Bulletin Issue 106 - May 2006

The experts at the service of transnational corporations have proved to have an unlimited inventive capacity to better serve those who are paying them. Among their most recent achievements is having managed to put up for sale nature itself under the guise of so-called “environmental services.” Expressions such as “oxygen sale” and “sale of carbon sinks” are now common currency, in particular in the countries of the South. Hundreds of government officials, consultants, certifiers, national and international conservation NGOs, United Nations organizations, cooperation agencies, private and multilateral banks, stock brokers and businesspeople – among others – eagerly await their slice of the pie, estimated at billions of dollars.

The vast rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo --the second largest on Earth after the Amazon-- have been seen by the World Bank as a target area. In 2002, the Bank provided funding for the government of DRC to develop a new set of laws for the management of DRC's forests. In September 2003, the Board of the Bank also approved a pilot project to 'zone' Congo's forests into areas for industrial logging, conservation, and community use. The project entitled 'Emergency Economic and Social Reunification and Support Project' (EESRSP), included $4 million to start the process of 'zoning' DRC's forests, potentially opening up tens of millions of hectares for industrial logging.

The political instabilities in Nigeria during Abacha's regime in 1993/94, which was an aftermath of the annulment of June 12, 1992 presidential election won by the late business mogul -Chief M.K.O. Abiola- created an acute scarcity of kerosene that was seriously felt in different parts of the country. The kerosene scarcity led to the invention of “Abacha Coal-Pot” – a locally made cooking stove that uses charcoal.

Eucalyptus were first introduced into China in about 1890 and were originally planted as ornamentals and roadside shade trees. The primary high tide of Eucalyptus plantations mainly for timber production in China came after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. It was not until the 1950s that extensive areas of plantations were established by state forest farms for the purposes of supplying mining timbers (pitwood), poles for construction and fuel wood. Government-sponsored planting programs during the 1970s and 1980s increased the plantation estate to about 600,000 ha. In 1954, a large area of eucalyptus plantations was set up in Leizhou Peninsula, Guangdong Province.

Since India gained political independence in 1947, Protected Areas and development projects like large dams, mines, industries, roads and army cantonments displaced millions of people in the country. Planning Commission estimates suggest that 21.3 million people were displaced by development projects between 1951 and 1990 alone. Estimates of people evicted by Forest Department—to create new Protected Areas and to clear ‘forest encroachments'—are not available. According to various movement groups working among Indian forest communities, about 300,000 families were evicted in last five years! There was no rehabilitation, and people of all ages were driven away from their homes, forests and agricultural land, to make way for plantations and wildlife areas.

In 2004, the Minister of Forestry, through Decree No. 101/Menhut-II/2004, issued a policy on accelerating pulpwood development to supply the pulp and paper industry. The policy received broad acceptance in the province of Jambi by PT Wira Karya Sakti (PT WKS), a forestry company subsdiary of the giant Sinar Mas Group (SMG).

"We want to hold accountable those companies that built or profited from the dam - the Korean company that built it or the Belgian company that owns the dam now. There should be letters sent saying, 'You are making money from this, why don't you take some responsibility and help all those people impacted by this project - allow them to move back?' We need to have enough land for us to be able to farm, which means moving to areas we consider our old territory, and we need to be given the right to live there with self respect and independence."

Bertolt Brecht wrote from exile: "Truly, I live in dark times./ The word ingénue is senseless. An unlined forehead / reveals insensitivity. He who laughs / has not yet heard the terrible news / it has not yet reached him. What times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence on so many wrongs?”

In 2003, Brazil's Aracruz Cellulose paid Klabin US$610 million to buy its Riocell pulp operations in Rio Grande do Sul. Along with a 400,000 tonnes a year pulp mill and 40,000 hectares of eucalyptus plantations came a certificate from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), saying that the plantations were well managed.

The commune of Lumaco, with its 11.405 inhabitants, is located in the Ninth Region of Chile. From the standpoint of the ancient Mapuche territoriality and the present Mapuche claim to territorial identities in this Region, Lumaco corresponds to the political centre of the Mapuche-Nalche (also known as “nagche” and “nag-che”) territory.

The Motilon Bari Indigenous Peoples have been settled for thousands of years in the basin of the Catatumbo River, in the Department of Northern Santander (Colombia). It is a forest zone, covering an area of approximately 126,600 ha and shares its frontier with Venezuela. Its humid forests, that act as a natural filter for Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), have considerable potential regarding biodiversity, wood and minerals, hydrocarbons and water resources.

On 13 May, over 400 young people of both sexes participated in an action against the plantations of the Japanese EUCAPACIFIC Company in the area of Tortuga, located in the Muisne Canton, province of Esmeraldas (see power point presentation of the action at http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Ecuador/Muisne_sin_eucaliptos.pps) This action – publicly announced the previous day in Muisne – is framed in the increasing opposition to the company's large-scale monoculture eucalyptus plantations that have deeply affected the region, depleting the water, flora and fauna that had previously been plentiful and used by the local population and evicting the inhabitants from the area.

To the south of the Yasuni National Park (see WRM Bulletin No. 96), an unequal battle is being fought. Spears against shotguns. The Yasuni National Park covers an area of 982,000 hectares. It is located in Huaorani territory and is part of the Intangible Zone where peoples of the Tagaeri and Taromenane ethnic groups live in voluntary isolation. Although extractive activities such as oil exploitation and logging are prohibited in the Intangible Zone, in fact an intensive and violent forestry exploitation has been taking place in full view and with the complicity of the police, environmental officers and the military. Trucks loaded with timber travel across river-ways and overland with impunity and even cross the military camp.

In South Africa, more than 1.5 million hectares of managed alien, monoculture tree plantations have been established, and currently more than 130 square km of new plantations are being established annually. Another 1.65 million hectares of alien invader plants exist, mostly eucalyptus, pine and wattle trees. South Africa's rural people have felt dramatically the impacts of the plantation industry, ranging from evictions of communities to make way for plantations, to unemployment and less available water resources, less available soils and less free access to local plant and animal resources which provide food, medicine, fodder, fuel, building materials and many other goods.

This August the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will finally catch up to the rest of the pack by putting into effect its first Operational Policy on Indigenous Peoples (OP-765). Joining the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and numerous private banks, the IDB finally takes its place among the other international financial institutions that have adopted policies over the last decade and a half which recognize the undeniable link between indigenous peoples' rights, sustainable development and poverty reduction. Indigenous peoples and their advocates are now asking themselves if the resulting policy was worth the wait.

In the last decade, financial institutions and investment banks have handed out more than US$40 billion for new pulp projects in the South. Analysts expect another US$54 billion to be invested in pulp mills in the South by 2015 much of it in Brazil, Uruguay, China, the Mekong Region and the Baltic States.