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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | National Forest Policy Draft 2018 Takes One Step Forward, Two Steps Back -Sushant Agarwal

National Forest Policy Draft 2018 Takes One Step Forward, Two Steps Back -Sushant Agarwal

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published Published on Apr 4, 2018   modified Modified on Apr 4, 2018
-TheWire.in

Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize.

On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the 1988 policy to focusing on timber and forest-based industries.

This is not the first time that the 1988 policy has been revisited to open the doors for forest-based industries. In 2016, a draft policy was published on the MoEFCC website only to be taken down after it was panned for excluding the Forest Rights Act and encouraging the entry of private industries in forest management. Even though the MoEFCC distanced itself from the draft, major chunks in the current draft have been copied from the 2016 document.

While there is merit in new concepts being introduced – economic valuation of ecosystem services, forest certification, national forest ecosystem management information system, etc. – these do not necessitate a complete shift in policy focus.

From tribal to timber

The shift in approach to forestry proposed by the 2018 draft contrasts the guidelines specified in the 1988 policy. The significance attributed to requirements and rights of local, forest-dependent communities is being substituted by the demand for raw material from forest-based industries. The 1988 policy had sections called ‘Rights and Concessions’ and ‘Tribal People and Forests’, both of which have been replaced by ‘Production Forestry’, ‘Increase (sic) the productivity of forest plantations’ and ‘Facilitate forest industry interface’, all of which focus on increasing the timber yield. The draft stresses the “need to stimulate growth in the forest based industry sector” and encourages forest corporations and industrial units to “step up growing of industrial plantations”.

The 1988 policy had specified that forest-based industry should “raise the raw material needed for meeting its own requirements” and that “no forest-based enterprise, except that at the village or cottage level, should be permitted in the future”. It had reiterated that the requirements of the local communities “should not be sacrificed for this purpose”.

On the other hand, the livelihoods of local communities finds mention in the current draft only thrice: as passive recipients of benefits accruing from wildlife tourism, as labour for forest-based industries and in relation to non-timber forest produce (NTFP). On the last count, the draft policy mentions that business plans for NTFP will be developed based on “climate-smart value chains” but does not specify how any such initiative will be owned or its benefits shared.

Second: the 1988 policy had articulated the need for a massive afforestation programme with particular emphasis on “fuelwood and fodder development” on all degraded and denuded lands in the country, including land available with forest corporations. The 2018 draft aims to use degraded land available with forest corporations to produce “quality timber” and proposes a public-private partnership model for afforestation in “degraded forest areas and forest areas available with Forest Development Corporations and outside forests”.

Worse, the document also recommends “commercially important species like poplar and eucalyptus”, both known to be water-demanding species with deep root systems that deplete groundwater. In 2016, the Karnataka government had blamed eucalyptus trees for depleting groundwater in the Arkavathi basin, which led to a fall in water supply to Bengaluru. Both poplar and eucalyptus also have negative allelopathic properties – i.e. they don’t encourage vegetative growth under their cover.

Over the years, numerous instances of gaur entering Kodaikanal in search of food have been attributed to the destruction of grasslands in shola forests by eucalyptus trees. In fact, a Parliamentary Standing Committee report on the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) Bill, 2015, highlighted this concern, recommending the clause  “particularly native species” be added after the word ‘plantation’ in two instances. However, this was not incorporated in the Act that was finally passed.

Pushing non-indigenous plantation species to meet afforestation targets and timber requirements will damage groundwater recharge and be counterproductive to public investments in such initiatives.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 2 April, 2018, https://thewire.in/environment/national-forest-policy-draft-2018-takes-one-step-forward-two-steps-back


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