Bulletin Issue 120 - July 2007

With this issue, the WRM bulletin reaches its tenth year. This anniversary provides an opportunity to give visibility to the numerous people who, in one way or another have made it possible – month by month and year after year – to issue the bulletin. It is important to start by saying that one of the most outstanding features of the bulletin is that it is produced through a wide network of people all around the world, who are willing to share the knowledge they have about local, national and international realities. It is those inputs that enable the bulletin to contain so much valuable and first hand information. Only a few of these people are, or consider themselves to be, journalists, but in fact they fulfil – and very seriously – this function.

A forum has been opened in Bolivia to discuss the issues and the vision of the Bolivian Amazon and to give back to the indigenous peoples the dignity stolen from them by the conquest of America.

The race for agrofuels has reached Benin. With heavy support from the government and forming a key part of the “agricultural revival strategy” promoted by the IMF restructuring programme, millions of hectares of agricultural and forest land are to be turned over to agrofuel production for export, with no discussion or concern for the impacts that this will have on the Beninese, their food production and their environment.

Indigenous peoples living in the tropical rainforests of Central Africa are widely dispersed and identify their groups by a variety of names. Numbering a total of 300,000 to 500,000 people, those members of communities from several ethnic groups characterized by their small stature are identified under the generic name of “pygmies” (see WRM Bulletin Nº 119). Considered to be the original inhabitants of the continent, pygmy populations have lived as hunter-gatherers in the forests of Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the Republic of Congo (ROC) since time immemorial. They have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the rainforest on which their livelihood, medicinal practices and culture depend entirely.

On 27 April 2007, following a visit to the Amazon region, the President of the Republic, Mr. Rafael Correa decreed a ban on timber extraction from this area because of the imminent disappearance of the country’s native forests. In spite of this declaration, the extraction of cedar wood in the Yasuni National Park (YNP) and in the Intangible Zone continues non-stop. The Yasuni National Park and the Intangible Zone are the territory of the Tagaeri/Taromenane Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation (IPVI). The invasion of their territories by oil and logging companies and tourists has placed these peoples in danger of extinction. To date, various measures have been set out on paper to avoid this happening, but have not been implemented.

In 2002, under the Tenth Plan, the Indian government set the national goal of having 33 percent of the country’s geographic area under “green cover” by 2012. The plan was even presented as part of India’s commitment towards the Millennium Goal on environmental sustainability. However, it is much more about industrial encroachment of forest land for tree plantations.

Since the year 2000, every July 26th has become an annual global commemorative day for the mangroves. This year's theme is entitled "On Behalf of Indigenous and Traditional Communities and Food Sovereignty." In reference to this year's campaign, the Latin American Mangrove Network, Redmanglar International states that International Mangrove Action Day “proclaims a call for the rights of the indigenous and traditional communities of the mangrove ecosystem based on the recognition of our territory where we build our culture, our identity and the base for our food sovereignty.”

In an “Open Letter to the population and Brazilian authorities”, the Commission of Tupinikim and Guarani Chiefs and Leaders state: “Today (24/07/2007) we are starting to carry out several peaceful actions with the aim of retaking possession of the 11,009 hectares of lands that belong to us and that have already been thoroughly identified by the FUNAI [the Federal Agency for Indigenous Issues] as lands traditionally occupied by us, Tupinikim and Guarani.

Chile is where the “forestry model” introduced into the countries of the South – that is to say large-scale monoculture tree plantations, mainly aimed at producing pulp for export – has been “sold” best. The 1973 military regime created a framework for the introduction of neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization and unilateral economic opening up, whereby the forestry sector was developed as one of the pillars of Chilean macro-economy. Forestry activities in Chile come second in importance to copper mining and are among the ten main products concentrating 50 percent of the total value of exports.

Between 1991 and 2001, Shell Renewables -a division of Shell Oil International- implemented a forestry operation based on the planting and harvesting of fast-growing cloned eucalyptus trees (see WRM Bulletin 46), with the aim of establishing a high-yield source of biomass for future energy generation. Later on, Shell sold its plantations. Very recently MagForestry -the forestry division of MagIndustries, a Canadian company involved in industrial and energy projects in Central-Africa (most notably the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo)- took over control of the former Shell’s 68,000 hectare eucalyptus plantation through the acquisition of all the shares of Eucalyptus Fibre Congo S.A. (EFC), the lessee of the industrial plantation.

Extensive areas of PNG’s tropical forests have been cleared to give way to export-oriented oil palm plantations, which have been established under the “Nucleus Estate Smallholder Scheme”. This means that a central company having its own plantation also contracts small farmers to supply it with oil palm fruit. The structure of the Nucleus Estate Smallholder Scheme and the nature of oil palm itself are raising serious concerns amongst civil society. Most of the social and environmental impacts of oil palm plantations have been well documented (see WRM bulletins 104, 86, 74). However, one issue that has received little attention is that oil palm plantations have differentiated gender impacts.

At the Climate Change Convention's COP13 in Bali this year the working group on reducing tropical deforestation is due to report back. It is expected from discussions conducted so far that proposals based on Costa Rica’s Payments for Environmental Services (services contributed by forests such as carbon sequestration, sustaining biodiversity and feeding the rainfall cycle) will be advocated in a new policy proposal known informally as ‘avoided deforestation’. ‘Avoided deforestation’ will be proposed under the title of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries or REDD.

While the promotion of agrofuels -wrongly called biofuels- continues increasing and resulting in the establishment of more and more plantations in Southern countries to produce them, many voices of representatives from North and South denounce their impacts and intend to influence those who are taking decisions to promote them. One of the decisions that is already causing a considerable increase in the production of agrofuels, is the one taken by the European Union which established the target that by the year 2020, 10 % of transport should be using agrofuels.