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- 10/21/08: Remarks by Henrietta Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance at the White House Development Summit
- 10/08/08: Remarks by Henrietta Fore, USAID Administrator and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance at The President's Freedom Agenda
- 10/01/08: Remarks by Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, at the Ceremony Marking the Full Operational Capacity of Africa Command (AFRICOM)
- 09/25/08: Remarks by Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, at 2008 Millennium Development Goal Malaria Summit, New York - "U.S. Leadership in the Fight Against Malaria"
- 09/22/08: Remarks by Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, at the White House Symposium on Advancing Global Literacy - "U.S. Commitment to Advancing Global Literacy"
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Testimony of Constance Berry Newman
Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Africa
"Saving the Congo Basin: The Stakes, The Plan"
Before the House Committee on International Relations
Subcommittee on Africa
March 11, 2003
Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify here today at this most important hearing on saving the Congo Basin. I am pleased to join my colleagues from the Department of State. It is important to note that USAID and the Department of State have been in close collaboration throughout the development of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP). We will continue to work together along with other US government agencies, African governments, and US and African conservation and business groups to ensure a strong partnership for the Congo Basin. We have great hopes for the future of the Congo Basin because in the words of Secretary of State Colin Powell:
[those]… in this partnership, have agreed to work together to help the countries of the Congo Basin create and manage protected forest areas, such as national parks. … [and] will work together to combat illegal logging and other unsustainable practices, and … implement programs to improve forest management and give people a stake in the preservation of the forest, by providing them with sustainable forest based livelihoods.
I would like to focus on three main areas: 1) USAID's understanding of the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) as the foundation for a strong effective partnership; 2) a review of the development steps to date; and 3) an outline of the steps to come.
CARPE AS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE
I agree with my colleagues that the foundation for the future of the Congo River Basin is the extraordinary role played by Conservation International (CI), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in focusing both public and private sector attention on the needs and opportunities of the environment in the Congo Basin.
A key component of the CBFP is the past work of the partners in CARPE, one of USAID's most prominent natural resource management programs in Africa. CARPE was launched in 1995 with the initial purpose "to identify and begin to establish the conditions and practices required for the conservation and sustainable use of the natural resources of the Congo Basin, in a manner which addresses local, national, regional and international concerns." In so doing, CARPE helped to fill a major void by collecting important data on the Congo Basin. In recent years, CARPE has received annual USAID funding of $3 million to address environmental needs in nine countries.
CARPE has been active at a time of intense interest in the rainforests of the Congo Basin. At the same time, the international community has become far more aware of its importance in a global context, whether by providing a potential source of forest products or absorbing carbon dioxide. Conservation efforts and scientific studies, partially supported by funds from CARPE, have opened a window into a part of the world previously very poorly understood.
African governments, meanwhile, have become much more attentive to the forest; improving laws and institutions that manage it, and at the same time granting extensive concessions to log it. This emphasis on logging has been a response both to dwindling oil revenues in central Africa and to increasing global demand for tropical timber. Those who live and derive their livelihoods from the forest are faced with increasingly difficult economic times, and have relied on the forest to deliver them more and more benefits in ways that may not be sustainable.
A recent evaluation of CARPE released in February 2002 by the noted British organization, the Environment and Development Group, stated that:
It is a thoroughly worthwhile enterprise, well worthy of sustained US Government support. It is an attractive model in many respects, important among which is the dynamism and flexibility that the NGOs and academic institutions bring to the development process. That they are not encumbered by procedures, protocols and elaborate security protection makes them much more accessible to the civil society organizations in the countries whose forests they are aspiring to help conserve.
CARPE emphasizes four subject themes: 1) improving logging policy and practice; 2) enhancing protected areas within a lived-in landscape; 3) encouraging better environmental governance; and 4) strengthening local resource management systems. These themes are in turn supplemented by three cross-cutting areas (promoting monitoring processes; improving training and institutional strengthening; and ensuring donor coordination). Generally, these themes have provided a sound framework for organizing the work of the partners. The results of the program are summarized in a loose-leaf document entitled, "Results and lessons learned from CARPE Phase I," which we would be happy to provide to the Committee.
Examples of the activities CARPE partners are engaged in are as follows:
Improving logging policy
- WCS has undertaken ground-breaking work in northern Republic of Congo (ROC) working closely with CIB (Congolaise Industrielle des Bois), a European logging company, to improve its practices. Collaboration between logging companies and NGOs is new in the area and is proving to be a promising partnership.
Enhancing protected areas
- Protected areas have been the principal domain of WWF (in Central African Republic (CAR) and Gabon) and WCS (in ROC and Gabon).
Promoting environmental education and environmental causes
- The conservation community in the Basin has found a role in causes such as reducing bushmeat consumption, a practice that threatens species, disturbs ecosystems and spreads disease.
- Community management of local forests (once exclusive to the national government and well-placed expatriate logging firms) has attracted a groundswell of attention in Cameroon.
