Bulletin Issue 121 - August 2007

For over a decade WRM has been gathering, producing and disseminating information and analysis on the social and environmental impacts of fast wood plantations, characterized as large-scale, fast-growth tree monocultures. At the same time, we have been stressing that such plantations should not be certified, focusing on the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), this being the scheme certifying most of such plantations.

Veracel Celulose – a joint venture between the Swedish-Finnish company Stora Enso and the Norwegian-Brazilian company Aracruz Celulose - has launched a process to obtain FSC certification for its eucalyptus plantations in the extreme south of the State of Bahia. For this purpose, it has hired the consulting firm SGS. This has led to a strong reaction on the part of over 300 Brazilian and international organizations that on 14 August sent a letter to FSC and SGS (available at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Brazil/Letter_Veracel.html) denouncing Veracel, contesting the process and demanding that certification should not be granted.

Once again, Stora Enso and Aracruz are using their economic power to mislead and wheedle. In addition to misleading and wheedling the Brazilian people, they are now misleading and wheedling Northern society with the aim of increasing the price of their products, increasing their sales and therefore, their profits! With this purpose, the Veracel pulp company presented itself voluntarily to FSC certification and resorted to SGS ICS, with headquarters in Sao Paulo, as certifying body. It set up the scenery for a theatrical event, in which the actors belong to the company and the public comprises financed partners to show that no conflicts exist. Once more, society was left out.

The book authored by Philip Gain -Stolen Forests, published in 2006- denounces the horrendous consequences of the introduction of plantations —teak, rubber, eucalyptus and acacia monocultures— on Bangladesh’s native forests. Except for the Sundarbans, monoculture plantations have rapidly expanded in recent times in all forest regions of Bangladesh. This has happened in the setting of rapid expansion of 'simple plantation forestry' around the globe. The plantation projects are implemented by the government but are financed mostly by the international financial institutions (IFIs) -Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank.

The Sixth Assembly of the Pataxo Front for Resistance and Struggle met at Monte Pascoal, Bahia, on 19 August to assess the problems they are facing as a consequence of insufficient land, impairing their sustainability and culture. The history of the Pataxo and their uprooting goes back to 1861, when together with other indigenous communities they were evicted from their lands by the government of the Province of Bahia, to gather them in a single locality. Later the Pataxo managed to occupy an area in the Mata Atlantica that stretches between the base of Monte Pascoal, the coast, the Cariaba River and the Corumbau River, known today as Barra Velha, where they took refuge and managed to remain in relative isolation.

In April 2003, in WRM Bulletin Nº 69, we wrote an article on the Democratic Republic of Congo focused on the exploitation of columbium-tantalite (coltan, for short), widely used in cellular phones, laptop computers and video games, and how the mining of this ore has devastated forests like the Ituri forest, changing forever sites which used to sustain the Mbuti livelihoods and were the habitat of several animals like gorillas, okapis --a relative of the giraffe--, elephants and monkeys. It was a sad picture that coltan left in the forests of DRC, a scenario for war and depredation.

Tourism has come to stay in Costa Rica and, with it, ransacking and depredation of the country’s prodigious ecosystems (see WRM Bulletin 84). This is denounced by Juan Figuerola, of the Costa Rican Federation for Environmental Conservation (FECON), in a press release under the heading of “The environmental devil: lord and master of Costa Rica” (“El diablo ambiental: amo y señor de Costa Rica”, available in Spanish at http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/CostaRica/Diablo_Ambiental.html).

This week, the Tasmanian Parliament will debate Gunns' proposed pulp mill at Bell Bay in Tasmania. If built, the US$1.4 billion project would need four million tonnes of logs a year. It would double Gunns current rate of clearcutting in Tasmania's native forests. The pulp mill would produce large amounts of toxins, polluting the air and Tasmania's Bass Strait. The day before the Tasmanian Parliament started its discussions, Australia's Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced a "draft decision" to approve the pulp mill.

As member of a group of international observers, invited by the Justice and Peace organization, we had the opportunity to visit an area in Colombia (Curvaradó) where ten years ago the local communities suffered from a violent eviction process and are now returning to their territories. It should be noted that “suffered a violent eviction process” does not reflect all the horror of the actions undertaken by groups of paramilitary murderers with the support of the Colombian Armed Forces. By means of murder, torture, disappearances, destruction and torching of homes and bombing, the repression achieved its objective: the eviction from the region of all the communities (in particular the Afro-Colombian and mestizo population).

Professor Ove Nilsson is the star of genetically engineered tree research in Sweden. Nilsson and his research team at the Umeå Plant Science Centre won the race to identify the gene that controls plants' flowering allowing them to produce genetically engineered trees which flower in weeks, instead of years. In 2005, the journal Science declared it one of the most important discoveries of the year. "Finding the start button for tree flowering means that we understand the underlying molecular processes. It means that we can press the start button instead of awaiting the natural course of things. In this way we can get trees to flower when we want them to," Nilsson explains in an interview with Eva Krutmeijer on the Linnaeus300 website.

A new report by German NGO Urgewald on the social and environmental impacts of the pulp industry is now available. The report “Banks, Pulp and People – A Primer on Upcoming International Pulp Projects”, produced by Chris Lang, describes the impacts of the industry, analyses the track records of the companies involved and looks at new expansions in the sector. The report is available on Urgewald's new website: www.pulpmillwatch.org , which documents the problems caused by existing operations and flags upcoming problematic projects.

Twenty-two women from provinces throughout Kalimantan and Sumatra gathered in Bogor from 22nd to 24th May to discuss the effects that oil palm plantations have had on their lives. Women and development Why women? It is obvious that Indonesian women are stakeholders who have been marginalised by the development process, including the establishment of large-scale oil palm plantations.

Large scale oil palm plantations have proved to be a very bad development for local people in PNG, and especially women for whom they have meant dramatic changes in their lives, work, safety and health (see WRM Bulletin Nº 120). The promised “development” –namely water supply, electricity, “improved” housing- offered to the communities in exchange for their land never come true. And the income results meager. According to chronicles from campaigner Andrea Babon, an oil palm grower said last year that they were initially promised around 200 Australian dollars (AU$) per ton of oil palm fruit they harvested. However, the international price of oil palm dropped and they just received AU$50 per ton.

Logging operations of Omex Industry Limited in Boloboe land on Vella La Vella island, Western Province of the country, have long been a subject of disputes and legal battles. Over the weekend of the end of July a tragedy took place. A group of local women went into the forest to demonstrate against the operation which they consider illegal. Their effort to protect their right over the land and their resources was suppressed by the security guards of the company, who –armed with knives, sticks, bow and arrows and stones- attacked and injured the defenseless group of women. Serious cuts, bone fracture and diverse wounds were the result of such attack.

Logging in Southern countries has proved that it may collect big export revenues for governments and huge profits for companies, but for local communities it has several miserable sides spreading environmental and social distress everywhere (see WRM Bulletin Nº 34). One of such sides has been highlighted in Solomon Islands, where a recent report by the Church of Melanesia’s Christian Care Centre, which undertook the study in the Arosi region of Makira province, revealed that more than 70 children from 12 villages had been sexually exploited by loggers working at nearby logging camps of the six villages studied.