IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature

The official VPA process has not yet begun in DRC. The Ministry of Water, Nature Conservation, Forests and Tourism has already expressed its interest in pursuing such an agreement and has communicated this interest to the EU. However, it is the Ministry of Management who is ultimately responsible for formally launching the VPA process with the EU and it has not yet sent an official letter requesting to commence negotiations. In the interim, the EU intends to send a technical assistant to DRC to support the national government in moving towards starting the VPA process.

There are currently host of constraints that must be addressed before DRC begins the official VPA process. For example, the principal piece of legislation in the forest sector, the Forest Code, faces a number of implementation problems. Additionally, there are ongoing challenges related to the conversion of old titles into forest concessions that must be dealt with before starting a VPA.

IUCN is helping the country ready itself for beginning VPA discussions. To this end it is bringing stakeholders together to discuss the challenges associated with illegal logging and possible opportunities to improve the situation with FLEGT initiatives. Once the official VPA process begins, IUCN will take on the role of facilitator of the multi-stakeholder dialogue. It will also be responsible for communications activities to ensure that relevant groups are well informed about the agreement’s development.

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IUCN has organized and facilitated a variety of meetings with different stakeholders related to forest governance. In 2008, it organized two sector-specific meetings with senators and the private sector. Both events generated official communiqués in which the parties expressed their support for entering into VPA negotiations with the EU. Recently, IUCN organized a tri-partite meeting that brought together participants from civil society, government, parliamentarians and the private sector in order to improve communication between the groups on forest governance issues. The meeting enabled the attendees to develop a list of priority actions for the future, and finished with the establishment of a small working group to facilitate the flow of information between the different stakeholders on issues such as FLEGT/VPA. In order to further improve the dissemination of information about FLEGT/VPA, IUCN will soon be commissioning the translation of the EU’s FLEGT briefing notes into four different languages spoken in DRC.

IUCN is currently trying to organize a meeting between various government Ministries (including the Ministry of Management) in order to increase their awareness about the VPA and facilitate the move towards launching negotiations. It is also planning a meeting in November 2008 on the issue of chainsaw logging in DRC, during which the VPA will be discussed as a possible tool to better govern this practice.

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