Bulletin Issue 109 - August 2006

In the world of today, many millions of people’s level of consumption does not even cover their basic needs. In plain language, these are millions of people – mostly children – suffering from hunger and misery. On the other hand, there are also millions of people – although much fewer – who consume too much, without this meaning that their basic needs – as human beings – are thus satisfied.

PNG’s social, political and economic histories have been moulded by its tropical forests. Covering 60 per cent of the PNG land mass and largely impenetrable, the forests have limited trade, defined customary laws and delineated life and culture. When the world thinks of PNG, they see its forests. Now, the logging of these incomparable life systems is corroding PNG’s society and politics, with only trivial economic benefit, and with alarming flow-on effects in the region.

The Bari people, a minority belonging to the Arawak family known as the Children of the Forest, inhabit the Catatumbo Basin in the north of the Department of Santander. The Motilon Bari have a language known as Bari-ara and their own internal and external political and social organization. Their supreme authority is the Autonomous Council of Chiefs, comprising 23 Caciques (Chiefs) from the 23 communities of the Motilon indigenous people. Their economy is geared towards self-sufficiency and therefore the defence of their territory implies the defence of the natural assets that are at the base of their existence.

In 2000, July 26th was first chosen as a day for the mangroves based on its great significance for the movement in Latin America led by Red Manglar (Mangrove Network). July 26th commemorates that day in 1998 when a Greenpeace activist from Micronesia, Hayhow Daniel Nanoto, died of a heart attack while involved in a massive protest action led by FUNDECOL and Greenpeace International. During this action the local community of Muisne joined the NGOs in dismantling an illegally built shrimp pond in an attempt to restore this damaged zone back to its former state as a mangrove forest. Since Hayhow's death, FUNDECOL and others have commemorated this day as a day to remember and to take renewed action to Save the Mangroves!

Many cultural systems are intimately interconnected with forested environments, whether the people live within the forest or on the forest fringe (including city dwellers and researchers studying culture). Forest based cultures have evolved within the forest environment, and their survival requires that that environment be sustained.

The case of Veracel Celulose is useful – as are so many others – in revealing the falseness of business discourse on “sustainability.” Veracel is a modern company, owned in equal parts by the Swedish-Finnish Stora Enso and the Norwegian-Brazilian Aracruz Celulose. Veracel is the owner of 164.000 hectares of land, 78,000 of which have been planted with eucalyptus trees in the State of Bahia, where last year its gigantic pulp mill started operating, with an annual production of 900,000 tons of pulp for export.

The coastal village of Mehuin is located in the Northeastern zone of the Province of Valdivia, on the borders of the ninth and tenth regions of Chile. It is a small bay, fed by the river Lingue, and surrounded by the mountains of the coastal cordillera. It has a population of approximately 1,700 people, but co-inhabits with 13 communities comprising some 3,000 Mapuche-Lafkenche indigenous peoples who come down to the village to sell their products and to get supplies. Some very well defined sectors also exist in Mehuin, with their own cultural characteristics. One of these is that of the artisan fisher-folk who inhabit the sector of the village known as “la Caleta”, near the Lingue River, where most of the daily life of the village takes place.

The Ñielol hill located near the city of Temuco in Chile’s Ninth Region, is a faithful witness to the numerous lies circulating both in this region and in many others in the country as well as in other countries, regarding forests and plantations. The first lie refers to the fact that the intention is to confuse people by speaking of forests when in fact it is monoculture tree plantations that are involved. The forestry companies, the most interested parties in this confusion, use various expressions: forests, planted forests, artificial forests, production forests. However, the difference between forests and plantations is evident to any person who, after visiting the region’s monoculture pine and eucalyptus plantations, reaches the Ñielol forest.

The Finnish company Oy Metsä-Botnia Ab (Botnia’s trade name) established in 1973, is the second largest pulp producer in Europe. It has four subsidiary companies, two of which are located in Uruguay: Compañia Forestal Oriental S.A. (FOSA), that has eucalyptus plantations; and Botnia S.A. established in 2003 to implement the project to install a pulp mill producing one million tons per year.

Extensive cultivation of oil palm and the resulting oil extraction have always been linked to repression. Plantation cultivation was originally established by colonial regimes. The rapid expansion of plantations in Asia following the Second World War was encouraged in connection with forest clearing and was used as a weapon in combating Malay rebels.

The environment in West Kalimantan has changed radically over the past 25 years. Much of the forest that supported communities’ livelihoods has been cut down and the land allocated to companies that clear it to make way for oil palm plantations. Even forest traditionally set aside for future generations (hutan cadangan) is prey to “forest conversion”, since the government regards land left fallow under traditional cultivation systems as “neglected” or “critical”. Now, indigenous people have lost their livelihoods and no longer have a ready source of timber or fish, nor can grow their own rice, vegetables and other crops any longer; they must buy food. So the introduction of oil palm plantations has made local communities poorer.

Oil palm plantations are expanding in South America: Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and now Peru have joined the commercial thrust. The companies find profitable opportunities at the expense of the invaluable Amazon forest and of the lives of peasants who are displaced from their lands where they obtain their means of livelihood. In the year 2000 the Ministry of Agriculture prepared the National Oil Palm Promotion Plan 2000-2010. With a market approach, the plan seeks to promote “clusters” in the departments of San Martin and Loreto until the consolidation of 50,000 hectares is achieved in the Amazon region which – according to draft Law 9271-- “has vast and rich lands where the palm oil industry can be developed.”

The accelerated destruction of rainforest and indigenous woodland in Uganda, making way for palm oil and sugar production, follows an all too familiar pattern that has been seen in other parts of the world, especially South Asia. Widely reported (in the local media) was the government release of five thousand hectares of protected woodlands from its statutory care to BIDCO, a palm-oil producing firm that originates in South Asia, in 2001. These forests, on the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria were then removed in short order. Currently, there is a new storm brewing over a proposal to hand seven thousand hectares of virgin forest to the east of the capital to a sugar manufacturing outfit that already owns thousand of hectares of plantations nearby.