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 ForestPreserving Forests: Page 3 At the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, convened by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, world leaders agreed on the importance of slowing the rate of global forest destruction. Conservationists have pressed for a new, legally binding Global Forest Agreement to conserve and manage the world's forests. In spite of the urgent need for such an international treaty, no agreement has been reached in the intervening years. Numerous meetings and conferences between nations have failed to draft a policy that would curtail the uncontrolled commercial logging that is ravaging forests around the world.
Several organizations, including the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), headquartered in London, and the World Resources Institute (WRI) of Washington, DC, have issued reports that chronicle the damage being done and the need for such a treaty. EIA's report, Corporate Power, Corruption & The Destruction of the World's Forests, The Case for a New Global Forest Agreement, argues for the need for international agreements to control commercial logging (Bohan et al. 1996). This report gives detailed information on the companies doing the most environmental damage to the world's forests and the methods used by these corporations to bribe and otherwise corrupt the leaders of poor nations to obtain logging contracts. Other organizations, such as the Rainforest Action Network, agree that international logging corporations must be regulated. This $100-billion-a-year trade operates with generous tax breaks from the countries where companies are based and the granting of logging concessions that often cover millions of acres through special arrangements made behind closed doors with government officials (Bohan et al. 1996). Logging concessions almost always ignore or overrule strict legislation already existing in many countries protecting the environment and wildlife, including endangered species (Bohan et al. 1996).
At present, cutting of forests is "regulated" only by the timber industry itself through the Tropical Timber Agreement, signed in 1983 by various international lumber companies. This agreement does not protect wildlife and the environment. In spite of renegotiation in the mid-1990s, the agreement still does not address ecological concerns or species preservation. Pressure from multi-national companies, primarily Japanese, to supply this lucrative market have overwhelmed the voices of conservationists throughout the world.
Logging in Central Africa is in the process of destroying the once vast and unspoiled forests. A conference in 1999 was convened by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to reach an agreement about the fate of these large tracts of tropical rainforest in Africa, located in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Gabon, the new Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and the Congo. In this region, 40,000 square kilometers of forest are being destroyed a year, endangering hundreds of wildlife species and opening up the forest to a devastating trade in bushmeat. Prince Philip, in speaking on behalf of WWF, stated that the organization hoped to protect 10 percent of this vast forest, an area too small to prevent extinctions and great biodiversity loss. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is in a state of political chaos, did not attend the conference, and no pact was signed.
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