David A. Harcharik
Forestry Department, FAO, Rome
Let me first welcome you on behalf of our Director-General, but also on behalf of everyone in the Forestry Department. We are very pleased that you are able to participate in this first Session of the Advisory Committee on Paper and Wood Products. You represent a good cross-section of the private industry community, with backgrounds in pulp and paper, sawmilling, and wood-based panels, and coming from forest industries associations, landowners associations, governments and international organizations from all over the world.
This Advisory Committee on Paper and Wood Products builds on the successful "Advisory Committee on Pulp and Paper", which had been meeting annually since 1960. This particular meeting is special as it is the first with the Committee having a broadened mandate, comprising all sectors of the forest industry.
I would like to express my own view of what I think the Advisory Committee's role is. First, I think it is very important that there be some high-level policy forum for forest industry at the global level which can address emerging issues, such as certification and labelling, development of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management at the national level and at the forest management unit level, and the very concept of sustainable forest management itself. These are important policy and technical issues that affect private industry. Other important issues for private industry and private land-owners are the merits of a legally-binding convention on forests at the global level, trends in supply and demand for forest products, the forest resource situation and economic development in general. FAO provides a policy forum on these subjects where industry leaders can exchange views and identify programmes and solutions to problems that you yourself can implement.
I note that other global forestry fora are not always as effective as they might be because they seldom have good participation from the private sector - for example, the Commission on Sustainable Development, which is meeting in New York right now, and the ad hoc Inter-Governmental Panel on Forests that was created by the CSD. I could also mention our own COFO (the Committee on Forestry), the Inter-Governmental Committee that advises FAO on our forestry programme that was held just a month ago, where there were few individuals with private industry background and private sector experience. In these global international fora, the voice of private industry is muted.
I hope that you will take advantage of this Committee to discuss some of these global issues that impact on private forest management and to become individually active by speaking out and following up on these global issues. You may also wish to share your views with governments, as many of the final decisions on negotiated events will be taken by governments. It is important that government representatives to international meetings have the benefit of your points of view.
A second important role of this Advisory Committee is to advise FAO, and in particular our Forestry Department. This Committee offers an opportunity to us to pick the brains of the private industry and the private sector at large and to benefit from your advice on our programmes. The type of advice that we get from the private sector is sometimes different than what we get from governments. Your advice is often much more practical, straightforward, and down-to-earth - it comes from the real world, and we need it.
We will be asking for your advice, in particular, on the Global Fibre Supply Study, in which we are actively involved right now. Recall that the Advisory Committee on Pulp and Paper identified this important issue and asked FAO to undertake the study. I hope that you will discuss the progress that we are making and advise us on how we can move forward faster and better.
A number of our other products have already benefited from your advice, for example, the FAO Model Code of Forest Harvesting Practices. This has become a very important and useful document. In fact, Southeast Asian countries are trying to use it as a model for developing more specific codes of practices for their region. Also, our work on statistics and outlook studies, supply and demand for wood products and non-wood forest products, are important to the industry and benefit substantially from your advice.
Chairman, I would like to mention a few other things that we are trying to do in the Forestry Department. Last year, for example, we began a strategic planning process. We went back to our roots in 1945 to understand clearly why we were created. Then we reviewed the many global issues and the increasing number of organizations that are addressing them. In order to understand clearly where we fit in and what our priorities are, we needed to think through in a very deliberate way, what the problems and issues are, what are the opportunities, and what institutions are addressing them. We needed to identify what FAO's niche is, to avoid duplicating the work of others, and to know what our comparative advantages are and how we can add to the work that is being done in a cost-effective way.
When we look at our own roots and strengths, it is very illuminating. There are some unique strengths of this Organization that do not appear in other organizations. For example, we are indeed global, there is no other international organization that addresses the forestry issues on a truly global basis like FAO. We are interdisciplinary. Being part of FAO, we have opportunities to link with agriculture, fisheries, statistics and sustainable development. Our staff are not only foresters; we also have people with backgrounds in public administration, watershed management, wildlife, anthropology, economics, etc. This gives us an opportunity to address some of the world's most important forestry issues on an interdisciplinary basis. Our staff is large or small, depending on your point of view. It is small if you think of all the issues that we would like to address, but it is large when you compare us to the other organizations. We have 75 professionals working full-time in the forestry programme, here in Rome, in our Regional Offices and our Sub-Regional Offices, as well as up to 200 contractors per year. That is far more talent than exists anywhere else. We also have a regional and global structure that I think is a real asset of FAO. We have a global committee, the Committee on Forestry, that is a primary, senior-level, policy advisory body on forestry. We also have this Committee on Paper and Wood Products that advises us specifically on global matters affecting the private sector. In addition, FAO has six regional forestry commissions (Europe, Africa, Near East, Asia, Latin America and North America) that offer an opportunity to discuss issues that are important regionally. Another asset of FAO is that we undertake both conceptual, or normative work - statistics, outlook studies, forest resources assessment, methodologies on better practices, etc., - in addition to operational work. We provide direct assistance to many countries to help put in place practices that will help those countries better manage their forests.
Next, we developed a very specific mission statement and clear objectives, and subsequently a framework for implementation. One can ask "Since FAO does not own any land, does not manage any forest, does not sell any timber, what is its role?" In forestry, we have three primary roles. The first, is to serve as a neutral policy forum to identify issues and seek solutions. The second, is to serve as a source of information on forests and the forestry sector globally and on forest methodologies and practices. I call your attention to the 1997 State of the World's Forests, one of our most recent products. Our third main role is to provide direct assistance to countries.
In addition, we have identified priorities for our programme of work, giving increased emphasis to global forest resource assessment, strategic sector and outlook studies, capacity building, assisting countries with national plans and programmes, community forestry and development of criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management.
Finally, I would mention that a very important part of implementing our work is the development and the maintenance of very strong partnerships. It is absolutely vital for FAO as an intergovernmental organization to have a very close dialogue with its member governments. We are governmental, first and foremost. Thus, we are trying to ensure that we have an open, transparent and constructive dialogue with our member governments, but also with other international organizations, with the environmental community and with the private sector.
When I travel, one of the questions I am frequently asked is "Is there any progress being made? We read the newspapers and we hear about deforestation and excessive logging, climate change and other problems. We hear about the CSD and the possibility of a forest convention. Is it all talk, or is any real progress being made?" Personally, I think that there is a lot of progress being made, especially in the Nordic countries, in North America and in some tropical countries like Indonesia, where you can see better forestry being practised on the ground. If you look at the reason for that, it is usually because of strong partnerships between the government, land-owners, the private industry and the environmental community. Partnerships are extremely vital today and I think some of the best forestry success stories stem very directly from good partnerships. Thus, one of the things that we are trying to do in FAO is to stimulate better partnerships between ourselves, governments, NGOs, international organizations and industries and that is why I think this meeting is so important to us.
I thank you again for coming, and I encourage you to stay involved in the issues, provide some very direct and frank advice to us, and help us find more success stories.
