MONROVIA – A civil society organization, the Association of Community Rights Defenders (ACORD), in collaboration with the Civil Society Independent Forest Monitors (CS-IFM) has trained a number of rural community forestry committee members to monitor and report on forestry operations in their areas.
ACORD has also developed a Community Guide intended to assist community-based independent forest monitors clearly perform their local forest monitoring activities. The Community Guide focuses on the Roles and Responsibilities of a community-based independent forest monitor especially while conducting their local level independent forest monitoring. This is geared toward ensuring communities are accessing and using benefits from their forest and its resources.
With funding from the FAO and the European Union FLEGT Program, ACORD has trained three forestry committee members in Rivercess County and two in Nimba County. As a result of the training, fourteen Community Forestry Development Committee (CFDC) members have been trained and established as Community Based-Independent Forest Monitors in Rivercess County while in Nimba County, ten Community Forest Management Body (CFMB) members have also been trained as Community Based-Independent Forest Monitors.
The rights of local dwellers participation in the management and governance of their forests is one of the pillars of Liberia’s forest reformed laws which is also backed by the Voluntary Partnership Agreement signed between Liberia and the European Union.
Part 7 Section 71 of the Forestry Development Authority (FDA) Ten Core Regulations provides for a third party’s involvement into forest monitoring activities.
However, many communities are in conflicts with logging companies over their benefits. Advocates have blamed corruption, lapses in the full implementation the forestry laws, its regulations as well as incompetent community governance structures for the conflict.
ACORD’s 12-month project trained 14 members of Community Forest Development Committees (CFDCs)—the community governance structure under the Forestry Reform Law of 2006. It also built the capacity of 10 members of Community Forestry Management Bodies (CFMBs)—the community governance structure under the Community Rights Law of 2009 with Respect to Forest Lands.
These communities were trained in log scaling, volume and cubic meter calculations. All these things are in the guide ACORD developed for use by Community Based-Independent Forest Monitors.
“The intent of the project is to train community forest governance structure members in independent forest monitoring mentality and skills to do it themselves: On last Thursday, March 28 at the meeting for the closure of project, Roland Harris, the Program Officer of ACORD who led the project said, “It doesn’t mean you don’t know what you are doing, but you need this kind of guidance so that you can do your own, independent forest monitoring,” Harris added.
Making remarks were also Joseph Tally, Deputy Managing Director of the Forestry Development Authority (FDA), and Oona Burke Johnson, Facilitator of FAO FLEGT.
Tally said it was important that communities are been empowered themselves to get information on logging companies’ operations in their communities, rather than sit and wait for the FDA to provide them with the information. “For them to know what is expected of them … is a good venture,” he told the program.
Johnson said the community-based independent forest monitors would be “the eyes” of the law, to make sure that logging contracts and forest regulations are adhered to.
“Liberia is very weak in terms of adherence to the rule of law,” Johnson said. “One of the ways we can bridge that gap between where we are and the rule of law is to create more eyes,” she added especially for independent forest monitoring activities. “We can create more eyes; we can put more hands around the table and in this way, we are sure that more information will be revealed to the wider public in terms of issues in the forestry sector.”
ACORD collaborated with a number of nongovernmental organizations, including National Union of Community Forestry Development Committees (NUCFDC), the National Union of Community Forestry Management Bodies (NUCFMB) and Volunteers to Support International Efforts in Developing Africa (VOSIEDA).
“With the kind of work you have done with them, I am sure moving forward most of them will be able to investigate issues of violations,” said Abraham Billy of VOSIEDA.
“They would be able to investigate issues of the agreement they have signed with companies and… will actually ease the tension … in the communities,” he said.
Andrew Zelema of the national Facilitator of the NUCFDC said ACORD’s forest monitoring guide was complemented by a guide developed by the NUCFDC that looks into specific logging contracts between communities and companies. He said the two guides would aid communities to benefit from their forest resources.
“Communities have that power provided by the forestry laws to ensure the implementation of Social Agreements signed between forestry concession holders and the communities. On the one hand, we are grateful to FAO through ACORD especially for developing a Forest Monitoring Guide for use by us (communities) which is generally focused on Independent Forest Monitoring and that we’ve made inputs and on the other have we (the NUCFDC) are also grateful that we have developed a specific guide focused on the implementation of Social Agreements signed between communities and forest concession holders. The both guides combined will ensure that agreements signed are fully implemented,” Zelema said.