Issue 151 – February 2010

The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity. According to the official web site, “It is a celebration of life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives. The world is invited to take action in 2010 to safeguard the variety of life on earth: biodiversity.” Biodiversity is portrayed as our “natural wealth”, on which we rely to provide us with “food, fuel, medicine and other essentials” we “simply cannot live without.”

Africa is richly endowed with mangroves, which cover over 3.2 million hectares, extending from Mauritania to Angola on the Atlantic coast and from Somalia to South Africa along the Indian Ocean.

The last remnants of forests in Bangladesh are disappearing and much of the blame goes to local peoples’ “slash and burn” agriculture. The government –supported with loans and funds from multilateral and bilateral financial institutions- is actively promoting the plantation of trees and would thus appear to be trying to revert the situation. However, the opposite is true. While indigenous peoples’ traditional shifting cultivation (jum) has historically proven to ensure the survival of the forest, government/IFI-sponsored “reforestation” is destroying the last remnants of true forests.

An article published in the newspaper “La Tercera”(1) and taken up on the Mapuche IMC blog (2) reveals the results of research carried out by scientists from Valdivia’s Austral University that link the presence of native forests with greater water production. According to this study, a major part of South American temperate forests are found within the Valdivian Rainforest Ecoregion (35–488S) in Chile and adjacent areas of Argentina, which has been classified among those with the highest conservation priority worldwide. 

The December 2004 tsunami that played havoc on several Asian coasts also exposed the level of human-made destruction of protective greenbelts including mangroves along coastlines. The need to re-establish natural protective greenbelts followed suit with quite often failed attempts.

A recent report by Greenpeace (“Why logging will not save the climate: the fallacy of GHG emissions reductions from so-called ‘Sustainable Forest Management’ (SFM) or Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) of natural forests”) evaluates greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from the various forms of industrial logging.

Plantar S.A. Reflorestamentos, a pig-iron and plantation company operating in Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais, has been trying hard to get money through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

An article published on the website EUobserver.com (1) informs that “a draft commission communication offering guidance to EU member states on the use of biofuels has classified palm oil plantations - the source of one of the most destructive forms of biofuels - as "forests."  Essentially, the document argues that because palm oil plantations are tall enough and shady enough, they count as forests.”

A research project was carried out in Laos to evaluate the economic, social and ecological impacts of large-scale land concessions to plant rubber and for making recommendations for the future management of land in Laos PDR. Two provinces were selected in the south of Laos (Champassak and Salavane), to conduct research over the course of one year from July 2007 to July 2008.

What follows is a communiqué from the Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations (RECOMA) reporting on the violent situation that local communities and Indigenous Peoples of the Lacandona forest in Chiapas are presently going through. “Appeal to international solidarity to protect the Lacandona Forest in Chiapas (Mexico), February 2010.

Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) is based on a simple idea: Making forests worth more alive than dead. But on closer examination, it is not simple at all. To forest peoples, forests already are worth more alive than dead. REDD could involve the biggest ever transfer of control over forests – to international carbon financiers and polluting companies.