A week of urgent negotiations begins Monday (16 January) in an effort to complete a replacement for the 1994 International Tropical Timber Agreement. The Agreement, which has been extended twice for three-year periods, will expire on 31 December 2006, and three previous negotiating sessions have failed to produce a successor pact.
The negotiations take place at a time when tropical forests are disappearing at a rate of 15 million hectares per year and increased attention is being given to the function of tropical vegetation as a natural "sink" that can recycle carbon dioxide and reduce global warming. Producing countries - often poor nations - derive some US$10 billion annually from tropical timber sales.
Negotiators still have to find common ground on draft articles relating to forest conservation, the allocation of voting rights within the International Tropical Timber Organization, which administers the Agreement, and financial arrangements for implementing a successor pact. Consensus has been reached on 25 of 48 draft articles of a new treaty. Overall agreement has been difficult because the interests of the 33 producing and 26 consumer member countries of the current treaty must be balanced, and because resistance has been encountered to an effort by some countries to broaden the scope of the pact to include tropical forest conservation.
An international pact on tropical timber has been in effect since 1983 but concern is now being expressed that the treaty could expire at the end of the year, leading to a negative impact on the global management of tropical timber forests. Some 150 delegates participated in the last negotiating session, which was held from 27 June to 1 July 2005. Those talks also took place at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
The tropical timber treaty is one of several international commodity agreements negotiated under the auspices of UNCTAD. Other agreements concern cocoa, cotton, grains, sugar, and olive oil and table olives. The purpose of the agreements is to create forums for consultations among producer and consumer countries; increase the transparency of markets for commodities through the sharing of statistics and other pertinent information; and help developing countries make the best use of their commodity sectors as they strive to establish sustainable economies. As with the International Tropical Timber Organization, which is based in Yokohama, international commodity organizations have been set up to administer the other commodity agreements.
