Bulletin Issue 130 – May 2008

World hunger is a source of ever greater concern for those who have yet to suffer from it, and ever greater suffering for those who already do – and who are growing in numbers year after year. Yet the policies being formulated in the global power centres not only do little to solve the problem of hunger, but actually tend to even further exacerbate it. A clear example of this point is the promotion of agrofuels. Under the guise of environmental protection (through the replacement of climate change-provoking fossil fuels) and the green label of “bio” fuels, millions of hectares of land are being turned over to the production of food… for automobiles.

Agrofuels are increasingly drawing words of warning, protest and condemnation from such disparate voices as high-level United Nations representatives like FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf and Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler, statesmen like Fidel Castro, and social organizations in both the North and South (see notes 1 and 2). Nevertheless, plantations of crops raised specifically to produce fuel continue to spread. In Latin America, Brazil is undoubtedly at the forefront of this trend. Energy agreements signed with the United States and Chile last year and recently with Germany have consolidated Brazil’s position as an ethanol producer.

In the first weekend of May, a cyclone ravaged Burma. Cyclone Nagris hit the Irrawaddy delta with winds reaching 190km/h. However, most havoc was played by a sea surge that came with the storm: a wave up to 3.5m high swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages. People couldn’t flee and figures of dead people are estimated at more than 100,000. The storm was strong indeed, but the root of such an enhanced devastation can be traced back in the country’s so called “development programmes” in the industries of tourism and shrimp farming, that implied the destruction of formerly lush mangroves.

Parojnai was his name. He was from the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode indigenous people who inhabit the Chaco forest stretching from Paraguay to Bolivia and Argentina, south of the Amazon basin. Parojnai Picanerai, his wife and their children had managed to live in the Chaco forest (located in Paraguay), without contact with the outside world despite increasing encroachment onto their territories.  Though the Paraguayan law acknowledges the Ayoreo’s right to own the lands which they have traditionally inhabited, their forest is being sold to private owners and rapidly cleared by speculators and ranchers for logging and later on for cattle raising.

In Africa, agrofuel initiatives are proliferating in many countries including Zambia, where jatropha has been selected as the main crop to produce biodiesel while sugar cane, sweet sorghum and cassava are chosen for bioethanol. A research undertaken by Matongo Mundia (1) in 2007 explains that “As on the rest of the continent, much of the drive for biofuel developments in Zambia comes from talk of achieving energy security and supporting social and economic development. However, there seems to be a lack of clarity over whether investment and targets are aimed at production of biofuels for the Zambian market or for export.”

Millions of people throughout the world live in rural areas and to a greater or lesser extent depend on forest ecosystems for their livelihoods. However, forest degradation and deforestation are occurring at alarming rates, thus endangering their lives. Whether for forest-dependent indigenous peoples and rural peasant communities or for urban communities reliant on environmental services provided by forests, these play a vital role in everyday life. Unfair distribution processes, consumerism and the lack of good governance lie at the centre of unsustainable resource management causing environmental problems and the continual impoverishment of local populations.

The expansion of large-scale plantations --either crops or trees-- for the production of liquid agrofuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel is increasing in many Southern countries –with harmful impacts on people and the environment. Now, even the FAO admits the risks. A recently published FAO report looks into agrofuel production and their gendered impacts, explaining that it may increase the marginalization of women in rural areas, threatening their livelihoods.

On the first days of this month the Tasmanian people got to know of a deal that had been struck four months before between their government and the timber company Gunns. The deal, called the Sovereign Risk Agreement, provides that taxpayers should fund the company along 20 years with $15 million in case its wood supply is compromised by any reason. (1)

Biofuels – bio-diesel oil extracted from plants to replace high cost fossil fuels – have become controversial as the biofuel plantations are taking away lands mainly used, in particular for food production, by local communities. In Burma, the ruling military junta has embarked on a massive expansion of biofuel plantations through forced confiscation of lands as well as arrests, fines, and beatings of farmers.

In November 2007, several representatives from World Rainforest Movement visited Komatiland Forests' operations at Brooklands in Mpumalanga province in South Africa. Under a photograph of J. Brooke Shires, who planted the first eucalyptus and acacia trees at Brooklands in 1876, we listened to a company presentation. Komatiland is a parastatal company managing a total of about 128,000 hectares of mainly pine plantations. The trees are grown on a 28 to 30 year rotation for saw logs. Komatiland employs 2,400 people with a further 1,200 people employed on a contract basis, we were told. The Komatiland plantations at Brooklands cover an area of just over 12,000 hectares. The company uses a horse harvesting system on about one-third of its land at Brooklands.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is an international governmental process which looked pretty nice when it was born in 1992, under the UN Earth Summit that took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By then it seemed that the world’s governments had become aware of the Earth’s looming future in case biodiversity loss under deforestation, biopiracy, agribusiness expansion, and so on, remained unchanged. So a mechanism –the CBD-- was put in motion, gathering every two years in high-level summits paralleled by civil society organization’s events.