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Countries with some of the largest surviving tropical rainforests have
refused to back a major international research project, proposed by the
British government, aimed at identifying endangered species of tropical
trees in order to curb trade in them.

The rejection came in Cambridge late last month at a workshop of the
International Tropical Timber Organisation, attended by scientific delegates
from Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ghana and other major exporters and importers
of tropical timber. Afterwards, Mark Collins of the World Conservation Monitoring
Centre, which would have carried out the work, said: ‘We weren’t just defeated,
we were minced.’

The decision is a serious reverse for Western governments which have
argued that the ITTO, a trade organisation of nations that produce and consume
tropical timber, can become a tool for saving tropical rainforests. ‘I don’t
see how they will be able to continue with this argument,’ says Collins.
‘The ITTO is simply not trying to meet the demands of the consumer countries
for international data on forest species.’

It may also lead to the withdrawal of support for the ITTO from conservation
groups, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature, which has worked hard to
promote the conservation aspects of the organisation.

The $800 000 research project, which the British and Dutch governments
had offered to fund through the ITTO, aimed to create an international database
on endangered tropical trees. It would also have drawn up plans for monitoring
trade in their timber, and presented options for the ITTO to promote the
conservation of timber species, including ‘development of international
trade controls’.

The World Conservation Monitoring Centre, a science-based organisation
in Cambridge that is backed by the UN Environment Programme, has already
conducted a pilot phase of the research, covering countries in Africa and
Southeast Asia. The findings, presented to the ITTO workshop, identified
1868 traded tree species, of which 304 ‘are considered to be threatened
at a global level’.

The governments of tropical countries have stonewalled the research
from the outset. Only Malaysia offered data for the pilot study. To add
insult to injury, delegates at the workshop then cited ‘gaps, inaccuracies
and uneven levels of reliability’ in the data as a reason for blocking the
larger study.

A confidential ITTO report of the workshop says that some species had
been ‘mistakenly categorised as vulnerable or endangered’ in the pilot
study. This could have an ‘adverse influence on international markets’ and
require ‘expensive activities to redress the mistaken interpretations’.

The workshop concluded that ‘attempts to develop a global database under
the auspices of the ITTO . . . are premature.’ Instead, it called for research
that would concentrate on ‘the development of a few national databases’.
These would be ‘under the ownership of the country concerned’ and, apart
from the ITTO secretariat, ‘no access to the databases would be permitted
to any other party’.

Simon Counsell, rainforest campaigner for Friends of the Earth, says:
‘This demonstrates that the ITTO’s priority is to serve the timber trade,
and the British government’s confidence in its conservation credentials
is misplaced.’

Ian Symons, an official at Britain’s Overseas Development Administration,
said that the government might continue to fund the research outside the
auspices of the ITTO. ‘We are not diminished in our support for this kind
of work,’ he says. The Dutch government, which has a policy of using only
timber from sustainable sources after 1995, may take a similar view.