By Devendra Kamarajan<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NAIROBI | KINSHASA (IDN) \u2014 Ahead of international donors announcing a 1 USD billion forest protection agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo, NGOs are urging that such funding for the Central African country should be conditional on a moratorium on any logging concessions, reports Greenpeace. The ban has stood since 2002 but the DRC government is apparently planning to lift the moratorium<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a letter<\/a> to the donor countries, more than 40 international and Congolese NGOs are warning that lifting the ban would put at risk an area of rainforest the size of France, resulting in land grabs, social conflict and the exacerbation of the climate and biodiversity crises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are standing on the precipice of an historic failure to protect one of the world\u2019s great rainforests\u2014and possibly the last still serving as a carbon sink. Any\u2014rather than a scaling back of industrial logging\u2014will inevitably result in an unstoppable \u2018cascade of deforestation\u2019, threatening millions of hectares of forest and the communities that depend on it.\u201d alerted Joe Eisen, Executive Director of Rainforest Foundation UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The appeal by to dozens of environmental and human rights organisations to donor governments comes with less than six weeks to go before crucial international climate negotiations in Glasgow. The organisations including Rainforest Foundation UK, Greenpeace Africa, and the national Indigenous Peoples network, DGPA, are appealing to donor governments to intervene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n