Replanting the World's Tropical Forests 

A review of a symposium entitled "The Art and Practice of Conservation Planting", organized by the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute in September 2001 in Taipei. The symposium was meant to focus on conservation aspects of reforestation but, disappointingly, most of the papers presented hardly touched upon the subject, apart from two, provided by FORRU-CMU staff and students (Vongkamjan, et al., 2001; Elliott et al, 2001).

"Conservation was hardly mentioned at all, whilst actual planting of trees was barely touched upon ... when tree planting was brought up, commercial tree species and exotics were the only species mentioned. Biodiversity was largely ignored and I left the symposium wondering why the word "conservation" had been included in the title at all."