JACK WESTOBY LECTURE 1999 1

In a long article written in 1962, Jack Westoby –already well-known as a forest economic thinker – putdown on paper what was then the conventionalapproach to forestry, based on the prevailing theory ofeconomic development of the time. Poor nationsshould emulate already rich nations, by acceleratingtheir industrialization, and putting their naturalresource capital to work in service of this objective, asquickly as possible. Forest industries – based onabundant natural forest resources in manydeveloping countries - were a good way to do this:they had strong forward and backward linkages toother parts of the economy – promoting their role as“multipliers”.

Later in his career, a time when most eminent men arecontent to rest upon their laurels, Westoby didsomething unusual – although typical of him. Herecanted on his conventional views on forestrydevelopment, and his attack on his own formerposition was fierce and broad ranging. In a ringingrenunciation he gave, at the World Forestry Congress,in 1978, he berated the developed world, and arguedthat poor countries are underdeveloped as aconsequence of the development of the rich nations:the success of the former is founded on theunderdevelopment of the latter, and is sustained by it.Later, he focused specifically on the forest industries,to make sure no-one took away any illusions that hesomehow wanted to exempt these from his wrath.Here is what he had to say about them:

“ ..very, very few of the forest industries whichhave been established in the underdevelopedcountries have made any contribution whatever toraising the welfare of the urban and rural masses,have in any way promoted socio-economicdevelopment. The fundamental reason is that thoseindustries have been set up to earn a certain rate ofprofit, not to satisfy a range of basic, popularneeds.”

Westoby’s turnaround was a bombshell. This was aprominent man; a man who had written and thoughtabout this sector, and its relationship to the rest of theworld, for a long time. It almost doesn’t matterwhether you favour his earlier view, or his later one –or even if you don’t much like either. What heachieved was a quantum leap in intellectualquestioning of the basic beliefs and mores which haddirected development policy – in this sector, andelsewhere. Westoby, I feel, was not a natural skeptic.His instincts were humanitarian, and, in general,humanitarians make poor skeptics. His legacy,therefore, is that he made us all think, and take noticeof issues outside the conventional set of concernsprevalent in the sector at the time. He was part – animportant part – of the process of walking away froma model of development that was clearly not working.

The intention of doing that, clearly, is that eventuallywe will converge upon something that works better.And, even if we have not reached that point yet, wehave at least been forced to think about people, andvalues, and other fundamentals which we earliermight not have considered. And that cannot be a badthing.

You can stand on a hillside in Sumatra and look acrossa low valley at the forest cover on the other side. Inthe foreground, and to the left, you do not need yourbinoculars to see that this part is a ruined forest. Thebig logs have been dragged off to the dumps andtrucked away, the smaller ones knocked over orsnapped off as the heavy bulldozers have clanked by.A few bedraggled spires or whole trees are leftstanding, but around them is a funeral pyre ofbranches, leaves and other detritus. Soon enough, thatpyre will be lit, leaving only the livid red of the roadsand eroding gullies as contrast to the blackened site.

Across to the right, you see what looks from thisdistance like intact forest. The variegated greencrowns form a dense carpet over the earth; some ofthe hooting of gibbons seems to emanate from thisspot; and the hornbills whirring overhead seem to beheaded in that direction. You will need yourbinoculars, or maybe even to take a walk over intothat area, to see that it is not a pristine forest, but hasbeen logged over, a few years back. Some of theroading is still visible, and big stumps appear throughthe vines and undergrowth here and there. But, it isstill forest.

Last, and farthest up the hill, is the remaining virginforest. Or, at least, it is unlogged forest – it may havebeen under other forms of use and extraction by localpeople for many years. You will probably want totake a walk to see inside this one: the high primarycanopy lofted like a cathedral roof over the layers ofunderstorey; the dense shade of the forest floor. Sitdown somewhere in here for an extended period, andyou will see most of the larger creatures that live here.Many of the smaller ones are living under the litterbeneath you, or in that brilliant green canopy highabove. Wherever they are, you will know that sittinghere, you are in close proximity to more varieties ofyour fellow living creatures than you are likely to beat any other place on the planet.

