Bulletin Issue 111 - October 2006

Everyone now seems to agree that the Earth’s climate is changing as a direct result of human activities and that the social, environmental, political and economic consequences will be catastrophic if nothing is done – and fast – to address the problem. The 12th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change will be meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, from 6 to 17 November. Unfortunately, this Convention has until now shown that human greed has prevailed over human intelligence, and has been dominated by interests that care too little about the environment and people and too much about money.

Infrastructure development in the name of regional economic integration poses one of the greatest challenges to environmental sustainability and social justice today. The initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) is a striking example of this new trend. IIRSA proposes a series of large-scale, high-risk and debt-heavy mega-projects that would result in extensive alterations to landscapes and livelihoods in the region. In this development framework, mountains, forests, and wetlands are seen as barriers to economic development and rivers become the means for extracting natural resources.

On 11 September 2006 the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) (the Brazilian environmental authority) approved the Environmental Impact Assessment on the construction of two dams in Brazilian territory on the Madera River, the largest tributary to the Amazon River.

Last month I wrote an article about FSC certification of “village forestry” in Laos. The article was based on a leaked report from a World Bank and Finnish government project, the Sustainable Forestry and Rural Development Project (SUFORD). The SUFORD report documented serious problems with logging under the project, of which 39,000 hectares has been certified by SmartWood under the Forest Stewardship Council system.

Similar to what has happened in several Southern countries harassed by centuries of colonialism, the wealth of Liberia has also been its curse. Tropical forests account for 47 per cent of Liberia’s land. Between 1989 and 2003, revenue from forests was used to fund a brutal conflict fuelled by the pillaging of forests. Timber was a key resource for Liberia's armed factions. Wood flowed out; money and arms flowed in. So many concessions had been corruptly awarded that they totalled more than the land area of Liberia.

In our previous issue (WRM Bulletin Nº 110), we published a section on “plantation certification at its worse”, including the case of the Pan European Forest Certification Scheme (PEFC), a programme for the endorsement of national certification schemes. The Australian Forestry Standard (AFS), developed by the Australian logging industry and the Australian Government and Government agencies, is the Australian member of the PEFC Council. It is also a main element of the Australian Forest Certification Scheme (AFCS), started in 2000 to provide an “Australian forest certification scheme”.

I recently had the opportunity of travelling to the Indian province of West Bengal and to visit the Dhoteria, Bagora and Mayung “Forest Villages” in the districts of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong. To the outsider, the mountain area of the Outer Himalayas appears to be covered by dense forests, mostly composed of very large trees. However, local people know that these are not forests, but old and new plantations of mostly two species: the Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) and Teak (Tectona grandis).

Later this year, United Fiber Systems plans to open a new 700,000 tonnes a year wood chip mill at Alle-Alle on the island of Pulau Laut. The mill is the first step of UFS’ proposed pulp developments for Kalimantan. The wood chips will be exported to feed pulp and paper mills in China.

The International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) conference “Forest Plantations Meeting: Sustainable Forest Management with Fast Growing Plantations” 10-13 October, 2006 encountered heavy opposition by several environmental and ecological justice groups. The groups involved in the opposition acted in solidarity with those in the Global South who are suffering due to large-scale monoculture timber plantations –from Asia (including India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Vietnam) to Africa (including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana), Latin America (including Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru), and Oceania (including Aotearoa/New Zeland, Australia).

The Sustainable Forestry Initiative - launched in 1995 by the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), the most powerful timber trade association in the world - covers an area over 40,485,830 ha in the United States and Canada. It is, in essence, a certification scheme by the forestry industry for the forestry industry. AF&PA member companies, including the largest loggers in the United States and Canada and the largest wholesale distributors of global wood products, account for 82% of the funds of SFI. With its "cut a tree, plant a tree" model of forestry, SFI is making sure the logging industry sustains fiber flow but does nothing to sustain forest ecosystems and even allows convertion of forests to tree-farms.

A thorough report by Leigh Brownhill and Terisa E. Turner (“Climate Change and Nigerian Women’s Gift to Humanity”) traces Nigerian resistance to massive oil exploitation --which has not rendered any good for the country’s people (see WRM Bulletin Nº 56) -- and highlights women’s leading role in that struggle.

The volume of fossil fuels burnt by the “oil” civilization in one year contains an amount of organic matter equivalent to four centuries of plants and animals. “We must break our addiction to oil” President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address, but he wasn’t advising people to use less oil. Instead, he launched the “Advanced Energy Initiative,” that would increase the federal budget by 22 percent for research into “clean” fuel technologies, including biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel obtained from conventional agricultural crops (such as soy and maize) or other oil-seeds (particularly oil palm), sugar cane or other cereals.

The World Bank has become the main international trader of carbon credits. Its new role gives rise to a series of conflicting interests.

The 9th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change held in Milan in 2003 allowed Northern companies and governments to establish plantations in the South under the Kyoto Protocol’s “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM), allegedly to absorb carbon dioxide and to store carbon. COP-9 allowed the use of plantations of genetically engineered (GE) trees [also known as genetically modified, GM, or transgenic trees] as carbon sinks, that is to supposedly offset carbon emissions