Ex-PM takes Walden Pond to the CongoTags: africa Congo funding cooperation aid politicians
Paul Martin has a new constituency. This one is twice the size of France and home to 50 million people - as well as 10,000 species of plants, 655 species of birds and 400 species of mammals.
After 18 years in Canada's Parliament - the final two as prime minister - he was named co-chair yesterday of a major European initiative to conserve Africa's Congo River Basin rain forest, the world's second-largest.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the creation of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, with roughly equal contributions from Britain and Norway totalling $215-million.
The basin represents about a quarter of the planet's remaining rain forest cover, and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has estimated that deforestation is reducing its size annually by 940,000 hectares or roughly 1 per cent of its total. The loss is largely attributed to legal and illegal logging using unsustainable harvesting methods. The cutting of wood for fuel is also a factor.
Mr. Brown decided a year ago to create the fund after being approached by Kenyan environmental and political activist Wangari Muta Maathai, who in 2004 became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Martin said in a telephone interview from London yesterday that the British Prime Minister called him several months ago to ask him to co-chair the fund with Dr. Maathai.
He said he and Mr. Brown had formed a close friendship when they were finance ministers of their respective countries and had worked together on African debt relief. Mr. Martin said Mr. Brown also knew he had been involved over the past 1 years with the reorganization of the African Development Bank.
"He knew I had a great interest in Africa."
Mr. Martin, who recalled several years ago visiting the legendary Walden Pond made famous by U.S. transcendentalist philosopher - and icon of ecologists - Henry David Thoreau, said the initiative will assess and fund projects aimed at preventing illegal activities, assisting local communities in protecting the forest, introducing sustainable harvesting practices and looking for alternatives to cutting trees for fuel.
The project also will include high-resolution photographic monitoring by satellite to record the rate of deforestation, with pictures beamed directly to Central Africa to enable regional governments to see what is happening.
Since leaving politics in 2006 - earlier than expected, he joked - Mr. Martin has divided his time equally between working on African and aboriginal projects.
He said his work with the ADB has meant spending a lot of time in Africa. He recounted one incident where he had been taken to see a community-managed part of the Congo Basin forest only to find that all the trees had been logged.
"It's clear that what's happening in the Congo rain forest is just devastation," Mr. Martin said. "The forest is being cut and there is no control."
Corruption is reported to be rife, with villagers who depend on the forests for medicine, shelter, fuel and food being paid by logging companies to allow trees to be illegally cut. Effective government forest control is notable by its absence.
Legal commercial cutting is typically carried out on a 30-year rotation, which allows some time for forest recovery. But foresters say the high-value species the loggers go after need 200 to 300 years to reach maturity. The result is an extensively degraded ecosystem in which young trees and fast-growing species predominate.
© Globe and Mail (Canada) -- 2008-06-18
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