Foreign Aid: Good Intentions, Woeful Results

By EUGENE LINDEN

A new threat to the world's fast-diminishing rain forests has united the normally fractious environmental community. The organizations arrayed against this peril constitute a Who's Who of the environmental movement: the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Testifying before Congress, Bruce Rich, chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund's International Program, said none of these groups were "exaggerating when they say they fear that an environmental Frankenstein has been unleashed."

And just what is this monster? Sadly, it is a program originally intended to save the world's remaining rain forests. The Tropical Forestry Action Plan, or T.F.A.P., was perhaps the most ambitious environmental aid program ever conceived. Sponsored in 1985 by the World Bank, the U.N. and other groups, the initiative was designed to help the world's tropical countries come to grips with deforestation. With the help of international agencies, each nation would come up with a formal proposal for managing and protecting its forests. T.F.A.P. would channel $8 billion in aid over the next five years to implement those programs.

By now, efforts to slow tropical deforestation should have been in effect for years. Instead, sponsors had to convene in Geneva last month for what James D. Barnes of Friends of the Earth described as a "make or break" meeting to see whether the foundering plan could even be saved.

Few would deny the seriousness of the crisis that prompted T.F.A.P. Moist tropical forests cover just 6% of the earth's terrestrial surface but contain at least 50% of the world's variety of insects, plants and animals. Throughout the world the forests are chopped to clear land, provide firewood or supply the timber market. A report issued in 1990 by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization shows that the rate of deforestation in the tropical world has accelerated 80% since 1980.

T.F.A.P. was the industrial world's largest collective effort to help address the developing world's environmental problems. It was launched with assurances that the program would not repeat the mistakes of past development efforts, which included duplication of effort; rip-offs by contractors, consultants and corrupt officials; and a tendency to promote the donor's priorities at the expense of the Third World's. Unfortunately, the forestry plan ended up repeating many of these failings.

From the outset, T.F.A.P. seemed to have more to do with expert opinion in industrial-world think tanks than with actual situations in tropical nations. Perplexed critics asked why India, with few remaining tropical forests, was targeted to receive $1.2 billion, while Indonesia and Zaire, with huge forests, were to receive $193 million and $34 million apiece.

It turned out that the authors of the original T.F.A.P. had chosen spending targets not by the size of their uncut tropical forests but by their ability to digest large amounts of money. Says Bruce Rich: "It was a plan that was really devised according to the needs of the aid agencies rather than the needs of the countries."

Embarrassed by such missteps, the sponsoring organizations made the first of several attempts to fix T.F.A.P. Be patient, they advised waiting aid recipients; the plan was still evolving, and its shortcomings would be addressed. Despite reservations increasingly being voiced by sponsoring organizations, however, the program seemed to take on a life of its own.

In country after country, proposed action plans stressed such projects as the opening of previously pristine forests for exploitation. Noting that Cameroon could become the "most important African producer and exporter of forestry-based products from the start of the 21st century," T.F.A.P. proposed construction of a 370-mile road through virgin rain forest that is home to 50,000 Pygmies. Many environmentalists wondered, By what logic do building roads into pristine areas and financing logging operations help preserve uncut forests?

The logic of self-interest, as it turns out: the sponsors of T.F.A.P. created a plan that promised benefits to rich and poor nations alike if they adopted programs stressing forestry over conservation. By making the forestry department of the U.N.'s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization principally responsible for administering the overall plan, moreover, the sponsors made it likely that cutting trees would have high priority.

But the organizations also made the mistake of selling the program in different ways to the rich nations and the Third World. Although touted to environmentalists in the industrial nations as a plan to save the forests, T.F.A.P. was sold to the Third World as one more source of funding for traditional forestry projects. Little wonder that the plans tended to be short on ways to slow deforestation. Said a development expert: "For officials in the Third World, environmental aid has become a new form of cargo cult: Go through the motions of doing these assessments, and cargo will come."

The most serious problem, however, is that T.F.A.P. may be based on a flawed premise. Thomas Fox of the World Resources Institute doubts there is evidence to support the assumption that tropical forests can be harvested and managed without damaging the ecosystem. So little is known about the intricate co- dependencies that tie the myriad species of plants, animals and insects of these forests into a working system that some biologists wonder whether tropical forestry is sustainable at any commercial level.

The plan has been all but disavowed by some of its original sponsors. James G. Speth, who as president of the World Resources Institute was instrumental in creating T.F.A.P., has described the plan as the "biggest disappointment of my six years at W.R.I."

FAO director general Edouard Saouma, an autocratic executive who likes to run his own show, has fought to keep control. Under threat of a funding cutoff from the sponsoring organizations, however, the U.N. organization agreed in Geneva earlier this month to cede control of the program to an outside governing council and to participate in the program's redesign. For the moment, these decisions have partially mollified critics, who are willing to wait to see whether these actions will produce meaningful reform.

So far, T.F.A.P. has not fulfilled the most dire predictions of environmentalists, but only because very little of the $8 billion intended for the Third World has actually been spent. Moreover, the plan has not been all bad. It offered a framework that brought rich nations together with Third World countries to begin dealing with tropical deforestation. "There are benefits to having global, one-stop shopping for the basic principles of forestry lending," says Barnes of Friends of the Earth.

Nor can it be said those criticizing T.F.A.P. are without sin. Tropical nations today find themselves besieged by international environmental groups, each promoting its own approach to conservation and planning. Some African nations are dutifully undertaking as many as seven different types of assessments, often with little coordination between the ministries involved. It was the fear of this type of scattershot approach that inspired creation of T.F.A.P. in the first place.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the T.F.A.P. disaster is that the furor it triggered has forced major international organizations to pay attention to the complexities surrounding tropical deforestation. The World Bank has been harshly criticized for promoting development projects that lead to the destruction of tropical forests. But the bank's vast influence in poorer nations gives it the potential to be a major force in plans to save the forests.

There is little time to spare. An estimated 210 million acres (85 million hectares) of tropical forests have been burned, cut or flooded in the five years since T.F.A.P. was conceived. It is not too late for the world to act to save these intricate green engines of life, but efforts to help will come to naught if the rich nations do not first absorb the failings of the world's most ambitious environmental program to date.