At this basic, emotional level, we are all drawn tothese forests, if we encounter them. We compare thelast site to the first, and we react against the violence,the finality, of that clearing operation. We look at thatmiddle site, and we find ourselves hoping that whatremains, at least, can be kept, and the form and manyof the functions of a living forest can survive. Is thisreaction because, at some instinctive level, we feelourselves in the presence of our origins? We are, after

The 2nd Jack Westoby Lecture, 1999Jim Douglas

Tropical Forests: Who Wants Them?

ANUFORESTRY

2 JACK WESTOBY LECTURE 1999

all, a tropical species. Is it the enormous life energythat we sense in that living system that draws us?

I hope it is not this - or, at least, not just this. I hope weare basing our concern on more than some sort ofecological gnosticism - because if we are not, then weare going to lose. The reason for that is that there areother eyes watching our little hillside: some of thembelonging to very rich and powerful people, andothers belonging to the most marginalized andignored people in this country. What they see isprofit, or basic livelihood. The transformations theyenvision are in lifestyle, or basic opportunity – notwhat ends up on that particular hillside. And they arenot going to be swayed by moral or feel-goodarguments.The tropical forests are one of the last great naturalresource frontiers left on Earth: the boreal forests, andthe oceans, are the others. Under presentcircumstances, the tropical forests are the least likelyof these three to survive as a great natural resourcewell over the next generation or two.

Can we do anything about this? Are we misguided toeven try? These are interesting questions, but we needmore focus:

• What do we lose, in aggregate, if we lose theseforests?

• What would it really cost us, in aggregate, tokeep them?

I wish we could spend a lot more time than we havehere tonight talking about the answers to thesequestions: there are massive issues of judgement andbasic belief involved in these questions.

But, all we can do is characterize the broad argumentsin the most superficial manner. The fact is that manyof the arguments in favour of keeping large areas oftropical rainforest intact can sound emotional, andeven speculative. It does no great service to this sideof the argument that we often find its banner beingcarried by rather irritating, pantheistic whackos, whoseem to be basing their case on a revival of paganEarth-worship. That approach may have served someof our very distant ancestors well, but I do assure youthat if you find yourself in the business of trying toargue the rationalist case for better management andprotection of the tropical forest, with friends likethese, you don’t need enemies.

Here, in highly truncated form, are the basicarguments in favour of retaining these tropicalforests:

• The rainforests are the repository of majorbiological, cultural and even spiritual treasuresof the planet. We have no more right to deprivefuture generations of these treasures than wewould to set fire to the Louvre;

• Even at a national level, these forests serve vital,but often undervalued and even unrecognized,roles in protecting watersheds, supplying ahuge range of non-wood goods and services.They can also supply valuable wood to localand international markets alike, in perpetuity, if

we choose to use them carefully for thispurpose;

• When these forests are exploited heavily, andthen destroyed, most benefit in the real worldfrom doing so accrues to wealthy privilegedelites. And who wants to help them?

• When these people are through with the forest,they leave an impoverished and damaged siteto the local inhabitants: some of whom maypreviously have lived in a long termharmonious relationship with the forests; othersof with whom may have arrived more recently,have their own demons of basic survival to dealwith. Either way, there is little chance, now,that the remains of the forest will be left torecover to that middle stand we saw on ourSumatran hillside. The land that is under thatforest has now become more valuable to thoseurgently in need of its sustenance, than is theforest itself.

Now, let us move to the other side of the argument.We don’t actually hear much from the other side –those doing the removing of the forest – firstlybecause we are not really inclined to listen to theircase anyway, and secondly because they are outthere doing what they do, not in here talking orlistening to us. But, their actions speak louder thanour words, most of the time.

There is a case to be made for rapid utilization offorest areas, with subsequent conversion of largeamounts of it. We saw much of the case for it in theearlier writings of Westoby:

• Forest exploitation generates capital withrelatively little investment, and then offers asecond dip, in the sense that the land openedand cleared by heavy logging is then availablefor others to use for growing things to eat, orsell, without having to wait for more trees togrow back on the site;

• History illustrates that most rich countries thatonce had extensive forests did exactly this withtheir resource. They did it for very extendedperiods of time, and they did very well out of it.

