SFM practice in Central African States and customary law
REVIEW ARTICLE
Sustainable forest management practice in Central African States and customary law Samuel Assembe-Mvondo* Center for International Forestry Research, Central Africa Regional Office, Yaounde, Cameroon, and Faculty of Law, University of Joensuu, Finland
Sustainable forest management (SFM) has become a major focus for the international community. This is because of themultifunctional importance of forest resources for the entire planet, namely ecological, socio-economic, cultural and climatic balance. General awareness of forest importance unfortunately coincides with the observed increase in threats, especially anthropogenic, to this world heritage. To tackle the continuing deforestation and degradation, the international community, through the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) and its predecessors, has attempted to adopt an international convention on SFM based on the 15 Rio Declaration principles. The limited success of international negotiations aimed at the adoption of such an instrument leads us to seek an alternative within international law theories, through analysis of the relationship between states practice in SFM and customary international law. To this end, this paper focuses on the practice of Central African States in sustainable forest management, especially statement of principles, sub-regional treaty and domestic legislation. The analysis
shows that their practice fulfils all the requirements in order to be regarded as regional custom. Therefore, principles and state practices of SFM can thus be considered legally binding for this sub-region, despite some major implementation shortcomings. Keywords: Central Africa sub-region; sustainable forest management; state practice; customary law Introduction This study focuses on SFM practices in Central Africa, aiming at shedding light on the following question: can
non-legally binding principles of SFM stemming from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit be considered part of customary law? The answers to this question can be of interest on both a scientific and a practical level. International legal theorists pointed out a long time ago that international customary law is one of the fundamental sources of international law (Kelsen 1945). The traditional place of custom in international law was reaffirmed in Article 38 of the statute of the
International Court of Justice, which provides that: ‘The Court (. . .) shall apply: international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law.' On the political level, the interest of this analysis can contribute to the development of debates in recent years within the framework of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) on the adoption of an international convention on SFM (Sand 1993). Sustainable management of forest resources has become a major issue of global debate within the international community. This is because of the increased awareness of the role that forests play in the maintenance of ecological, climatic, economic and social balances on the planet (FAO 1999; CARPE 2005) on the one hand, and the rise in threats, especially human, to this common heritage on the other (Kiss 1982; FAO 2007). The latter observation was particularly highlighted in Agenda 21 that came out of the Rio Summit. In fact, the Rio Declaration calls on all nations of the world and other civil society actors to reduce the increasing curve of deforestation and all other human threats to the sustainability of forest biodiversity. The scientific
assumption here is that international environmental law can play a major role in the development of harmonised legal norms for the conservation and sustainability of forest resources, through the institutionalisation of necessary principles of solidarity and cooperation, which are fundamental
to the protection of these resources (Klemm and Shine 1998). However, in spite of the awareness of the necessary role of international law in the sustainable management of the world's forest heritage, negotiations relating to the adoption of the international convention, within the framework of the UNFF continue to run up against the principle of national sovereign rights over natural resources (Ruis 2001; Mayers and Bass 2004; Kuokkanen 2006). Unfortunately, the last meeting of UNFF in April 2007 has not moved forward on this aspect, as it still emphasized the
voluntary nature of the SFM principles (UNFF 2007). Hence, the need to seek an alternative solution on this legally binding issue of SFM by studying some regional instruments.
The analytical study of sub-regional practices of SFM (SFM) in this paper is focused mostly on Central African countries for reasons linked not only to their biodiversity, but also to regional collective actions aimed at protecting their forest ecosystems. Regarding forest biodiversity,
Central Africa's humid dense forests cover approximately 240,700,000 ha (FAO 2001). Located around the catchment area of the Congo River, these forests are the second largest tropical forests in the world, after the Amazon Basin. The forest biodiversity of Central Africa is of world importance, considering its diversity in the number of endemic plant and animal species: the forests contain more than 1000 bird species; nearly 10,000 plant species, of which 3000 are
endemic; and 400 proven mammal species (Koyo 2004; International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology Vol. 16, No. 4, August 2009, 217-227
*Email: s.assembe@cgiar.org
ISSN 1350-4509 print/ISSN 1745-2627 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13504500903031709
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