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Wildlife bill draws flak

Experts warn proposed law will do more harm than good

Inam Ahmed
The government is railroading a new wildlife law, which experts view as ill-conceived and if passed by the parliament would rather lead to degradation of forests and wildlife.
It would also lead to huge shrinkage of the forest area as much of the core forest would be declared "buffer zone" where commercial plantation would be done.
Although the draft law is meant to protect wildlife, it does not contain any proposal for rescuing wildlife from the verge of extinction.
Dr Reza Khan, a wildlife expert of international repute and winner of
National Environment Award, said there is no reason to have a new law if no organisational structure exists to implement it. The forest department in its present form could not save the wildlife. So it is utopian to think that the same department would be able to protect wildlife under a new act.
So the first task would be to set up a new wildlife department for an organisational structure, and only then one should review the 1973 wildlife law to identify the lacunas.
The parliamentary standing committee on the environment ministry is expected to discuss the draft of the lawsoon.
The draft keeps intact the provision of hunting wildlife with permission from a non-existent game warden. It does not propose any institutional mechanism to oversee hunting.
Experts say there should have been an authority that would decide how many licences could be issued, which species to be hunted, and how money collected from hunting would be ploughed back to conservation. The authority should also monitor if the law is being followed in hunting.
Experts also criticise the way wildlife has been categorised. The categorisation does not show which
animals or birds are endangered, critically endangered, or are available commonly. They say such categorisation is important if hunting is to be allowed, and the list has to be constantly updated.
The proposal says the forests should be comanaged as it is done now. But the co-management concept that the forest department applies is quite flawed and is way off from success cases of Nepal or India, said Dr Anisuzzaman, a wildlife expert.
The basic tenet of the forest department's practice is to keep its own authority over the co-management committees. As such the communities' views are never reflected, and these committees mostly consist of elites and illegal loggers. This simply does not serve the purpose of protecting the forests.
The draft proposes a wide classification of woodland into things like ecopark, Kunjabon (grove?), sanctu-
ary, buffer zone, community conservation area, safari park, etc. But experts question such segmentation, and say this would rather make wildlife conservation difficult.
"When the government cannot take care of the three existing categories, how can it take care of the proposed 12 categories?” questions Dr Ronald Halder, a wildlife lover. "The law only enhances the power of forest officials, which could be dangerous, as corrupt officials then could manipulate the forest people into illegal logging."
The draft law allows the government to take over private land in the name of wildlife conservation. For example, the government would have the authority to declare any private land or woodland as special biodiversity conservation area. So any individual, who would view that his land could be taken over by the government for the existence of any animal or bird, would be rather motivated
to kill off the wildlife to save his land from being acquired, said Dr Reza Khan.
The proposals also allow protected forest land to be used by the forest department for afforestation and gardening under a classification of buffer zone. This actually means forests would actually lose significant part of their areas to commercial plantation, as degraded areas within protected forests have been defined as buffer zones. The trees in the buffer zones would be commercially extracted under social forestry, and so would not serve the purpose of wildlife protection.
The definition of buffer zone is also contested, as worldwide the buffer zone is the area outside a reserved forest. However, the draft law identifies huge degraded parts of reserved forests all over the country as buffer zones while the areas outside are identified as landscapezones.
The Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh (WTB) observed
that the proposed law has also not specified any review time for the law, to update it with time. For example, Canadian, Zambian, or South African laws are updated every five years. Otherwise the law remains unchanged for a long time, in the case of Bangladesh it has been since 1973.
Although the act is called the Wildlife (Conservation) Act 2011, yet it does not contain any guideline on what is to be done to conserve the wildlife identified by the act as being in danger. The South African, Kenyan, and Indian laws contain such guidelines.
The law also falls short in areas of penalties for killing or trading in wildlife, WTB said. For example, there is no provision for incremental penalty for repeat crime of hunting without licence. Also no penalty has been proposed for illegal import or export of wildlife.
The proposed law is replete with terms like ecotourism, traditional trophies, special
biodiversity conservation area, and marine park. Unfortunately, it has not given any definition or regulatory standard for such nomenclatures.
The proposed law mentions formation of a scientific committee to suggest various measures. But this committee is supposed to be made up of botanists and wildlife experts. No mention of marine, wetland, or environmental experts has been made.
The law also approves breeding by individuals or organisations, which could be dangerous, as unbridled commercial breeding could impact negatively on wild population. The so-called crab farming in the Sundarbans is an example of how wild crabs are caught and claimed as commercially bred.
The draft although purports to protect the customary rights of the fisher folks and boatmen in case a wetland is declared protected, it totally ignores the traditional rights of the forest
dwellers — the bone of contention over protected area management that keeps the forest people away from foresters.
In the present draft, the forest department by design is provisioned for maintaining distance from the forest people, for the sake of continuing with the corrupt practices, alleges Sanjeeb Drong, general secretary of Bangladesh Indigenous People's Forum.
The draft law does not opt for any major shift in ensuring inclusive and transparent management of forests, and in recognising traditional forest rights.
But it allows the indigenous people to keep trophies used for rituals without putting any limit on such possessions. This poses a great threat to wildlife. For example, if every one in a village in the Sundarbans would want to keep a tiger skin as a traditional trophy, all the tigers of the forest could be wiped out by this practice.