The tragedy of the tropical forests, in my view, is thatwe have lost about half of what existed on earth whenI was born, and yet we still cannot really decide uponthose basic questions: can we afford to lose theseforests? Can we afford to keep them? Either we decidesoon – and act effectively upon that decision - orevents will decide for us.

The reason we have not managed so far to do so is notbecause we have no answers, but because we have toomany answers. The tropical forests – whether becauseof the primeval attachments I spoke of, or otherreasons - attract the attention of a wide variety ofacademic, professional and civil society groupings,every one of which seems to end up convinced that ithas the central answer to the dilemma (that is, whenthey have finally finished arguing among themselvesabout what the actual dilemma is).

We could spend an entertaining couple of hours herejust thinking up ways to characterize these groupings,but we will have to content ourselves with a fewsimple examples, to get the point across:

• There is the “forestry is like agriculture, onlytaller” crowd. They think that the only forestsand forestry we should be concerned with is thatpart of it we can treat just like a farm, populatedby large and rather slow-witted plants thatultimately must be trained either to work for thegreater good of the agronomic class, or get out ofits way. In fact, very large areas of land clearedof forests have not gone to efficient andprofitable productive use, for the simple reasonthat that sort of use usually requires heavy up-front capital investment of the type that is rarelyavailable in developing countries at the frontierof the development zone – which is where theforests usually are.

• Economists are often the handmaidens of theagronomic push, because of their tendency,when dealing with complex natural systems, tobelieve that if you have at least one piece ofinformation on a price, or a response, then yougeneralize that to cover the whole system, andif you don’t have even that one datum point,then you assume the value of whatever theoffending item is to be zero.

• We have the “four legs good, two legs bad” set,which came to prominence at the RioConference in 1992. These people basicallynever saw an item of biodiversity they thoughthad a value less than the GDP of a mediumsized economy; they never saw a protected areathat was large enough; and they neverencountered a forest production operation theyliked;

• “Forests are us”. This group seems to believethat if we could only find a way to vest allownership and authority for the forests in thehands of traditional forest dwellers (sometimessimple sons of the soil living nearby are alsoincluded), then everything will turn out alright.This idea seems to be based on the notion thatbecause the people who are to receive thislargesse have no money now, no amount oftemptation to make some fast will sway themfrom their impecunious morality;

• And, I almost forgot: the foresters. Well, the factis, almost everyone involved in the highinternational councils on tropical forests forgetsthem, when deciding what is to be done withthe forests. Economists, if they rememberforesters at all, tend to think of them as a gaggleof befuddled rustics; the conservation crowdwrite them off as being the apparatchiks of thelogging monster. And so it goes…

I know this is caricature, and unfair at that. In fact,each of these groupings has something to offer, and atleast some part of their diagnoses of what is wronghas to be listened to. But, keeping the tropicalrainforest intact, in the real world, is the business of

dealing with a problem that is immense, complex,diffuse, and variable. Because of the paradigm warsthat beset the sector, we have almost become used tofailure, to erecting partial solutions that sit on suchnarrow bases, they topple almost from the moment ofimplementation. We fire one magic bullet at theproblem after another: internally contradictory,under-financed, and wide of the mark. Nothing we docompetes effectively with greed, and survival: the twogreat motivators of what is really going on in theforests.

Let me give you one example of what I mean:

At the present time, although you may not havenoticed, a fierce debate is raging among internationaldevelopment assistance agencies, NGOs, academicsand others involved, on the issue of sustainablemanagement of natural forests in the tropics.Sustainable forest management has become a mantrafor development assistance agencies, in particular, butnow also for many of the mainstream environmentalNGOs who have had to recognize that no-one is goingto pay for large swathes of commercial forest to be setaside.

We have the “four legs good, two legs bad” set, whichcame to prominence at the Rio Conference in 1992.These people basically never saw an item ofbiodiversity they thought had a value less than theGDP of a medium sized economy; they never saw aprotected area that was large enough; and they neverencountered a forest production operation they liked;“Forests are us” failur - paradigm envy takes over:one group ‘traditionalists’ run off into ever moretechnical experimentation and pilot studies, provingand re-proving that sustainable forest managementcan work. Since there is in fact little doubt thattechnically, and in a highly controlled environment,sustainable forest management can work, thepersistence of donor agencies in supportingcontinued trials can be characterized more asoccupational therapy for donors, than a seriousattempt to deal with the problem of forest loss atglobal scale.

