Highlights and images for 23 July 2024

“I believe we are dancing the two-step,” quipped a Member during Tuesday’s morning session, when Committee on Forestry (COFO) delegates engaged in lengthy discussions while negotiating text on scaling up agricultural and forestry linkages.

During initial country statements, delegates shared examples of Members’ efforts to scale up agroforestry, along with more recommendations for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) work in this area. While negotiating draft recommendations, Members accepted a proposal from Cameroon for a paragraph seeking updates from an internal FAO working group on its planned activities, which include a global agroforestry assessment and a series of guidance materials making the business case for agroforestry.

However, lengthy back-and-forths took place on the appropriate framing of trade-offs, including whether to reference measures, such as trade barriers, that may impact land management. Many delegates opposed the inclusion of reference to trade, while Brazil noted that there are some measures that can address trade-offs that have an impact on trade, and in some cases disproportionately impact smallholders. Members eventually agreed on compromise text proposed by Chair Walkner.

Delegates could not reach consensus on a draft recommendation on FAO support for improving Member capacity for integrated land use planning and monitoring. They disagreed about references to restoration, forest degradation, and sustainable use, as well as text lifted from the Declaration of the High-level Segment of the 19th meeting of the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF 19). The paragraph was sent to an informal Friends of the Chair group to work out compromise language. Following another unsuccessful attempt to reach consensus, Chair Walkner sent it back to a Friends of the Chair to resolve outstanding issues.

After lunch, Members moved on to the agenda item on enhancing the contribution of forestry to the bioeconomy. Introducing the item, the Secretariat noted that “pressure on forests is greater than ever,” with use of materials surging over the past 50 years and a still greater increase needed for the 10 billion people that will populate the earth by 2050.

In discussion on proposals for COFO recommendations, Members debated, amongst other things:

• whether and where to insert references in different paragraphs to a "circular" bioeconomy or "sustainable patterns of consumption and production"; 
• the inclusion of UNFF 19 language on sustainable forest-based bioeconomy approaches; and 
• the mandate for a FAO conference on the contribution of the forest sector to a sustainable bioeconomy, and which FAO bodies would be targeted to receive the report of the conference results.

In the end, COFO agreed to encourage Members, and invite FAO, to scale up technical support, capacity building, sharing of knowledge and practices, research, and technology transfer to support formulating national, regional, and global sustainable forest-based bioeconomy approaches, strategies and action plans fully incorporating sustainable forest management. COFO also:

• invited Members to support sustainable practices, market development and investments in forest-based value chains;
• encouraged FAO to improve its knowledge base and data collection, analysis, and sharing, promote policy coherence and scale up technical support and capacity building to advance sustainable bioeconomy practices across agri-food systems and forestry, and initiate a global bioeconomy partnership; and
• invited FAO to convene, subject to the availability of extrabudgetary resources, an international conference on the role of the forest sector in the bioeconomy, and report on its results to COFO 28 and the appropriate sessions of the FAO Council and Conference.

Delegates briefly began discussing draft text for the Chair’s summary on the agenda item on the Committee’s Multi-year Programme of Work 2024-2027. Several suggestions for changes and additions were made but none reached consensus. The text was left with many brackets denoting draft text over which disagreements exist, to be discussed further in an evening “Friends of the Chair” informal negotiating session. Delegates also sailed through the agenda item on Strengthening FAO’s contributions to the International Arrangement on Forests. 

In keeping with the morning’s theme, a lunchtime World Forestry Week high-level side event, moderated by Dos Santos A. Silayo, Chief Executive of the Tanzanian Forest Services Agency, and FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo, focused on scaling up agroforestry. As well as hearing first-hand accounts of country experiences, participants also discussed what investments and actions are needed for scaling up agroforestry, including ways to address barriers.