Smoke in the woods

“Does the 2018 Forest Policy draft build on the new direction of 1988 and incorporate the lessons learnt since then? Unfortunately, the answer is a no. But in the haze of poorly written text with its platitudes and confusion, one intent is visible. Carping about the decline in forest productivity, it identifies “production forestry” and plantations as the “new thrust area”. Forest development corporations, white elephants of the statist era, are to be the institutional vehicle. But in a neoliberal twist, they will now enter into public-private partnerships (PPPs) to bring corporate investment into forest lands”