Management of rosewood stocks: the committee in charge taking action

The committee in charge of managing the stocks of rosewood of Madagascar, encompassing environmental organizations such as the WWF, Alliance Voahary Gasy, Madagascar National Parks, and the Foundation for the biodiversity and protected areas, is currently working closely with the World Bank so as to establish more transparency in the activity of managing rosewood stocks. 

Since last year, the committee has been working on the development and implementation of an action project. According to the government representative in that committee, Emmanuel Rakotovahiny, 3 important documents have already been drafted, whose contents deal with locating logged rosewoods, marking and counting them, implementing of surveillance system to avoid new illegal logging, wood processing and making sales offer. These documents are to be consulted and evaluated by the World Bank experts for validation before they can be brought into effect, i.e. applied in the field.    

Rumors have lately spread about the transshipment of rosewoods through boats along the east coastline of the country. As explained by Emmanuel Rakotovahiny, “Such an operation would just be impossible due to the inexistence of continental shelf, allowing anchoring boats on sea.” Actually, performing transshipment in open sea is technically impossible in that it may cause severe accident. Still according to Emmanuel Rakotovahiny, spreading rumors on rosewood transshipment is simply an effort tending to destabilize the activity of the committee. For the moment, the exploitation of rosewood in Madagascar is regulated only by the decree 2011-001, which represses any precious wood illegal activities, and the decree 2010-141, which prohibits the logging, the exploitation and the exportation of precious woods in Madagascar.