Cameroon, and hope that it can continue. In the meantime, thanks in advance for your answers to the five questions set out above. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

With best wishes,

John Nelson
Policy Advisor

cc : HL (FSC), MC (FPP), MD (Wijma), SN and BT (CED