Now; back to the other side of this sustainable forestmanagement argument. Let’s call them the‘iconoclasts’. Their argument is that sustainable forestmanagement is financially unattractive, and willnever be supported by the private sector in tropicalforest countries. Therefore, they have concluded, theonly way to protect the rainforest is to allow theaccessible parts of it to be logged - fast and rough, ifthat is the way industry wants it – and then closeddown, so that the biodiversity and other assets canrecover, with no further production to be permittedon that area.

The irony is that both groups engaged in this now-furious exchange want basically the same thing: theretention and protection of as much of the tropicalforest as can be obtained. While they tear away ateach other the forests continue to go, and both sidesare diverted from what they both know, (or shouldknow) is the real problem: political vested interestand corruption, distorted incentives and policies inthe sector, and systematic exclusion of large groups of

JACK WESTOBY LECTURE 1999 3

4 JACK WESTOBY LECTURE 1999

marginalized people from any real stake in the forests.These are the real factors that make the sustainableforest management approach fail now, and the samegroup of factors will make the alternative approachfail, if they are not dealt with directly. I am remindedhere of the Aristotlean anomaly, where philosophersand thinkers debated for an extended period howmany teeth a horse has - or should have, according totheory – until it was decided that someone mightactually have to go out and count them. It is abouttime this sort of thing came to a halt.

Perhaps the only thing that will be effective inbringing us to focus on real strategy will be thespectre of some real threat to us – not just them outthere – from forest loss and destruction. One thing wehave to worry about more today than we did in thepast is that, at a global level, the process by whichforest removal takes place seems more and more to bea costly and risky one. In the most immediate term,we are all aware of the health and economic costs ofthe massive fires that have burned in forest (and ex-forest) areas in Indonesia and the Amazon. Whetherthe costs are even higher than those rests largely onwhat you think is happening to our climate. What thisis, and how far it will go, I am certainly not equippedto say. But if there is something going on, in this area,then what is happening to the tropical forests has a lotto do with it: it is estimated that around 30% of releaseof carbon into the atmosphere results from tropicalforest destruction, and I have been told that the firesin Indonesia in 1997-98 actually released more carbonthan came from all man-originated activities in theUnited States: usually, the undisputed champion ofsuch emissions.

In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder whichwill turn out to be worse for global warming: all thoseforest fires, or the hot air emanating from theinternational tropical forests debate and talkfest onwhat to do about it all.

SO: WHAT ARE WE TO DO?I have had my fun with the priesthood of theinternational forests debate. Now, it is time to put upor shut up:

There are three things that are going to befundamental in changing outcomes in the tropicalforests:

• money• political leverage/influence• reform by stealth: coalitions and consultations

MoneyIs money the problem? Sometimes, when people hearthat the donor agencies are spending around $1500million per year on forests in developing countries –and disbursements from the Global EnvironmentFacility will be additional to that – they are prone toask: isn’t that enough to make some difference? Or, ifthey have been around the development assistancebusiness themselves, they might even ask: can therecipients really absorb even that amount – let alonemore - effectively into the forests sector? However, if we compare the flow of actual aid money(even including loans from development Banks) into

the developing country forest sector, to the value ofoutput from that sector, then the input figure isminuscule: perhaps in the order of 1% of total value ofoutput. If we were able to include the value ofagriculture (intensive and extensive, sustainable andnon-sustainable) which occurs on land cleared offorest for that purpose, then the ratio between donorinputs and value of output would be even more tiny.Taken alone (i.e. with no strong linkage to largersources of political and financial leverage) there islittle chance that this amount of funding can producesignificant change, in this particular sector, with itsmajor governance and vested interest problems.

If we could add the flow of capital from developedcountry private sector sources (or other developingcountry sources) into the mix, we would obtain amuch healthier ratio, since that flow is probablyaround ten times as much as the flow from donoragencies (among which I modestly include the WorldBank, even though we are primarily a lender, not adonor). But we then have to ask ourselves thequestion: how much of that money is likely to produceany salutary improvement upon the status quo offorest management, sustainability and protection?And what have we – the donors, or more broadly, theconcerned group in the international community –really done so far to influence the results of theseprivate sector flows into forestry? Our workingtheory is that, with a great deal more money to bringto bear – correctly focused, of course, and equippedwith the appropriate delivery instruments and levers– and meaningful coordination of the sources of donorfinance around that money, and an enhanced capacityto actually negotiate the package of proposedintervention with client governments and a broadgroup of other stakeholders, the money instrumentwould improve matters considerably.

