Kenya Expands Legal Protection For Forests (and it only took 10 years!)

[hatrack]

After a nearly 10-year delay, the Kenyan parliament has approved legislation to protect the nation's dwindling forests from rampant encroachment, Environment Minister Kalonzo Musyoka said Wednesday.
The new law, which contains major revisions to existing 58-year-old legislation, was adopted with no fanfare two weeks ago amid uproar over ongoing government evictions of forest squatters in Kenya's central Rift Valley, he said.

"There is a lot we are now going to do in regard to the conservation of forests," Musyoka told reporters in response to a question at a news conference called to discuss an unrelated environmental issue. The Forest Bill 2005 seeks to plug enforcement and other loopholes in the now-replaced law adopted during British colonial rule of Kenya in 1947 that critics complained was not strong enough to protect the country's forests.

Since independence in 1963, Kenya's forest cover has shrunk from 10 percent of its 582,650 square-kilometer (224,962-square-mile) territory to a mere 1.7 percent, according to environmentalists who campaigned for the new law. The loss is due to unbridled deforestation for charcoal production and other industrial uses as well as politically motivated post-independence allocations of forest land to allies of successive governments, they say.

The new bill was originally submitted to parliament in 1996, but several politicians close to then president Daniel arap Moi, who retired in 2002, blocked it allowed for the government to repossess previously allocated forest land.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050817155354.nf3z6ogx.html