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Fishing and Logging Policies

rose to ask Her Majesty’s Government how they respond to calls for environmentally sustainable fishing and logging policies. The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I resist calling this a fish and chips topic, but there is a sense in which fish and the products of forest trees go together. Both are essential to the livelihood and sustenance of very many of the poorest of the poor; the large-scale commercial exploitation of both is harming the environment as well as those livelihoods; but exclusively environmental management of these precious public goods risks impoverishing further those who have little other resource. There are about 62 million households which depend in one way or another on fishing, and 22 million small-scale fishers. Of the total export value of the world trade in fisheries and aquaculture products of about $60 billion, half accrues to developing countries. It is a major source of foreign exchange for them and a key provider of cheap and accessible nutrition, as well as cash income for over 2.6 billion of their citizens. But, as we know, overfishing threatens all these gains. I heard many complaints in Senegal, where fishing is the only economic activity which provides decent jobs along the coastal area, about the big rapacious Spanish fishing boats which plundered their valuable and delicious fish, coming close in to the shore on night-time raids—an economic and an environmental threat. Last March, the High Seas Task Force, chaired by my honourable friend Ben Bradshaw, published research by the Marine Resources Assessment Group which set out the loss to the economies of poor countries from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, worth up to $9 billion a year. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the loss was equivalent to one quarter of their annual fishing exports. And that is apart from the unsustainable pressure put on fish stocks, the destruction of the marine habitat and the insidious incentive to other illegal activity such as smuggling and money laundering which such large-scale evasion of the rule of law encourages, made easier by flags of convenience regimes. The problem is not so much lack of rules—there are international instruments—as lack of enforcement and of political will. Relatively modest funds would be enough to guarantee the protection of sustainable national fishing industries, for instance, in West Africa and the Mozambique channel, where national governance systems are up to the task. DfID and Defra, working together, have started the ball rolling with an international plan of action. But it all needs to come higher up within the international political agenda and pull in better resources. Particularly, I ask my noble friend what approach the Government propose to the European Union, whose members fish so heavily off the African coast, with over $350 million of subsidy and arguably predatory fish licensing agreements, typical of those negotiated between strong and weak parties. Logging provides even starker examples of the need for vigorously enforced sustainability that does not disadvantage poor people. Your Lordships have heard before in this House, from the noble Lord, Lord Eden, and others, of the terrifying rate of depletion of the world’s forests and of the effects on climate and biodiversity. Pressure groups have campaigned vigorously against their destruction, with some response. Most east Asian governments have signed up to a regional agreement to protect their forests. The deputy treasurer of the Conservative Party has bought a piece of the Amazonian rain forest. There is a new Chinese tax on chopsticks. The European Union has recently promulgated the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Initiative, to which the UK Government will donate £24 million over the next five years. Thus there is a range of solutions in prospect. But let us look more closely at some of them. One is to try to prevent any logging in forests. Mr Eliasch, who bought the 400,000 acres of rainforest, closed down the forestry operation and laid off 1,000 Brazilian workers. Cameroon decided to regulate commercial use of its forest through a statutory permit system, including substitute tree-planting, over 10 years ago. The money raised from the sale of the permits was to go to the development of adjacent rural areas. But laws are one thing and the capacity to implement them quite another. The DfID solution has built on its own illegal logging programme, commended by an independent review for exemplary working with the EU and for national cross-departmental work with the Foreign Office and with Defra. Some of the significant points in its successor policy are the participation of 25 private sector companies from across Europe and Africa, funds for enforcement and better governance in forest countries, and a recognition of the need to put our own—western—consumer house in order by deterring demand for illegally procured timber. But the tendency of multilateral agreements is to focus on safeguarding the forest against large-scale commercial exploitation of an unsustainable kind. No one can argue with the importance of that, and it is excellent that there is agreement among five EU governments to adopt procurement policies that favour certified wood. And It is a great pity that the United States does not want to join in. But there is a risk that those who live in the forests lose out. They will in any case lose employment if bad loggers are driven out, and they will lose their wood if ““good”” loggers police their patch and drive them away. I have seen poor millet farmers in Mali forbidden, by a very well intentioned NGO project manager, from using a cart to gather firewood. A much better example was the Takieta forest in Niger where the villagers, with the help of SOS Sahel, learn the difference between sustainable cutting of trees and damaging uprooting. There are also many other products of the forest than cut-down trees: there is rope, leaf fibre, gum arabic and medicine from renewable plants. If local harvesting is combined with local processing and manufacture, the value added remains in the community—if the capacity can be built up. Lack of long-term ownership, often the case for forest-dwellers, is a disincentive to investment in sustainability. In the absence of strong tenure rights, individual, environmental and economic rights need to be maintained. When powerful organisations, be they commercial loggers with modern legal title to land or influential environmental pressure groups, compete with the people who live in the forest, it is easy to see who will win. Forest management presents a conflict of rights, and it is important that a rights perspective is applied, with a conduit for just settlement where rights can be balanced one with another. Governments need the economic growth that sustainable cultivation of trees can contribute to. People need the jobs and cash that such employment brings. Forest dwellers also need their environment and their other sources of income to be protected. The world needs biodiversity, and the carbon and water storage which depend on it, to be safeguarded. May I ask my noble friend how DfID’s newly launched strategy for research on sustainable agriculture will deal with more sustainable, equitable and profitable use of the forests? What will the role of the planned regional research programmes be?