Can we get it?

It is unlikely the regular donor agencies are going toratchet up assistance to the forests sector any timesoon (the EU is a possible exception: it appears tohave large and growing funds available for forestsinvestment in our client group of countries). The samecan probably be said of the foundations and otherprivate and civil society sources of grant funds,although it would be worth exploring newer sources,such as the Turner Fund, some of the Japanese privatesector foundations, and so on.

A more promising source might be some of themultilateral Banks which have concessional lendingoptions: Japanese Bank EXXIM; KFW; the NordicDevelopment Bank; ADB and the other regionals, tothe extent they can soften lending, and so on. Ourinitial impression is that these agencies oftenencounter problems in disbursing effectively to theforests sector – or have hardly even considered doingso, in some cases.An even more promising source of money, eventually,might be the carbon market: the basic idea ofprotecting forests as a way of retaining carbon inbiomass, instead of allowing it to go up in smoke. Atthe moment, we are a long way from that, but it iscertainly worth watching in future. Let’s hope theforests can wait long enough for the international

JACK WESTOBY LECTURE 1999 5

negotiators on the Kyoto Protocol to make up theirminds on this one.

Political leverage/influenceI have already made the observation that when sectormarkets and policies are distorted heavily by thepersistent ability of industry and political elites toengage in lucrative rent-seeking behaviour, then noamount of technical assistance, nor of externalboosting of the ideals of sustainable management andforest protection, will have much influence. In effect,under these circumstances, the decision makers whowould have to initiate and then implement reform arethe very people who benefit most from not doing so.

This is never an easy subject to discuss: taken thewrong way, it can look like self-appointed expertsrepresenting the values of a lot of spoilt-brat Westernnations, applying pressure to sovereign nations toadapt themselves to their whims. But, if we agree thatvested interest and political interference in the propermanagement of the sector and the resource really domatter, then we must address it in some way, or admitthat we cannot make a difference. If you will allow meto become a little bit centred on my own organization– the World Bank – for a few moments, then I will notethat there are means available to the Bank to raise thepolitical profile of the sector, in a way that makessome of the issues which are creating the worstproblems more obvious. For example, structuraladjustment lending is potentially powerful. This is aform of lending whereby the Bank negotiates with agovernment a series of policy and institutionalreforms, aimed at distortions and malpractices thatare believed to be interfering with good governanceand economic management. It links required policychange to important levels of loan financing (ratherthan having policy dialogue locked up inside smallersector based investment loans, which may havelimited leverage). It can be used to carry the dialogueon forests and natural resources to areas ofgovernment and civil society where these subjectsusually do not receive much attention: to Ministers ofFinance, for example, who usually matter a whole lotmore than Ministers of Forestry. Especially incountries where the official forestry agency haspurposely been kept weak and ineffectual.

To some people in this room, structural adjustmentlending by the Bank will be anathema: and we canhave that particular argument later, if you like. I willcertainly admit now that, to date, use of thisinstrument by the Bank has only marginally involvedforests and natural resources issues: the tradition ofadjustment lending has been to focus on themacroeconomic ailments of an economy – theexchange rate; the finance sector; civil service reformin aggregate; trade and fiscal policy; and so on. This issomething we could improve upon – we wouldcertainly need a lot of help from other stakeholders inthe sector at both international and national level tomake it work.

Reform by stealth: coalitions and consultationsI hope you will have taken, from the situation Idescribed surrounding the debate over sustainableforest management earlier, the message that those ofus engaged in this subject are not particularly good at

talking with each other. We are excellent at talking ateach other. We are like a group of people standingaround an elephant, in a dark room. Each of usreaches out, and touches a part of it. Each of us comesaway with a very clear idea of what we haveencountered: but it will be a very different idea fromsomeone at the other end, who has graspedsomething quite different.

