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To think about a 200-year-old Portuguese public administration service is to think about a structure created to address people’s needs in a social, economic, cultural and even administrative context that is completely different from the one that continues to exist today, 200 years later. It is reasonable to justify the existence of an interest and demand for such a service.
This reality, surprising for its relevance, suggests that the real basis for the creation of services to manage a system as complex as a forest within the territory of a country can only be the system necessary to organize society, whatever its nature and whatever the political-administrative context that exists in the country at any given moment.
This is, in fact, why for more than 200 years the State, in different forms, has ensured the functioning of administrative structures responsible for forestry policy in Portugal.
Under different names, and with a strange shift in competences and powers, Portugal’s forestry sector has assumed almost all state functions.
From asset managers and landscape planners, to those responsible for collecting taxes, to the employer welfare function that provides social support in times of famine, the forestry administrations scattered across the country embody the priority that the State places on economic and social development at every turn, always bearing in mind long-term strategic thinking – the vast majority of decisions concern afforestation, infrastructure development, the prestigious public housing stock – which today urgently needs investment – including the constitution of the Technical Police, specially trained and with the explicit objective of protecting natural resources (Forest Guards), which created the country’s first and so far only national park – Peneda-Geres National Park.
Democracy brings freedom of choice, and this freedom of choice is conditioned by the natural privileged choice of the interior countries in a poor country whose resources have been depleted by colonial wars and in the context of a serious asymmetry in development and living conditions between the coastal and inland areas, and a massive outflow of population to the inland areas.
These territories lost their most important asset – their people – and with it their ability to modernize and create conditions that meet their needs, whether better living conditions or the creation of economic value in natural activities, many of which, today, demonstrate their importance in the national economy, such as hunting or fishing in inland waters and tourism!
Fifty years of democracy and almost four decades of European integration have blurred the asymmetry of development between the coast and the interior – today we have towns and medium-sized cities in the interior that offer very good conditions in terms of quality of life – but we still need to root the concept of territorial cohesion in the minds of citizens and, above all, this reality and experience will allow us to convince more and more people to live and work there.
All these dynamics are not new to the evolution of rural areas, and therefore, it does not neglect the forests or their evolution over the years.
Today, few families plant a pine forest on the occasion of a child’s birth as a way of covering anticipated wedding expenses, just as an agroforestry landscape consisting mainly of subsistence farming, a situation associated with the rift caused by out-migration and property division, constitutes a serious problem of abandoning large tracts of territory.
If we generally agree that less can be better, then when we face a system that is seriously out of balance, as has happened for decades in the Portuguese rural world, with a significant reduction in investment and resource allocation, a vote in the forestry sector even with the scarcity of resources typical of a poor country like Portugal, leading to a frightening distance of the state from citizens and rural areas, with a concomitant loss of heritage, abandonment of activities and national values as a whole. The best example of this loss of values is undoubtedly the scourge of rural fires, which has been the main cause of biodiversity loss in Portugal.
The happy decision to merge the Forestry Department with the Parks and Protected Areas Administration – in 2012, the State Forestry Administration merged with the State Nature Conservation Agency – and from this, the ICNF (Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests) was born. All over the world, this is already a political choice that needs to be defended. Managing forests and natural spaces is an inseparable task, because nature and forest protection policies are inseparable. Forest producers – essentially farmers – are the main stakeholders in defending ecological balance and protecting biodiversity, because today no one has any doubts about the interdependence between the balance of natural systems and their ability to support sustainable production activities and lasting. .
The State has the difficult task of regulating the different interests involved and ensuring the fulfillment of the responsibilities entrusted to us to ensure that future generations have the same level of resources capable of providing a standard of living, at least of the same quality as that enjoyed by the present generation. This is what is behind the decisions that sometimes give rise to the pleasure of defending the nest of a rat, a pack of wolves or a bird of prey. Behind these decisions lies the search for a sustainable balance between the personal and legitimate interests of the initiators and the need to guarantee a sustainable future for future generations.
In a context of great difficulties facing the world, and with the particular complexity posed by the climate change that the planet is experiencing, Portugal is able, through the ICNF, to ensure that it assumes its responsibilities and contributes to the greater goals to which we are all committed.
To achieve this, we need to bear in mind the need to continue investing in modern, transparent and innovative public management and in the protection of our natural heritage, of which forests are one of the best examples!
Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Nature and Forest Conservation
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