Meeting in Geneva from 27 June to 1 July for the third session of the United Nations Conference on the Negotiation of a Successor Agreement to the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1994, 150 delegates were unable to finalize a draft text. They adopted a resolution in which they agreed to convene a fourth session in January 2006. The 1994 Agreement expires on 31 December 2006.
Negotiating a new agreement has proven difficult because it requires both reconciling and defining on paper the interests of the 33 members of the Agreement that produce tropical timber and the 26 consumer members. Of the 48 draft articles of the successor agreement, 25 have already been informally agreed upon. The outstanding questions concern the objectives of the Agreement, which some would like to be broader; definitions and allocation of voting rights; and financial arrangements. The original agreement, which dates from 1983, dealt only with tropical timber. Some delegates today would like to broaden the scope to cover tropical forest conservation as well.
As the next session will be the last chance for negotiations, the President of the Conference, Carlos Antonio da Rocha Paranhos (Brazil), urged delegates to be more flexible and to show real political will. The very existence of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) is at stake: this organization is a vital international partner in the development of the production capacities of producer countries, and manages some 200 projects in about 30 nations.
There is also a chance that all the guidelines on managing tropical forests will be discarded: to give up on managing the "Earth´s lungs" -- the tropical forests -- would pose a real risk to the environment.
The two previous sessions of the Conference were held in Geneva from 26 to 30 July 2004 and from 14 to 18 February 2005.
