Opening words by CIFOR

Wil de Jong on behalf of CIFOR's Director General, David Kaimwoitz

Dear Mr. Ambassador, dear participants,

First I also would like to welcome you all to the third meeting of the Promotion of the Asian Forest Partnership

CIFOR is happy to once again participate in this meeting together with our other lead partners, the Governments of Japan, the government of Indonesia, and The Nature Conservancy.

We feel that this third AFP meeting is a very important meeting. At this meeting, we will be moving from the stage of discussing the three central issues of the partnership: illegal logging, forest fires, and forest rehabilitation, to presenting what each government and organization is doing about them and define a specific work plan of activities.

CIFOR has been working hard to collect materials on these three main issues and put them on the AFP website.

We believe that this is especially important because gathering and sharing information, data, and experiences, is an important component of the AFP's activities. CIFOR is fully committed to work hard to make that component a success.

On the issue of illegal logging, we feel that the AFP can make important contributions to defining legality, timber tracking, and the verification of legality. Several AFP partners are already working on these topics, and AFP' contribution can very much strengthen these efforts.

We believe it is important to continue to examine how the AFP can compliment and re-enforce the efforts of the Asian Forest Law Enforcement and Governance (FLEG) process and other Asian processes that are pursuing common objectives as ours.

We all recognize that the problems that the AFP addresses are difficult and they will their time and amount of efforts to solve. But we are encouraged by the strong sense of cooperation that we have seen in the AFP and are very proud to be part of it.

We wish you all a productive meeting. Thank you.

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