Logging Concessions and Local Livelihoods in Cameroon: from Indifference to Alliance?

Abstract

Sustainable forest management gives the opportunity to better integrate the way local populations use their customary "village terroirs" in the logging activities. This requirement is explicitly stated in all forest laws of the Congo Basin countries but its implementation on the field remains under documented. In Cameroon, 30 forest management plans (FMP) for logging concessions have been reviewed to assess how they effectively include customary use rights. The integration of use rights into the FMPs is heterogeneous but always with very low enforcement. The weak influence of the FMP application on local practices is confirmed with an empirical survey that shows that natural, financial, and physical capitals in two villages of the eastern region of Cameroon have been little affected by the adjoining logging concession over the latest 13 years. Extrasector policies such as agriculture, road infrastructure, techniques, and land tenure are the real drivers of socioeconomic change at the local scale. Their impacts are facilitated by the presence of the logging concessions, which can contribute indirectly to improve local livelihoods

The Multiple Dimensions of Rural Forests: Lessons from a Comparative Analysis

“…The Southern Cameroon case study illustrates the evolution of local tropical humid forest management systems in the face of an emerging 'community forests' policy (Lescuyer et al 2012). …”

Public Policies and Management of Rural Forests: Lasting Alliance or Fool's Dialogue?

“…The development of scientific forestry established professional foresters as the only knowledgeable and legitimate forest managers, thus discarding farmers and local people. This has entailed important biases for rural forests management, as noted in the papers by Lescuyer et al (2012) in Cameroon, and Rives et al (2012) in Niger.…”

“…Rural forestry schemes focus globally on encouraging local people to access conventional forest management rather than adapting to rural forest management logic. Lescuyer et al (2012) show that the integration of local use rights or local knowledge and practices into community forest management plans is primarily formal. Kouplevatskaya and Buttoud (2008) showed that in France, even if local forest policies target rural development and farmers' participation, forest management still focuses on classical forest services (provision of timber and energy, protection of "remarkable" plant or animal species) and not on the real farmers' needs and interests.…”

“…"Participation" thus becomes "inviting local people" into an already defined plan (Auclair et al 2011, Lescuyer et al 2012) in which their http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol18/iss1/art30/ power is quite limited. "Dialogue" is restricted to information meetings (Macura et al 2012), and "social forestry is often targeted at degraded zones of the reserved forests with the aim of restoring them with the participation of the people" (Macura et al 2012).…”

Effects of selective logging on large mammal populations in a remote indigenous territory in the northern Peruvian Amazon

“…Legal extraction from these concessions requires plans for reforestation, minimizing the socio-cultural effect on the local people and the biological effect on the environment (MINAG 2009). Although many studies have explored the social, economic, and ecological effects of timber concessions (Uhl et al 1991, Verissimo et al 1992, Watson 1996, Lescuyer et al 2012, most have focused on the effects on lumber species targeted for extraction, and relatively few on game and other wildlife species (Rist et al 2011). However, it has been repeatedly shown that timber operations cause widespread negative effects on wildlife populations, including population declines and local extinctions, as well as other effects such as infant malnutrition, abandonment, and mortality (Thiollay 1992, Marsden 1998, Meijaard et al 2006.…”