Let us come directly to the point here: theinternational community is lousy at coordinatingeffectively around the tropical forests issue. In somecases, this is exactly the way national governmentforest agencies and Ministries want it. They will wantto keep the donor and international effort confined tofairly narrow technical inputs, along lines they cancontrol. To some extent their attitude is justified, inthat they are (or should be) most aware of their owntechnical needs, and are right to be wary of the vestedinterest involved in some donor offerings. But theyalso know that if donors and others begin to exchangeviews and information in a highly organized way,sooner or later, much more difficult policy andincentive issues will rise to the top of the agenda:issues the line agencies either cannot or do not wish todeal with.

Let us come as directly to another point: despite theirearnest protestations to the contrary, most donoragencies (the multilateral Banks very definitelyincluded) have only fairly haphazard relationshipswith major opinion groups and elements of civilsociety in their host countries. Those of us who are inthis business are all familiar with the rapid runaround local NGOs which sometimes is called uponto suffice as “consultations with civil society” when aproject is in the wings awaiting approval. We rarelytake the time and put in the effort to engage the mainelements of civil society in our deliberations on whatshould be done in a given place. If we did it together,around a fairly well-defined agenda, but with plentyof time and resources to allow the process to develop,two things would happen:

1. the donor and lending agencies themselveswould become better informed about what theoptions and possibilities for sector developmentreally are, and would also be working off acommon view of what the real issues andproblems in the sector are;

2. the relevant areas of government wouldincreasingly be pulled into the discussion, andwould need to adapt their own thinking to therealities of what is going on out there.

FINAL THOUGHTSThe theme I have taken from the example of JackWestoby is intellectual honesty. Westoby moved fromone very specific view of forests and development,across to another – one about as far from the originalas it was possible to get. This attracted criticism –some of it well-meant, and some not. But he had beenaround for a long while, and no doubt he was wellaware of the consequences of his actions before hetook this road.

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At the risk of sounding like a functionary from theChinese Government, I would like to finish with aproposed list of the “four honesties” that we might alladopt, as a starting place for getting our efforts in thetropical forests to be more effective:

• instead of arguing endlessly over what theappropriate definition of sustainable forestmanagement is, or whether it can be achievedin all tropical forest situations we encounter, weshould agree to pursue significantly improvedforest management (including forestprotection) wherever that is possible. Given ourachievements (or lack thereof) in this area sofar, that ought to be enough for any of us.

• we should all promise not to come up withanother magic bullet for achieving majorreductions in deforestation and degradation inthe tropics, for at least the next ten years. Weknow what needs to be done; we know that, inmost cases, it is going to be difficult, andprobably expensive to achieve. Let’s notpretend otherwise, and get on with it.

• we should all admit that where vested interest,rent-seeking by political elites and exclusion oflegitimate stakeholders from the process offorest use and management are prevalent in aforest sector, we must deal directly with thoseproblems, not spend our time solving simpler,technical ones while waiting, Micawber-like, forsomething to turn up.

• even if we pool resources, ideas and skills, wemay still not save the tropical forests. If we donot work together, we have no hope. Whoeveryou are, and whatever you may think of theBank, and its ilk, if you have this goal, you needus. And, whatever I may have said about youtonight, we need you.

I am not an apocalyptic by nature, and I don’t want tofinish on a note of doom. It is always a temptation, inan address like this, to refer to a turning point, acritical decision between chaos and redemption.Otherwise, people listening might ask themselves -why is he here? Or, more embarrassingly, why am Ihere listening to him? But the currency of doomsayingis rather debased at the moment, as we approach theend of the millennium, and the wave of remorselessbeat-ups of Nostrodamus or the Book of Revelationscrests.

The tropical forests are not going to disappear on the1st of January year 2000, or 2001 depending on whenyou think the new millennium starts. But, what can besaid without risk of being accused a prophet of doom,is that they will disappear eventually, unless wechange course significantly. One of the essentials inmaintaining hope that we can do this is an awarenessof the realities we face, so that we are ready to dealwith the obstacles. What I have tried to do tonight isemphasize that we have plenty of those, and that ifwe continue make enemies of ourselves within theranks of the concerned, we will never overcome them.

Pick a side, get on it, and bear in mind the warning ofW.B. Yeats, in that great opening stanza to his longpoem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.