Bulletin Issue 100 - November 2005

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently published its “Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005”. The accompanying press release begins with the worrying statement, “Deforestation continues at an alarming rate”, but we are immediately reassured by the second line which states: “But net forest loss [is] slowing down”. This may perhaps be slightly cryptic to many. We might ask the obvious question: how can forest loss be slowing down when deforestation rates continue being alarming? That, of course, would miss the subtlety of the FAO experts. They did not say that forest loss was slowing down. They said NET forest loss is slowing down.

Among other direct and underlying causes of deforestation, Africa's rainforest ecosystems are threatened by logging, as are virtually all of the world's remaining large, contiguous rainforests. These biodiversity rich rainforests provide critical habitat not only to local indigenous but all of the Earth's peoples and species.

Unsustainable production for unsustainable consumption. That’s the case with crude oil, the pillar of industrialization and the so-called modern “growth” advocated by globalised free trade. It has a huge cost though, that goes on invisible, “externalized” by the macro-economists. But for local communities the cost is far from external. They suffer it in their lungs, their skins, their eyes, their wombs, their daily lives and deaths.

South African pulp and paper company Sappi is planning to increase the capacity of its Sappi Saiccor mill by more than 200,000 tons a year. Sappi Saiccor is the largest producer of chemical cellulose (dissolvable pulp) in the world. Its mill at Umkomaas, about 50 kilometres south of Durban Port currently produces about 600,000 tons of chemical cellulose a year. The chemical cellulose is used to produce things like cigarette filters, sweet wrappers, an additive to washing powder that stops dirt sticking to clothes and the stuff that makes vitamin tablets stick together. Almost all of Saiccor's cellulose is exported.

The growing trend of establishing plantations of oil palm has taken its toll primarily on tropical forests, where this palm finds enough soil, water and solar energy to fill its needs (see WRM Bulletin 47). The typical procedure is to log a certain area of forest and then establish the plantation aimed at the production of oil and kernel oil. But it also happens that plantation companies may “clear” the entire forest by setting it on fire –as has been the case with the notorious fires in Indonesia.

The existing Indonesian pulp and paper industry is currently generating a tremendous strain on forests. In that context, a new $1.2 Billion huge pulp and wood chip mill is planned to be built in the province of South Kalimantan. The project is owned by the company “United Fiber System (UFS)” which is owned, among others, by Swedish capital investors. The new pulp mill would worsen the current depletion of forests in Indonesia, and the national and local problems connected to it.

The Penan in Sarawak have been struggling for their rights to land and forests for more than twenty years, not only by setting up logging road blockades, but also by legally claiming their Native Customary Rights (NCR) in court. In spite of their ongoing resistance against logging and plantations on their native land, the Sarawak government and its concessionaries --logging and plantation companies-- continue to disrespect the Penan's rights on their land.

The Wanniyala-Aetto ("forest beings") are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka, gentle hunter-gatherers who have lived in a sustainable relationship to their tropical forest environment for the past eighteen thousand years. Having survived 2,500 years of settlement of their island, first by Sinhalese and later by Tamil migrants from India, five centuries of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisation, and two world wars, the Wanniyala-Aetto were evicted from what was left of their ancestral forests by the Government of Sri Lanka.

In a recent outburst of “environmental enthusiasm” stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked "paper parks," few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.

During the present month of November, the Guarani People of Itika Guasu, who inhabit the Province of O’Connor in the Department of Tarija, the location of the Margarita mega gas field, gathered in Assembly. The reason was to denounce before national and international public opinion the REPSOL-YPF company’s arbitrary treatment of the Guarani communities that inhabit the TCO (Original Community Territories ) Itika Guasu territory, in violation of the economic, social, cultural and environmental rights established in the State Political Constitution, ILO Convention 169 (Law 1257) and the Hydrocarbon Law (3058). The following communiqué was issued by the Assembly:

Wherever the pulp and paper industry operates, it brings with it the promise of jobs. Unfortunately, for the people living in the area that the industry takes over, these promises rarely bring work. In a recent report for World Rainforest Movement, Alacri De'Nadai, Winfridus Overbeek and Luiz Alberto Soares, record how Aracruz Celulose, the world's largest producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp, has failed to provide work for local people.

The forests of the Colombian Pacific, the Pacific Region Territory, one of the areas of greatest biodiversity in the world, have been inhabited for many years now by Afro-descendent riparian communities. Their members were the last Colombian citizens to gain recognition of their right to the ownership of the territories that they possessed and used for centuries.

The project for the installation of two pulp-mills in Uruguay on the river of the same name, has given rise to firm opposition, both in the country and among civil society in the neighbouring Argentine province of Entre Rios, across the river a few kilometres from the location where the pulp mills are to be installed by the Spanish company Ence and the Finnish company, Botnia.

Initiated by WWF in cooperation with business partners --a group of producers, buyers, retailers and financial institutions-- in 2003, the initiative called Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has hold its third meeting in Singapore this month where 8 Principles and 39 Criteria were adopted. The IUF and the Berne Declaration had called for fundamental changes to the proposed "Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Palm Oil Production" --which were finally adopted without any change--, for permitting the use of highly toxic pesticides that are extremely harmful to human health and the environment. In their current form, the criteria ensure the interests of the pesticide industry --co-sponsors of the initiative-- rather than the health of oil palm plantation workers.