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- Paper Pulp Mills - Uruguay
- Corporate Accountability and Human Rights
- Climate Change and Human Rights
Historic Forestry Law Passes in Argentina
Indigenous Communities and Small Farmers Gain Usage Rights
November 29, 2007 - Argentina has its first native forestry law. The bill approved by Congress yesterday, had suffered endless delays in the House and Senate, largely due to resistance from Argentina's principle lumber producing provinces. That was overcome this week by a proposal from the Environment Secretariat to create a Compensatory Fund to offset lumbering revenue losses.
The law prohibits lumbering without proper permits, and mandates environmental impacts studies and participatory territorial planning of forestry resources in each of the country's provinces. The Federal Environmental Authority is to provide the necessary finance and technical assistance to achieve these while mandating provinces who receive federal forestry financial assistance to provide yearly reports on the use of funds and the state of its forestry resources. It also places a one year moratorium on new lumbering until EIAs are properly reviewed and approved, effectively banning new permits for one year.
The law's primary objective is to promote the sustainable use of Argentina's forests, protect biological diversity and ecological balance in forested areas, as well as uphold the quality of life of populations living in them. It promotes the precautionary and preventive principles in the forestry sector, while establishing the obligation to regulate and control the depletion of native forests establishing red, yellow and green categories determining levels of sensitivity. The Law establishes the specific benefits forestry resources provide to society, including: watershed regulation, biodiversity land and air quality conservation, carbon gas emissions constraints, diversification and natural landscape beauty, cultural identity and quality of life.
Forestry reserves will be introduced in each national eco-region. The law also creates a mechanism for the promotion of national programs to protect forests, promote reforestation initiatives, and maintain up to date information about Argentina's forests.
The law applies to primary as well as secondary forests, and makes special provisions obliging all forestry projects to guarantee the sustainable use of lands (of plots less than 10 hectares) by indigenous communities and small farmers , a key element promoted by the Environment Secretariat, to bridge human rights protection in the environmental legal framework. Indigenous and other stakeholders groups are also guaranteed rights of access to information and participation, prior to forestry permitting decisions.
While that law had met up with staunch resistance in the House of Representatives, where it originated, the Environment Secretariat began a strong lobby earlier this year in favor of the law, engaging provincial governments that had come out strongly against the law, lobbied by lumbering interests which saw it as a deterrent for local economic development driven by lumbering. Key environmental groups rallied behind the law and joined efforts by the Environment Secretary to push for the approval of the bill, in hopes to revive chances that it might make it through the Senate and Congress before the end of Kirchner's administration on December 9 th .
The political turning point came with the introduction of a compensatory fund to the bill, which would retain 2% of agricultural, game and timber export revenues (estimated at Arg$1billion (US$330 million)) to be made available to lumbering provinces that choose to conserve their forests instead of cutting them down for revenue (the fund resolved the issue of lost forestry revenues that the law would imply for local wood producing companies).
The Fund, in addition to the millions of signatures mobilized by civil society organizations, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Proteger, and the Wild Life Fund, pushed the Senate and Congress to vote in favor Argentina's first national forestry protection law.
The Environment Ministry pushed for the inclusion of strict elements on compliance and enforcement, with a severe scale of fines for violators, establishing a registrar of violators of forestry regulations, the inclusion in which would suspend possibilities of obtaining lumbering licenses.
This marks yet another important step to the nation's rallying effort to promote greater environmental compliance and enforcement.
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