Bulletin Issue 118 – May 2007

Everyone seems to agree on the need to protect the world’s remaining forests … while forests continue to disappear at the same alarming rate as usual. It is therefore important to distinguish between those who are truly committed to forest protection and those whose deeds and words go in opposite directions. For this purpose, most of the articles included in this issue of the WRM bulletin serve as good examples.

Forest conservation is back on the international climate agenda…big time! More and more Northern and Southern governments, bilateral development agencies, multilateral development banks and big conservation NGOs are arguing that “countries” should be compensated for protecting the “carbon reservoirs” in standing forests. Under some plans, Southern governments’ forest protection plans would generate pollution rights that the governments could then sell to Northern industries to allow them to continue business as usual.

The Association of Ecologist Communities La Ceiba – Friends of the Earth Costa Rica (Asociación Comunidades Ecologistas La Ceiba- Amigos de la Tierra Costa Rica - COECOCEIBA- AT), which includes members from various social sectors (academics, professionals, ecologists and peasants), considers that it is time to creatively develop new models of forest cover restoration. It is time to give the opportunity to autochthonous reforestation models based on some of the basic principles that the country’s main natural ecosystem itself -the tropical forest- is silently teaching us. It is time to give an opportunity to the creativity and experience already existing in the communities and to try out models that are sounder in environmental terms and more participative and fair in social terms.

In the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo lies the large, dense, mountainous Ituri rainforest, which spans approximately 70,000 square kilometers. It is an area rich in natural resources. Tropical timber is harvested (legally and illegally) on a large scale. Minerals such as gold and coltan (used in mobile phones) are exploited intensively after the trees have been cut down.

After 12 years, powerful multinational mining companies have been unable to bend peasant resolve in the zone of Intag, Canton Cotacachi, Imbabara Province in the northwest of Ecuador. This nightmare began in 1991, when an anonymous Japanese man started to travel around the area in his vehicle. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing. Towards 1995, it became known that he was “prospecting for mines” that is to say, he was looking for minerals in the subsoil.

Late last year, Norconsult, a Norwegian consulting firm, won a US$1.5 million contract to supervise construction work of the Xeset 2 dam in the south of Laos. Norconsult won the contract, which is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), without any competitive bidding. Norconsult has plenty of experience of working on the Xeset River, having worked on the planning and construction of the 45 MW Xeset 1 dam, which was completed in 1991, with funding from Sweden, Norway, the Asian Development Bank and UNDP. During the dry season, the Xeset 1 dam produces virtually no electricity, because of the low water flow in the Xeset River.

Uganda has witnessed growing protests in recent weeks over government plans to give over 7,100 hectares of Mabira Forest, a nature reserve since 1932, to SCOUL for sugarcane growing. Razing the forest could devastate a fragile environment, sparking soil erosion, drying up the climate and removing a buffer against pollution for Lake Victoria. Technical, professional and expert advice against the project as well as public protests culminated in the resignation of the Board and senior technical staff of the National Forestry Authority (NFA). The new Board, appointed in December, 2006, is in the process of approving more forest give-aways for commercial purposes such as Kitubulu in Entebbe, Buyaga (Lyantonde), Mpanga (Fort Portal), Nebbi, Arua, Ntungamo, Kitgum and Bobi, among others.

The struggle between two agricultural projects has stepped up in Brazil. On the one hand, the agro-business project based on the concentration of vast stretches of land, on production for export, on large-scale production and on monoculture plantations, mainly of soybean, eucalyptus, and sugar cane. On the other, various Via Campesina social movements in Brazil defending Agrarian Reform, and supporting an agricultural model based on agro-ecology, production to strengthen the domestic market, family and peasant farming, diversified production, cooperation and a change in the technological and productive matrix. click images to enlarge

At the end of April this year, the Brazilian Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) was host at its Florestan Fernandes National School (Guararema, Sao Paulo) to almost 80 members of social movements and organizations from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe attending the International Meeting on Monoculture Eucalyptus Plantations. The aim of this meeting was to define an agenda for joint action against the advance of monoculture tree plantations and pulp mills at global Southern level. The meeting was the result of a strategic decision by the network of Via Campesina International movements to identify the monoculture model as one of the main threats to food sovereignty on a local, regional, and world level.

The Thai government has set its policy on producing palm oil-based biodiesel as energy. At present, the country’s large-scale oil palm harvest areas account to around 400,000 hectares, but since 2006, a discourse on oil palm has emerged to promote its plantation as a “renewable source of energy”, a “country savior”, a “reforestation scheme”, a “wind-protection zone”, and a “transformation of deserted rice fields into palm fields”. To fulfill the government’s ambition, a daily production of 8.5 million litres of biodiesel must be met. That means another 800,000 hectares of oil palm plantation areas must be expanded between 2006 and 2009, totaling 1.2 million hectares of the palm cultivation. By 2029, the plantation areas would reach 1.6 million hectares.

The promotion of large-scale fast-growing monoculture tree plantations started in Uruguay in 1987, with forestry law Nº 15939 of December 1987. Today these plantations occupy over one million hectares of land and not only lands in the “forestry priority” category.

The US South Carolina-based company ArborGen is a partnership between the timber corporations International Paper and Mead Westvaco, and the New Zealand-based Genesis Research and Development. ArborGen has been growing GE Eucalyptus hybrid trees and testing them for cold tolerance on a secret 1-acre plot in Baldwin County, Alabama, close to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The place was found to be home to a number of experimental, genetically modified crops, many of which appear to be growing on a Loxley farm owned by agricultural giant Monsanto Co.

WRM has created a new video section in its website. You can find it in the page’s left column or going directly to http://www.wrm.org.uy/Videos/index.html. Impacts of large scale monoculture tree plantations that we have been documenting for years are described by local people: from the forest destruction caused by oil palm plantations in Indonesia, to the local struggles of Via Campesina women in Brazil against Aracruz Celulose’s pulpwood plantations and of Ecuadorian people against the eucalyptus plantations of Eucapacific, the ecological disaster in Chile resulting from Celco-Arauco pulp mill, the growing problem of timber plantations in South Africa, the potential risks of the projected Finnish Botnia pulp mill in Uruguay.

On April 26, the Swedish Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry organized in Stockholm the seminar “Tilting forest industries from North to South”, aimed at discussing the growing tendency of the Swedish tree plantations and pulp industry to invest in Southern Countries such as Brazil, Uruguay and Indonesia. Unfortunately, the organizers declined to open up a space in the panel for representatives of southern countries present at the time in Sweden. Such representatives included experts on the social and environmental impacts of plantations and pulp mills from Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Swaziland and Uruguay, as well as a number of Swedish students just returned from a field study on Veracel and Aracruz’s plantations in Brazil.

Botnia is currently building the world's most controversial pulp mill at Fray Bentos in Uruguay. It is doing so with hundreds of millions of tax payers' dollars funnelled through the World Bank, the Finnish export credit agency and the Nordic Investment Bank. The profits produced, along with the pulp, will be exported.

The hegemony of the G8 in international forums such as the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change means that global climate policy is been chosen for its compatibility with the existing economic system rather than its effectiveness in reducing emissions.