MEETING OF THE BUREAU OF ALTERNATES
NORTH AMERICAN FOREST COMMISSION
Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico
November 6-10, 2000
PARTICIPANTS:
Mexico
Victor Sosa Cedillo, Director General of Forestry, SEMARNAP
Laura Lara Granados, Liaison Group, SEMARNAP
United States
Val Mezainis, Director, International Programs, USDA Forest Service
Jan Engert, Mexico and Brazil Program Coordinator, USDA Forest Service
Liza Paqueo, Project Development Specialist, International Programs, USDA Forest Service
Canada
Gordon Miller, Director General, Science Branch, Canadian Forest Service
FAO
Yves Dube, Forestry Officer, Planning
SUMMARY OF ACTION ITEMS AND DECISIONS:
A. General

BOA agreed on the value of awards for long-standing and dedicated working group members.
Laura Lara, Jacques Trencia, and Oscar Cedeno will research options for how to do NAFC
Commission awards and/or Working Group awards and present options at the next BOA meeting

BOA agreed to explore urban forestry, watershed and recreation issues by developing ideas for
project proposals rather than establishing “new” working groups. Further discussion on potential
projects will be discussed at the next BOA meeting.

On carbon sequestration issues, the first step will be to improve the technical paper on carbon
sequestration given at the NAFC meeting in St. Andrews. The BOA will provide Sosa with
contacts from the U.S. and Canada for further work on updating the paper.

At the next meeting, BOA will discuss reconvening task force on working groups.

BOA (esp. Mezainis) will offer recommendations of Secretariat candidates.
B. Working Groups

Chairpersons of working groups should invite FAO focal points to regular working group
meetings. BOA will consider proposals for funding their travel to working group meetings if
needed. At a minimum, focal points should be informed on all current activities of the working
group. Dube is responsible for giving Liza Paqueo contact information for focal points, so that
they may be added to the mailing list.

Laura Lara is responsible for communicating with Oscar Cedeno, Fire Management, about the
$25K CDN which has been allocated to website development.

Lara and Paqueo are also responsible for coordinating with Trencia to get an updated membership
list from the Forest Genetics group.
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
Mexico will publish latest minutes/proceedings from the Silivculture Working Group meeting.
Silviculture working group needs to integrate some specific activities in tropical forests.

Mezainis will discuss with current Insect & Disease Chair, Tom Sterner, formation of an “Invasive
Species Working Group” with sub-groups of Plants and Animals. Tom Sterner would be charged
with organizing the plant group subgroup and asking for proposals/recommendations by next
meeting.
C. Funding

