The AFG is drawing up a set of proposals for the review of the Law on communal forests.
As part of the review process of the Law on communal forests, which the Xunta de Galicia is undertaking, the Galician Forestry Association has scheduled a series of meetings with forest communities to present its proposals. These proposals, which reflect the concerns of the Association's partner communal forests, will be put to debate and enriched with new contributions made during these meetings.
Since January this year, the Regional Ministry of Rural Affairs has begun the process of amending the Law on communal woodlands. To that end, it asked the members of the Galician Forestry Council (of which the Galician Forestry Association is a part) to submit a list of the points that each organisation considered essential to review, improve and/or remove or expand in the current law.
The AFG has compiled the most notable problems with the current wording of the law on communal woodlands, based on its 36 years of experience working with the mountain communities. These ideas are set out in a document that has already been presented to the Ministry of Rural Affairs. In next week's meetings, this document will be discussed and enriched with new contributions from the community woodlands. All of this will form the official position that the Forestry Association of Galicia will adopt.
For now, there is no text available on the new law. In fact, it has not yet been decided whether to carry out an in-depth review of the current Law on communal forests, which dates from 1989 (with successive amendments), or to draft a new law to regulate communal properties.
The meetings to be held next week are as follows:
- 16th May, CMVMC Laxe social club, O Valadouro, at 7.30 p.m.
- 18 May, at the San Xoán de Laíño Neighbourhood Association premises, Dodro, at 7.30 pm.
- 20 May, Xinzo Cultural Centre, Ponteareas, at 7.30 pm
Parallel to this, the Forestry Association reminds everyone that a public participation process is open on the Transparency Portal of the Government of Galicia, which will remain open until 24 May 2022, and in which any citizen or entity can submit proposals.
Proposals
Among the issues that need to be clarified in the review of the Law on communal forests, the Forestry Association of Galicia highlights the following points:
- Condition of a community neighbour. It is necessary to clarify which individuals can attain the status of community member, as this is a common source of dispute. On the other hand, a certain degree of flexibility is required to facilitate the functioning of communities in Galicia's interior, which is experiencing a marked population decline.
- Germanic origin. To introduce into the law the concept of the Germano-Saxon origin of community woodland.
- Legal acknowledgement. In recent years the legal capacity to act of the community woodlands has been expanded and must be recognised in law. Perhaps today it is possible to grant full legal personality to the community woodlands, given the now-lost practice of individual commoners' rights of use on the woodland.
- Classification of the mountain. The composition of the Provincial Jury for Communal Woodlands (Article 10) should be updated, introducing a greater technical component and a new method for electing, on a per-municipality basis, the representative member for the community associations, adding the function of arbitration. It would also be worth debating a simple formula to enable the “merger” of communities, especially of settlements within a parish, creating a new joint community.
- Organisation of communities. In communities with a large number of residents, it is difficult to achieve the quorum the minimum currently required, and this can hinder the adoption of agreements necessary for forest management, so it is necessary to enable mechanisms that allow for the management of the list of commoners in the face of repeated absences by a large number of them. It is proposed that qualified majorities be calculated in relation to the number of people present at the assembly, rather than in relation to the total number of commoners.
- Social uses of the mountain. It is currently very important to introduce a specific Article 3 on the ownership of the existing paths and forest tracks in the community woodland, as well as on the need to formalise contracts with hunting societies that include the community woodlands in a TECOR.
- The growing social use of forests is causing conflicts with the owners of community woodlands, with numerous cases of forest tracks and trails identified in the Cadastre and municipal inventories as public property, when they have always been communal (private) service paths to the woodland.
- Support for management and boundary demarcation. The demarcation of community woodlands should be facilitated and funded, and measures to promote advice and governance for these woodlands should be developed, as they are obliged to incur costly administrative and technical expenses due to bureaucratic requirements.
- It is also necessary to amend aspects of the precautionary management of forests in a state of severe neglect (introduced in the December 2021 Law on Fiscal and Administrative Measures), changing matters concerning indicators of neglect or the intervention of local councils.
- Acts of disposal. Acts of disposal (Articles 5, 6, 7 and 8) must be classified and updated; in particular, the duration periods and the obligations of the contracting parties should be reviewed. In general, it is observed that the duration of contracts arising from disposal acts is too short, leading to requests for extensions that often cannot be granted, which may give rise to disputes between the community of owners and the contracting entity. On the other hand, there is the contradiction that if the community woodland is incorporated into the Land Bank, it must cede its use for periods of 50 years.
