Bulletin Issue 129 - April 2008

Once upon a time … the governments of the world got together and agreed that the Earth was facing severe environmental problems and that something needed to be done about it. The historic event was named the Earth Summit and it took place in 1992 in the tropical scenario of Rio de Janeiro. Everyone was feeling very enthusiastic because governments had committed themselves to a new type of development -which they defined as “sustainable”- which would prevent the negative environmental impacts of the until then prevailing development model. People became even more hopeful about the future when they were told that from then on governments would ensure that all types of production would be socially equitable and environmentally friendly.

Today the world – the people’s world – is helplessly witnessing a global crisis due to a steep rise in the price of foodstuffs which, as all disasters, affects the more vulnerable sectors, the more dependent economies, the more impoverished countries, more seriously.

The Constituent Assembly formed to discuss and draft a new Ecuadorian Constitution resolved on 14 March 2008 to grant an amnesty to 357 human rights activists who had been “criminalized for their protest and resistance actions in defence of their communities and the environment,” according to an official press release. Most of the 357 are community and peasant leaders, some of them indigenous, from communities throughout the country. The criminal charges against them stemmed from their involvement in grassroots opposition to mining, oil, hydroelectric and logging projects, as a means of protecting water supplies and the environment and defending their communal lands and collective rights. Their crime: defending life, human rights, and nature.

Agriculture in Northern Ghana accounts for more than 90% of household incomes and employs more that 70% of the population in the region. Most of the agricultural production is by small-holders at subsistence level, reliant on seasonal rainfall which is unpredictable and sporadic. During the dry season much of the population is idle, forcing people to migrate to the more prosperous southern parts of the country where they are employed in menial jobs.

A recent study published by WWF (1) analyzes deforestation and forest degradation in Riau Province between 1982 and 2007 and identifies their main drivers: pulpwood and oil palm industrial plantations. The study shows that the fastest rate of deforestation in Indonesia is occurring in central Sumatra's Riau province, which used to have 78% of its land covered by forest. In the past 25 years, some 4.2m hectares (65%) of its tropical forests and peat swamps have been cleared for industrial plantations. About 30% of Riau’s forest has been cleared to establish oil palm plantations. The recent rise of palm oil demand to feed the increasing global market of agrofuels is fuelling much of the forest clearance.

Alan Garcia’s government is promoting a bill (draft law 840) also known as the “Forest Law.” It is a law concerning the promotion of private investment in reforestation and agro-forestry, whereby land with no forest cover in the Peruvian Amazon – erroneously classed as deforested wastelands, meaning there are no acquired rights over them – could be allocated, not as concessions, but as private property. This would open the door to major capital to establish large-scale tree plantations, under the guise of “reforestation.”

The world is undergoing an acute food crisis with soaring prices for basic food and desperate food-related riots that threaten political stability in many Third World countries. By the end of March, prices of rice and wheat were about double their levels a year earlier, and maize prices were over a third higher. According to FAO, the import bill for cereals for the world’s poorest countries will rise by 56% in 2007/08, after a 37% increase in 2006/07.

In Brazil there are two conflicting models: that of the large monoculture plantations (ranging from eucalyptus, soy-beans and rice to sugar-cane), on lands held by a few large companies; and that of the peasant, indigenous and landless communities that build collective and diverse productive spaces and demand the historically promised agrarian reform.

The municipality of Puerto Wilches, located in the Central Zone defined by the Agricultural Plan for the Implementation of the Biodiesel Programme, is home to much of the agricultural activity in the department (province) of Santander. According to the Agricultural Plan, there are roughly 21,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the municipality, representing 91.7% of the department’s palm oil output.

The Palmeras del Ecuador Company was established in the Ecuadorian Amazon, in the Province of Sucumbios, Shushufindi Canton, at the end of the seventies. The former Institute for Agrarian Reform and Settlement (Instituto de Reforma Agraria y Colonización - IERAC) granted a concession to the company of 10,000 hectares of land, considered to be “waste land,” deliberately ignoring that these were ancestral lands of the Indigenous Siona and Secoya peoples and nationalities. This led to their almost complete extermination because of the occupation of their lands.

Pesticides negatively impact the health and lives of millions of agricultural pesticide users, their communities and consumers worldwide –they also cause great damage to biodiversity and the environment. The pesticides used in oil palm plantations have adverse impacts on human health and the environment. Agricultural workers in oil palm plantations are heavily exposed to pesticides and suffer a range of dangerous acute and chronic health effects, though many remain tragically ignorant of the causes.

Carbon trading and offsets distract attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Promoting more effective and empowering approaches to climate change involves moving away from the blinkered reductionism of free-market dogma, the false-economy of supposed quick fixes, the short-term self interest of big business. The concept that underpins the whole system of carbon trading and offsetting is that a ton of carbon here is exactly the same as a ton of carbon there. That is, if it’s cheaper to reduce emissions in India than it is in the UK, then you can achieve the same climate benefit in a more cost-effective manner by making the reduction in India.