Funds of $20k was requested and approved for Insects and Diseases working group for the
publication and distribution of report on Mistletoes. US will fund.
D. Working Group Information Dissemination - Website and Mailing List
a.
Action Items for Website:
i. Lara will talk to Oscar Cedeno about Fire Management’s $25K dedication to website
and what it’s purpose will be.
ii. Paqueo will put report on website and send e-mail to study group chairs for comment
iii. Each liaison is in charge of making sure assigned working groups follow consistent
format, as decided upon by BOA:
1. About Us: description on working groups- something longer than a mission
statement. Liaison officers will be responsible for contacting working
group chairs or writing this section themselves.
2. Activities: past and recent, meeting reports, upcoming activities, what’s
new?, publication and databases
3. Membership: needs to be updated
4. Photos specific to their working group activities as well as group photo of
members (see Forest Genetics page)
5. All reports will be in English but working groups are responsible for
providing all executive summaries in French, English, and Spanish.
6. All reports must be submitted electronically and not as hard copies (MS
Word, WordPerfect, HTML, Text files are preferred).
7. All Photos must be scanned in at 72dpi and saved as jpegs. Gifs are also
welcome.
iv. Paqueo will add a calendar of upcoming events and meetings to site.
v. Next meeting, BOA will decide on how to organize their site on the NAFC page.
b.
Action Items for Mailing List:
i. Send new information (reports, updates, etc) to entire mailing list as way of sharing
information and gaining more visibility for NAFC and activities.
ii. Paqueo will update membership list on NAFC website.
c.
The progress report of the FAO’s consultant, Sander Dankelman, “International Dialogue on
Forestry: FAO Statutory Bodies on the Internet,” was distributed to participants for their
information and reactions, and to continue efforts to harmonize approaches.
E. Upcoming Events and Meetings
 Silviculture and Forest Genetics: joint meeting in April 2001, Puerto Rico
 Atmospheric Change: November, 2001 in Monterrey, Mexico.
 Fire Management: October 15-19, 2001 in Cancun, Mexico.
 Insects and Diseases: September 2001 in San Francisco.
 Inventory and Monitoring: January 2001 in Victoria, Canada.
 Forest Products:
 BOA: late May or June in Canada (TBA)
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PREVIOUS MEETING: The previous meeting of BOA was held on June 11, 2000, in St. Andrew’s, New
Brunswick.
NOVEMBER 7, 2000:
a. Val Mezainis chaired the meeting of the BOA. He opened with introductions and a
review of the meeting agenda. The following topics were added to the “Open
Discussion” agenda item of handling emerging themes: reforestation (Dube), watersheds
(Miller), and nurseries. The following international activities’ updates were also
included: World Forestry Congress (Miller) as well as the recent meeting on local level
criteria and indicators in Chihuahua, Mexico (Engert and Lara).
b.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES:
i. FAO: A Management Support Service was created in September 2000,
replacing all existing departmental management support units, with a view to
providing a range of administrative support services, advice and management
information to Divisional Directors and Department Managers in the area of
finance, budget, procurement-requisitioning, personnel and travel. The
introduction of and the related-training in the Oracle Financial System is being
completed. Field Program operational responsibilities for non-emergency
projects are being further decentralized. At the end of the process, the
distribution of responsibilities between Headquarters and the decentralized
structure will be as follows:
a. Technical Units at Headquarters: Global and Interregional projects
b. Regional Offices: Regional projects and projects in countries without
FAO Representations.
c. FAO Representations at country level: country projects.
The posts of Forestry Department Program Coordinator and Senior Forestry
Officer (Plantations and Protection) were filled.
ii. MEXICO: Newly elected President, Vicente Fox, has issued a mandate to allow
more decentralization in the new government. The new government will be
instituted in December. The President has given forestry high priority, with talk
of creating a cabinet level forest commission. Resources would also be
increased; however, the role of SEMARNAP is still unsure. From November
13-15, there will be a USAID sponsored fire conference in Mexico City. 18
countries from all over the Americas will be attending.
iii. CANADA: National elections will be held in Canada at the end of November.
Gordon Miller will assume responsibility for the science program of the CFS.
An effort is underway to link policy and science and to work more with C&I.
Although administration changes may occur after the elections, there are new
objectives on the table: reduction of internal networks and bureaucracy, more
time between managers and employees, shifting projects to higher level, and
more emphasis on international activities.
iv. USA: Organizational changes will also depend on outcome of the elections.
This year, the US had what some consider the worst fire season in history. Seven
million acres burned in forest and grasslands. Dry fuels and hot dry weather
was the cause. $25 million was spent to fight the fires. The US received help
from Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel to combat the fires.
The Clinton administration proposed an increase to the fire budget by $1.1
billion. Clinton also signed into law in 2000 an agreement in which 25% of
timber sale revenues from public lands would fund local economic development.
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Calculations would be based on historical levels and no longer directly linked to
annual timber sale revenues as in the past. Both a new forest planning
regulation as well as new roadless policy will be released soon.
c.
REPORT FROM THE WORKING GROUPS
i. Silviculture (Lara)
a. Both Laura Lara and Victor Sosa attended the joint meeting of the
Silviculture and Forest Genetics working groups in Merida, Mexico, in
