Yes, but there is another way of seeing this: that REDD funds, however big or small, will simply ‘subsidise’ corrupt governments such as Indonesia – one of the biggest culprits in the illegal logging world, if I am not mistaken – from clamping down on illegal activities that are supposedly robbing their treasuries of forestry revenue.

The losses to tropical countries from illegal forestry activities have been known and well enough documented for many years. Seeing as how these losses run into the billions of dollars, yet the costs of stopping them, and collecting all the appropriate forestry taxes would probably only be tens, or at most hundreds of millions of dollars. So, by any simple economic analysis, it would be worth tropical countries investing in whatever it took to stop the illegalities. But, of course, they have failed to do so…

Why do we think that is? Well, probably for the same reason that they have tended to keep *legal* forestry taxes at rock-bottom levels: because the more profits (‘rent’, in the economic parlance) that the logging industry can capture privately, either through legal or illegal activities, the more there is available for bribes, backhanders, ‘informal taxes’, paying for election campaigns etc, which you and others in EIA have been very good at exposing.

This is why REDD in the absence of massive improvements in governance in most tropical countries is not only likely to be a total waste of money, it is possibly also going to be counter-productive. It will simply provide yet another means for corrupt forest sector decision-makers to carry on pocketing the benefits of illegalities and not enacting the forest sector reforms that desperately needed, and may even entrench endemic courruption. The promise of easy REDD money is already undermining efforts to bring some of the worst illegalities under control through the FLEGT programme.

REDD payments should probably be conditional on achievement of a certain level of success in stopping illegalities, and perhaps signing up to the EU-FLEGT process. Moreover, REDD’s future paymasters, such as the World Bank, should look hard at the level of legal forestry taxes, such as area fees, stumpages taxes, export levies etc, and see how much these can be raised FIRST, in order to raise the required funds for forest protections, before throwing good REDD money after bad policies. Otherwise, all that will happen is that the inefficient and illegal operators will just become more inefficient, and the fat cats will get fatter.

We should be taking action to ensure that unsustainable / illegal timber does not enter the EU, USA and Japan for a start. Arguably, we have a duty to do so. When was the last time there was an exposé.

We should do the same with palm oil supplied from most sources in East Asia (including RSPO members who are dragging their feet but who include enterprises with great influence) – at least until proposals to expand palm oil plantations in Indonesia, Papua and Sarawak have been scrapped.

It is likely that most of these products are supplied through well known ports..

If major NGOs in the USA have their snouts in the trough, there is a risk that the aid funds of the EU and its member states (one hopes inadvertently) achieve the same in Europe.

REDD in its present form could not and cannot work. We have scuppered the fundamental needs of human communities who are guardians of our great forests because of fear and allowing the continued cancer to casio economics to rule.

For in the end if we who so called control the long term future of our great forests cared for them this situation would not have come to fruition.

With 1/4 of humanity having been betrayed by our lack of wisdom we will now enter a relatively short period of time when climate chaos will come into being.

SEEBif gives a glimmer of hope but even that was betrayed because in reality we did not care enough. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.

Now that we have no REDD agreement, and in that the Copenhagen failure will reduce the chances of there being ANY kind of US legislation this year, perhaps the trough-snouting US ‘conservation’ NGOs involved in the ARP will realise that their planetary treachery has also undone themselves and undermined their plans to profit from REDD schemes.