Laos

On 7th November 2000 the formal opening of a US$2.9 million laminated-wood processing factory took place at Nabong Farm, 30 kilometres from Vientiane, the capital of Lao PDR. The factory will initially sell timber pallets to IKEA, the Swedish retailing giant, and in future will produce furniture under the trademark Vicwood. Financing came from a series of loans --US$550,000 from IKEA, US$800,000 from the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, and US$300,000 from Swedfund, the Swedish IFC counterpart.

The Lao People's Democratic Republic -the only landlocked country in Southeastern Asia- occupies an area of 236,800 square kilometres with a still large coverage of forests. These forests hold high levels of biodiversity, and provide the livelihoods for much of the 80% of the population that lives in the countryside.

Hydropower megaprojects in several Southeast Asian countries are frequently preceded by devastating logging operations in prospective inundation zones. This kind of practices cause an extensive negative environmental impact and damage indigenous communities, that are forced to abandon their lands and are resettled somewhere else. In Laos current and pending dam projects are being used as cover to evict village people from intended reservoir areas and from upland watersheds (see WRM Bulletin 8).

To the oil and mining companies, repressive governments and banks we list among the world's exploiters, we must add another sector -conservationists. Unaccountable, opaque and pursuing a model of protection that is both repressive and outmoded, some of the world's biggest conservation organisations are becoming indistinguishable from other neo-colonial corsairs. Unwilling to contemplate the wider consequences of their actions, they have ensured that conservation is now one of the greatest threats to the global environment.