Bulletin Issue 126 - January 2008

The Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSSTA) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), will hold its thirteenth meeting in Rome from 18 to 22 February 2008. In the meeting’s agenda there are two items of extreme importance for WRM’s concerns: forest biodiversity and invasive alien species. Though they will be treated separately (the former by the full meeting and the latter by a working group), we believe that they are inextricably linked.

In August 2006, Phulbari, a town located in the Dinajpur district, witnessed the killing of five persons at the hands of Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) during a massive rally against the controversial open pit coal-digging project supervised by UK-based Asia Energy. More hundreds were injured among a crowd of some 50,000 people opposing a coal open-pit mine which would cover an area with more than a hundred villages of seven unions in four Upazilas —Phulbari, Birampur, Nawabganj and Parbatipur— and part of Phulbari Sadar Upazila, under Dinajpur district.

Front-page articles in mainstream newspapers and magazines have pictured Congo’s crisis along the “preconceived notion of the ‘savage,’ ‘depraved’ African”, said Maurice Carney and Carrie Crawford, from Friends of the Congo (FOTC), in their article “Casualties in the Scramble for Congo’s Resources” (at http://friendsofthecongo.org/commentaries/congo_casualties.php). In doing so, “the leading media institutions of the west are complicit in one of the most well documented resource heist of the 20th century and which persists at the dawn of the 21st century.”

India's new Tribal Forest Rights Act came into force in the beginning of 2008. It gives indigenous forest communities rights to continue their forest life. Adivasi communities should not be evicted if they do not agree to be displaced for the establishment of a "critical wildlife habitat" in their area. But still the administration of the forest areas and the corporations often try to displace Adivasi communities, even for mining activities in sanctuary areas.

In 2003, Liberia emerged from 14 years of national and regional conflict that left around 270,000 people dead and 1.5 million displaced. Presidential elections in November 2005 were won by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first ever female president. It is well documented that the conflict was in part fuelled by uncontrolled exploitation of and competition for Liberia’s resources, especially timber. This factor along with associated corruption and revenue misappropriation led to sanctions being imposed on Liberian timber exports by the UN in 2003.

Liberian NGOs hope that negotiations expected to start this spring between the European Union (EU) and Liberia for an EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) partnership agreement will support their calls for legal reform and respect local peoples’ rights to land. At the root of any EU/Liberia partnership agreement must be a definition of legality that ensures good governance and provides long-term control to Liberian communities as the natural custodians of Liberia’s forests. It is also important that Liberia’s legal and institutional framework is in line with Liberian constitutional principles and socio-cultural realities as well as international law and best practice.

At the end of 2007, the Peruvian government opened the way to the exploitation of new oil plots in the Province of Loreto, on the frontier with Ecuador: plots 67 and 121 to the US Barrett  Resources Corporation and plot 39 to the Spanish company Repsol YPF.

The young indigenous Mapuche leader, Patricia Troncoso has been on a hunger strike since 10 October 2007.  She was given a prison sentence of 10 years and a day, accused of terrorist arson at the Poluco Pidenco property. This fire took place in December 2001 and the alleged perpetrators were tried, in the presence of “faceless witnesses” (that is to say, anonymous witnesses), under the Anti-terrorist Law created during the military dictatorship. That is to say, it was a trial without even a minimum guarantee of due process of law as established in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and ratified by Chile.

Indonesia, a leading producer of palm oil, reached an output of 16 million tonnes in 2006, having tripled the area of land under oil palm plantation between 1995 and 2005. Though the Indonesian government had established a moratorium on forest conversion for estate crops --though unclear about how long the moratorium should be maintained and whether it referred to a moratorium on actual conversion of forest cover or a moratorium on changing the status of forest lands to allow planting (see WRM Bulletin Nº 124)-- the country’s policy on palm oil development seems to continue the increasing trend. There are plans to add some 10 to 11 million hectares to the six million hectares of land occupied with oil palm plantations, in response to the rising global demand for palm oil.

The United States is legendary for our ability to consume. Though we have the third largest population in the world far behind China and India, we consume more than any other nation in the world.  This is no different when it comes to paper; we leave the rest of the world behind with the average American consuming 300 kg of paper per year.  For context, the United Nations estimates that 30-40 kilos is the minimum needed to meet basic literacy and communication needs.

In last month WRM bulletin Nº 125, and linked to the 12th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007, we warned about some decisions of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Executive Board that might attract more tree plantation projects to the CDM –such as the removal of restrictions that prevent providing a perverse incentive to cut down forests to replace them with CDM sponsored monocultures, and theincrease of the size of tree planting projects that can apply to the CDM under simplified procedures and with fewer requirements to assess social and environmental impacts. The announced trend seems to be reaching Zimbabwe.

Since 2003, New Zealand's Scion has been carrying out a field trial planting of genetically engineered (GE) Radiata pine and Norway spruce trees at its research facilities in Rotorua. The GE trees contain reporter genes, herbicide resistance genes and genes which according to Scion are "thought to affect floral development". The trial is planned to last 22 years, although none of the trees will be left in the ground for more than 10 years. In January 2008, someone got into Scion's GE tree experiment site by digging under the fence. They damaged 19 trees but no one seems to know whether any parts of the GE trees were removed. The protester (or protesters) left a spade with a "GE Free New Zealand" sticker on it.

In Latin America biotechnology applied to research on varieties of transgenic trees to give them certain characteristics facilitating their large-scale monoculture plantation is being led by two countries: Brazil and Chile. In Brazil, the National Biosecurity Technical Commission (CTNBio), the body responsible for monitoring recombining DNA technology – implying gene manipulation –approved standards for planned liberation into the environment of experiments with transgenic eucalyptus trees in the country in June 2007.

The Sixth Meeting of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) took place in Penang, Malaysia from 28 November to 3 December 2007. The 25th Anniversary of the foundation of this Network was celebrated in the same city that saw it come into being: Penang. PAN is a network involving over 600 non-governmental organizations, institutions and individuals, who work in over 90 countries to replace the use of dangerous pesticides by ecologically and socially just alternatives. Although when it started out, PAN was centred on the struggle against the use of agrotoxics, technological changes brought on a new problem – transgenic crops – an issue that was incorporated into PAN’s working agenda some time ago.

The main threat to the world's forests is not that they will all be cut in the coming decades. There is an even larger threat; that the last tracks of rich, beautiful, vibrant biologically diverse primary forests that still exist on this planet will all be replaced by ugly, biodiversity-poor and empty rows of monoculture tree plantations. This is one of the main conclusions that could be drawn from the information in the latest State of the World's Forest report that was published by the FAO in 2007; that the trend to replace biologically diverse forests with tree monocultures is continuing, and it is even accelerating. Every day, thousands of hectares of biologically diverse forests, are being replaced by monocultures of Oilpalm, Eucalypt, Pine, and even genetically modified trees.

In March 2006, in Curitiba, Brazil, the parties to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) discussed the issue of genetically modified (GM) trees. Some delegates demanded a moratorium on GM trees. Others requested that the CBD produce a report looking at the "potential environmental, cultural, and socio-economic impacts of genetically modified trees". The CBD produced its report in early December 2007. The report will be discussed during the 13th meeting of the CBD's Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), in February 2008 in Rome.

Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Parties, intergovernmental agencies, conservation NGOs, indigenous peoples and local communities, and civil society organisations will meet in Rome on 11-15 February 2008 to assess implementation of the CBD Programme of Work on Protected Areas (PoWPA) for the period 2004-2007.