- These and other examples around the Congo Basin indicate that, despite a period of significant physical insecurity in the Basin (ROC, CAR, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)), the people and their governments are concerned about the deterioration of their environment and want to take action.
Encouraging local resource management
- Local resource management systems have been addressed by a number of partners, most notably Innovative Resources Management in its work in Cameroon. This work has encouraged Africans to feel a sense of "ownership" of the forest. A number of small-grant holders have also done interesting and useful work, though all on a modest scale.
Utilizing high-tech monitoring of the forest
- Monitoring the forest through use of remote sensing techniques has been carried out and has generated productive collaboration between partners, as well as a good interchange between the US and field-based workers. It provides quantitative data capable of informing predictions and policy decisions.
Bolstering capacity of local NGOs
- CARPE has funded some excellent regional training initiatives, as well as funding capacity-building grants to local NGOs, which have displayed potential. These activities have mainly been in those countries where CARPE has a field presence.
In sum, CARPE and its partners have worked with great cost-efficiency to deliver a complex, flexible and imaginative contribution to forest conservation in the Congo basin. That work has served to assure us that the basis for this recent significant increase in funding is based on tested methods using reliable data and experienced partners and producing identifiable results.
REVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT STEPS TO DATE
My colleagues have provided excellent overviews of how the CBFP has evolved since the announcement at World Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2002. I will provide an answer to the question of the integration of CARPE with the CBFP.
It is essential to an effective partnership that there be a blending of the strengths of CARPE with the new emphases of CBFP. This blending has followed a number of steps: on October 16-17, consultations were held with the NGO community; on December 12, meetings were conducted with various USG agencies; and on January 17, the new CARPE Strategic Objective was approved. This strategy highlighted the shifting focus of CARPE to incorporate the objectives of CBFP.
Under the CBFP, which of course includes a number of different donors, NGOs and corporate groups, CARPE will be the primary USG vehicle in the delivery of services. At the same time, CARPE will continue to do work independently from the CBFP. In this way, the two entities will be attached to each other but not interchangeable.
USAID's new departure in this area emphasizes moving CARPE from "learning lessons" to applying these lessons to action on the ground. In order to facilitate this change in strategy, in January 2003, USAID relocated CARPE management from USAID headquarters in Washington to the Congo Basin (USAID/Kinshasa, DRC). We believe that this change will greatly strengthen our presence in the Basin, affording many more opportunities to interact with all partners in assessing and addressing problems and opportunities on the ground.
NEXT STEPS
The next steps for implementation are already underway, with a planning meeting scheduled for next week in Kinshasa, DRC. Subsequent to that meeting the interagency group will meet in April to review recommendations emanating from the Kinshasa meeting and to develop a set of criteria for proposal submission. Proposals will then be developed in May by NGOs in collaboration, as appropriate, with USG agencies for ultimate review and decision-making through a collaborative interagency process. Funding for action on the ground in the Congo Basin will be made available to those organizations with successful proposals before the end of the current fiscal year.
It is important to note that, consistent with USG practice, USAID will install a tracking system that will verify that the resources intended to be spent in the eleven landscapes selected under the CBFP really are so spent and that such results are equally identifiable, auditable and reportable.
CONCLUSION
As we look to the future, we realize that there are special opportunities to address environmental issues in the eleven landscapes which will be the particular emphasis of USG resources within the CBFP. We intend to ensure that the focus will be on producing identifiable results within those landscapes which will be reported back to Congress.
The priorities of the CBFP will be to:
- Encourage communities in the Congo Forest region to achieve a sustainable means of livelihood through well-managed forestry concessions, sustainable agriculture and integrated ecotourism programs;
- Help African countries develop a network of effectively managed national parks, protected areas and corridors; and
- Improve forest and natural resource governance by encouraging community-based management, combating illegal logging and enforcing anti-poaching laws.
In addition, USAID will stress the importance of working with three African regional institutions. The USG, together with the partners in the CBFP, is now in a better position to support the aspirations of the African people in the region. Working together we can all make a big difference on the wide range of problems threatening the environment in the Congo Basin.
The USG proposed to invest up to $53 million over four years (2002-2005) including a $36 million increase for CARPE. Coordination of these resource flows from many sources is extremely important if efforts are to be most cost-effective; this includes filling critical gaps and leveraging local effort. The combination of the CBFP facilitation process and the field-based USAID CARPE management will afford us the best mechanism to ensure that the USG resources are serving the most critical needs and are efficiently and effectively being spent on achieving results.
Thank you for supporting the Administration's request and for your continued support of the Administration's efforts to promote conservation and sustainable resource management in the Congo Basin. In order to ensure that the USG's resources make a difference we must respect the fact that this effort depends upon the people living in the Congo Basin to achieve a lasting, positive impact on the second largest tropical rainforest in the world. We have every intention of making that a high priority.
I thank the Committee for drawing attention to this important Administration initiative and I look forward to taking your questions.
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