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The Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, launched in 2003, is the European Union’s (EU) response to the global fight against illegal logging. In particular, FLEGT aims at reducing trade in illegal timber between the EU and timber producer partner countries.
Pro-Formal results indicate that Cameroon is characterized by a large, vibrant and largely informal domestic timber sector, which supports the livelihoods of thousands of local forest users including small-scale farmers, indigenous communities, chain-saw millers, traders and service providers. The domestic timber sector is characterized by the activities of smallholders, chain-saw millers and traders who rarely own a legal harvesting permit and extract and process small quantities of trees with chain or mobile saws. The resulting low-quality timber is traded in domestic markets or across the borders of neighboring countries (e.g. Chad and Nigeria), with little formal taxation. Informal taxation, conversely, is pervasive along the production chain. Results indicate that informal operators pay about 9% of their profit margins, or about EUR 6 million per annum, in bribes to representatives of ministries, local police, the military and customs officials. By signing the VPA, Cameroon has committed to undertake broad governance reforms of the entire forestry sector. Existing laws are not geared to sustaining a healthy, small-scale, domestic timber market. Pro-Formal findings indicate a need to improve and simplify access to the resource; to develop and adopt specific fiscal regimes for the domestic timber sector (such as royalty rates, processing, transport and marketing levies); to improve access to credit on favorable terms for small-scale operators; to create incentives to comply with the law; and to improve flows of information to smaller operators.
Formalization processes come with both benefits and risks, which require ongoing assessment, monitoring and mitigation. Case studies of formalization conducted in other natural resource sectors indicate that even well-intentioned processes can lead to exclusion, criminalization, barriers to entry and elite capture, which could disproportionally and negatively affect smallholders and operators, together with negative environmental impacts. If well-conceived and monitored, formalization could increase transparency and clarity of users’ rights, reduce conflict and improve working conditions and local economic benefits.
Gabon officially entered into VPA negotiations in September 2010. The initial engagement resulted in agreement on a road map and the production of a legality matrix. However, the latter has not yet been validated and negotiations were resumed only recently. It is difficult to predict the final coverage of the VPA, but available information seems to indicate that it will also cover the domestic market. The domestic timber market has undergone a drastic transformation in recent years. Pro-Formal results indicate that the domestic consumption of artisanal sawn wood decreased by almost half in 2008–2012, and that more timber than in the past is now supplied by industrial scraps, as industrial production for the national market increased during the same period. These trends are largely explained by the financial crisis, a log export ban effective as of 2010 that forced industrial companies to process timber locally, and increased control and enforcement efforts.
This report considers the feasibility of applying to forest clearance for agriculture the same consumer country measures that have been used to exclude illegal timber from agricultural commodity supply chains.
DRC has committed to reduce its emissions effectively, efficiently, and equitably from deforestation and degradation (REDD+). The country experiences complex relationships between drivers, agents, and institutions of deforestation nationally. The REDD+ policy arena is influenced by both governmental and non-governmental actors whose number have increased in the policy arena over the years; however, weak coordination among these actors remains an issue. Since 2009, the DRC has announced several reforms relating to land tenure, land-use planning and agricultural policy, to create an institutional environment that motivates the implementation of REDD+ in the DRC. By 2019, none of these reforms had materialized, due to both political changes and a lack of finance, capacity, and political will. Between 2013 and 2019, little progress has been made on REDD+ in the DRC, as a result of conflicting interests among actors both at national and decentralized levels; information asymmetry; elite capture and corruption; and the pre- and post-election situation. To date, the effectiveness of REDD+ activities in the DRC remain unclear, due to the absence of rigorous impact assessment. However, efforts can be observed on the field where there is increased number of participants to forest policy process compared to REDD+ early years; and several ongoing projects are testing policy options within and across levels. If these efforts are sustained, they can contribute in putting in place conditions to achieve REDD+ objectives.
"This volume is a product of the staff of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank."
Reviewing the conditions in which the Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism is being established in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is part of Component 1 of the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (GCS-REDD) being conducted by the Center for International Forestry Research. The overall aim of this global study is to provide decision-makers, practitioners, donors and the scientific community with reliable information on the dynamics of national actions related to the REDD+ mechanism. Discussions on REDD originally seemed to focus on the construction of a global structure and the establishment of a multilateral instrument to replace the Kyoto Protocol. But at the 14th Conference of Parties (CoP 14), held in Poznan in 2008, discussions on the reliability of REDD+ focused more on the dynamics of national- and local-level actions and brought out the need to better understand, analyze and explain the national institutional context of REDD+ development. Subsequently, this review used the extractive approaches. The first inputs were reports, articles, books and documents on the DRC that were directly related to forest management, socioeconomic and political institutions, etc., whether published or not. Because of the diversity of sources, the quantitative data sometimes seem contradictory and conflictual. In the next step, semi-structured interviews were held with experts working in the forestry sector and data were obtained from the participants’ observations. Since this analysis covers the period between May 2011 and June 2012 actions in the field and the institutions after those dates were not included.