July.
b. Request to BOA to recognize Frank Wadsworth and Javier Chavelas,
both of who are retired, with plaques.
c. Silviculture group requests that the website be in Spanish as well as
English. (see Website notes)
d. Lara and Paqueo will contact Trencia about updates to NAFC mailing
list.
e. Jacques Trencia will contact Liza Paqueo about putting up the report on
the website.
ii. Forest Genetics (Lara)
a. Tom Ledig is the new chair of the working group.
b. Forest Genetics would like to establish cooperation with all of the
Americas.
c. In conjunction with Silviculture group, Forest Genetics is planning a
Southeast Convention, where both groups will present.
d. Joint meeting in April 2001 in Puerto Rico.
e. Victor Sosa offered to publish Silviculture report from last
meeting…may be ready for publication at the end of the year.
iii. Forest Products (Miller): There is no current report on this group; they haven’t
been very active after a fairly enthusiastic start.
iv. Atmospheric Change (Miller)
a. This group has been very active.
b. They had a meeting in October to discuss membership expansion,
building partnerships, and further work on their charter and
development of information brochure.
c. Peer review in February 2001.
d. Harry Hirvonen has agreed to stay on for another 2 years.
e. Next meeting will be in November 2001 in Monterrey, Mexico.
v. Fire Management
a. Recent meeting in September in Hawaii.
b. They have $170K CDN leftover from Vancouver conference, which
they will allocate in the following way:
i. $35K for next meeting
ii. $25K for development of Fire site on NAFC web page
iii. $90K research and collaboration with Mexico: $50K of research
money will be spent on first year program and the remainder on
second year program.
c. Long range plans is to have all three countries operating under the
incident command system.
d. Some of their main objectives for the upcoming year are to increase
skill building, to continue work on fire rating system, and to have
technical exchanges between Mexico and Canada.
e. Next meeting: October 15-19, 2001 in Cancun, Mexico.
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vi. Insects and Diseases
a. New chair: Tom Sterner
b. Recent meeting: September 20-22, 2000, in Victoria, Canada.
c. Mark Gillis and Harry Hirvonen of Atmospherics working group
attended the meeting.
d. The group will present a resolution at the next commission meeting for
implementation of detection system to monitor invasives regionally.
e. The group is also doing a pest risk assessment on Sudden Oak Death,
which has recently been seen in Northern California. Mexico and
Canada are afraid that this disease will spread.
f. Next meeting: September, 2001 in San Francisco.
g. Funding request (see funds)
vii. Inventory and Monitoring
a. The group has not met since January, 2000.
b. Next meeting in January, 2001, in Victoria, Canada.
d.
OPEN DISCUSSION: (Emerging issues related to formation of separate working
groups.)
i. Alien Species
a. There has been a lot of interest by Canada and Mexico in this subject.
b. Mezainis will explain to Tom Sterner (Insects & Diseases) about
forming the Invasive Species working group, which will be further
subdivided into sub-groups: Plants and Animals.
c. Tom Sterner is charged with organizing plant group and asking for
proposal/recommendations by next meeting.
ii. Urban Forestry
a. BOA will defer this until the next BOA meeting pending political
situation in Mexico.
b. Thought: Could develop a sister project between Los Angeles
(TreePeople), Mexico City, and Vancouver, rather than a separate
working group?
iii. Carbon Sequestration
a. Sosa suggests to have updated papers on carbon sequestration (c.q.) ;
specifically to update and complete report for c.q. from St. Andrews
across North America.
b. BOA will provide Sosa with contacts on c.q. for purpose of updating
the paper.
c. FAO: Focal point Wulf Killmann may be able to help Sosa.
iv. Watersheds
a. The definition of watersheds is too broad; it can be integrated into any
of the working groups.
b. A sister urban forestry project could jointly address this issue.
e.
v. Recreation
a. For Mexico, there is no clear responsibility for recreation in
SEMARNAP, difficult to address issue through NAFC.
b. For next meeting: BOA will explore this issue in both the broader sense
(social values as a potential indicator) and in the purely technical sense.
c.
FUNDING:
i. No Funding requests from either Mexico or Canada.
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ii. Insects and Diseases request $20K from BOA for publication of report on
mistletoe; US will handle this.
f.
REVIEW OF STUDY GROUP ACTIVITIES (Miller)
i. Automatic Translators from the Internet were tested; they are not bad tools but
not sufficient with official documents.
ii. Working groups are very interested in seeing liaison officers attend meetings.
iii. A task force needs to interview these working groups; will wait for Rosalie
McConnell at next meeting to reconvene task force.
iv. Working groups want clear signals on NAFC expectations. Dube suggests
possibly hiring an external consultant full time to take a look at the task force
mandate and do a systematic review; BOA sees no value in external consultant
but sees that task force needs to strengthen interaction with working groups and
Commission.
NOVEMBER 8, 2000:
a. WEBSITE & MAILING LIST (Paqueo and Dube)
i. The progress report of the FAO’s consultant, Sander Dankelman, “International
Dialogue on Forestry: FAO Statutory Bodies on the Internet,” was distributed to
participants for their information and reactions, and to continue efforts to
harmonize approaches.
Mr. Dankelman ‘s task will be to help us arrive at a structure that will resolve
the following needs:
1. Increased visibility of the statutory body sites on the FAO Web site
overall.
2. A common structure and design for the statutory body sites that are
improved with respect to the current one (and which facilitates
additional material to the sites and maintenance of existing material).
3. Improved value of the statutory body Web sites, both for those directly
involved with the statutory bodies, and for those who may come to the
Web site looking for information.
