Destroying forests

Controversy about forest destruction has been the World Bank's achilles heel for nearly two decades. The flagship disasters in Brazil and Indonesia in the 1980s focused on the role of the World Bank as forest destroyer. The subsequent attempts by the World Bank to do good forestry through the TFAP (Tropical Forest Action Plan) proved a further public relations disaster for the Bank. The TFAP was an ambitious plan launched by the World Bank and other international actors in the mid-1980s to mobilize US $ 8 billion over a period of five years. While the official goal was to curb deforestation, the TFAP's planned investments were very much geared towards industrial logging activities. It was the uniting of ecological justice NGOs in opposition to the TFAP that created the World Rainforest Movement (WRM). The TFAP debacle, which the WRM triggered, and broad-based criticism of environmentally destructive forestry loans for West Africa forced a rethink of forest policy in the Bank in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The WRM network was influential in this policy review, which resulted in a new World Bank Forest Policy in 1991.