The British Indian Forest Act was passed in 1927. The act was aimed to regulate the then Indian forest products, and collect forest revenue as a source of income for the British government. Colonial extraction policies brutally destroyed the forest ecology in Bengal, and this law helped British colonizers to disregard local users.
In 90 years, Bangladesh has not had much improvement over that first law as we kept following rules and legislation created in 1927. The British government, being motivated particularly by resource extraction, did not have any consideration beyond rent extraction. The rights of forest users, and special considerations for tribal communities, were not clear. Conservation and protection of forests and natural resources were ignored.
Recently, the Bangladeshi government took a step towards reform in the forest sector, and the Ministry of Environment and Forest is planning to pass a new act to protect and conserve Bangladeshi forests. The draft law is available on the website for all to peruse.
There are two important things to notice about this draft: a) The policy draft is not data-driven -- it does not even show the current forest conditions; b) the policy draft is mostly a duplicate copy of the colonial forest act from 1927. For most parts of the document, it is a direct translation of the British Indian Forest Act.
In short, the reform act incorporates the administrative process created by the British. For most forest-related activities, forest settlement officers will be the last person to decide on the extraction. There is a strict law against open access, but the law does not have any specific guidance regarding forest conservation. It has some vague guidance for protected forests and collective forests. The government can give the right to use to villagers, but there is no particular rule for benefit distribution over users.
There is a chapter in this policy draft on private forests to control chemicals, pesticide use, and deforestation. The only place in this proposed law where information is surely used is on livestock and animals. The whole concept of human livelihood, dependence on forest, and local development indicators are absent from the proposed law.
In this article, using research-based evidence, I would like to show the importance of data and information on human livelihood to design a new forest policy. A combination of conservation, protection, and human-induced management could be helpful being introduced in the current law. For this purpose, we need to understand spatial variations in development indicators to propose a forest law regarding conservation, protection, and community use.
We also need data to propose an incentive mechanism for people who live around the forest. In short, policymakers must use available information on development and forest use to propose a data-driven law.
We can look back to the evidence-driven research on forest protection. From various studies on Nepalese and Indian forests, we see that the protection of forests reduced firewood collection and overall welfare. We also see that people who have better access to the market, better access to alternative forest use are less affected by the forest law in these countries. We also know about gender discrimination created by forest law, as women are the primary resource collectors from the forest.
These studies on Nepal and India could be extended to understand the impact of protection at different stages in Bangladesh. We also need to understand the need and dependence of indigenous people on surrounding forests. Forests are concentrated in areas where tribal communities are the main users. Distributional effects of the forest policies are important to think about.
Given the prior research on other countries, it should be clear that we need forest laws to include every type of human welfare. The combination of policies that helped to raise income and conservation are strict protection with buffer zone management, community forest management, and increase in market dependence by financial and technical incentives for cookstoves.
Local government systems with incentives can be very beneficial for common-pool resource management, as, historically, it has been proven in different places and times. Understanding social and ecological formation is very critical for that purpose. Other than Nepal and India, we can also look at studies in Latin America. Research shows how community engagement created sustainable forest protection in Mexico.
Additionally, site selection for the conservation and protection of forests needs to be dependent on certain datasets. The first most important thing is to understand the current pressure on forests. We can use satellite data available from the 1970s to detect forest Cover and pressure. We need data on pressure to select where we need the highest protection and to design that mechanism. We also need to understand the importance of biodiversity richness and hotspots.
On the other hand, we need information on human demand. We can extract this from household-level data, either by collecting new survey data or by using existing databases.
My proposals are as follows: From studies on different countries by many researchers, we can manage the forest laws in mainly three ways: 1) Open access with limited entrance, 2) open access with no entrance, and 3) community management. To design this protection and conservation, we need to collect information on current forest cover from satellite data, and we also need information on human forest use from household-level surveys. We also need information on climate change and its uncertainties.
If we can manage and overlap all these data, this should be a straightforward task to design forest laws using modern ecological methods. In conclusion, I would like to stress the fact that the new law needs to be data-driven and needs to be very careful about human needs. The draft law, as it has been proposed, is very much of a colonial legacy of forest laws.
Aparna Howlader is Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Rhode Island.