4. Greater linkages among the statutory bodies (for example, enabling a
user to easily see how agenda items common to all of the regional
commissions have been treated in the different regions).
5. Greater linkages between the statutory body sites and the information
on the rest of the Forestry Web site (particularly the country
information).
ii. Paqueo described new design of unofficial NAFC website located on USFS
International Programs website.
iii. Action Items for Website: Each liaison is in charge of making sure assigned
working groups follow consistent format, as decided upon by BOA:
a. About Us: description on working groups- something longer than a
mission statement. Liaison officers will be responsible for contacting
working group chairs or writing this section themselves.
b. Activities: past and recent, meeting reports, upcoming activities, what’s
new?, publication and databases
c. Membership: needs to be updated
d. Photos specific to their working group activities as well as group photo
of members (see Forest Genetics page)
e. All reports will be in English but working groups are responsible for
providing all executive summaries in French, English, and Spanish. It
is too difficult and BOA does not have enough resources to translate all
the pages in the different languages.
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f.
g.
All reports must be submitted electronically and not as hard copies (MS
Word, WordPerfect, HTML, Text files are preferred).
All Photos must be scanned in at 72dpi and saved as jpegs. Gifs are
also welcome.
v. Paqueo will add a calendar of upcoming events and meetings to site.
vi. Next meeting, BOA will decide on how to organize their site on the NAFC page.
vii. Paqueo also discussed a mailing list database she organized for NAFC members.
This list needs to be updated by the commission. Paqueo circulated hard copy
of the mailing list to BOA members, who then made as many necessary
corrections as possible.
viii. Action Items for Mailing List:
a. Send new information (reports, updates, etc) to entire mailing list as
way of sharing information and gaining more visibility for NAFC and
activities.
b. Paqueo will then update membership list on NAFC website.
b.
WORLD FORESTRY CONGRESS (Miller)
i. The Congress will meet in 2003 in Quebec City, Canada.
ii. There has been difficulty recruiting Secretary General
iii. Objectives include identification of where to put emphasis; search for
commercial partners, and work on details of the meeting in the absence of a
Secretary General.
c.
YEAR OF THE MOUNTAIN (Dube)
On 15-16 September 1999, a small informal working group met at the Banff
Center for Mountain Culture in the Canadian Rockies to explore ideas for the
further development of and action on the North American Mountain Agenda
(NAMA). After exploring some of the opportunities and challenges in the current
funding and political environment, the group laid out a draft four-year programs,
one component of which was the facilitation of the creation of Year of the
Mountain 2002 Pilot Projects in mountain communities in the three countries. A
general NAMA progress report is available on the Mountain Forum on-line library
at: (http://www.mtnforum.org/resources/library/byere99a.htm). Other contact
persons are leslie_taylor@banffcentre.ab.ca or ebyers@mountain.org .
d.
MEXICO C&I (Engert and Lara)
i. Lionel Iglesias is head of C&I project in Mexico.
ii. Chihuahua Meeting in late October to introduce test and how it relates to
Montreal Process and forest level work, to gain ownership.
iii. There was high level of interest and support on the first day.
iv. USFS Inventory and Monitoring Institute (IMI) is the US contribution to this
project. Pam Wright and Judy Loo (geneticist, Canada), Tom Hoekstra, and
Mexico were at the meeting to collaborate together.
v. SEMARNAP helped fund this project.
vi. It is necessary to have $360K MEX for commitment from the next
administration in Mexico. Need a report from Lionel to support this request.
vii. Proposal of $235K US to fund project for 2 years- $140K (first year) and $95K
(second year). Currently, there is $65K US from USFS and USAID.
viii. Mexico will donate $25K.
ix. Miller suggests Canada will pay for Pam Wright’s time.
x. Second workshop possibly in February or March.
e.
COFLAC (Lara)
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i. Sosa and Alfredo Martinez attended the Bogota meeting, where Sosa was voted
Vice President of Central American region.
ii. At the meeting, they prepared items to have a program of concrete activities.
Discussed activities will be presented to all Latin America.
iii. At the end of November, there will be a meeting in Brazil.
iv. Also discussed: more C&I efforts in southern Mexico and Central America.
f.
REGIONAL FORESTRY COMMISSION ON FAO (Dube): The idea of strengthening
the role of FAO Regional Forestry Commissions as regional fora has been discussed and
will be further discussed during COFO in March 2001, in particular when the Bureaus of
Regional Forestry Commissions will meet on Sunday, 11 March, 2001.
g.
FOLLOW-UP TO BOA MEETING IN ST. ANDREWS: Laura Lara will translate all
BOA minutes into Spanish.
h.
FOLLOW-UP TO NAFC RECOMMENDATIONS IN ST. ANDREWS
i. Silviculture working group needs to integrate some specific activities in tropical
forests.
ii. FAO focal points need to play more active role in NAFC activities; focal points
can attend BOA meeting in Rome.
iii. BOA will examine urban forestry, watershed, and recreation at the next meeting.
iv. Recommended to FAO to expand urban forestry, watershed, and recreation to a
watershed scale to include eco-tourism.
v. Mezainis recommends instituting a Secretariat: possible retiree who can
volunteer his or her time but NAFC will pay for his travel. Secretariat will
attend meeting, collect reports, work with Paqueo on website, put out a
newsletter. To be discussed at next meeting.
i.
MEETING WITH FOREST STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE
j.
NEXT BOA MEETING
i. Canada will host next meeting in May or June (TBA). BOA proposes that FAO
will host October meeting in Rome.
ii. Hawaii will be the site of the next commission meeting.
NOVEMBER 9, 2000: Field trip to Ixtlan de Juarez in Oaxaca.
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