Issue 165 – April 2011

This month, on April 22, Earth Day was celebrated around the world. Earth Day was founded in the 1970s by environmental activists concerned about the effects of pollution and environmental degradation on biodiversity and ultimately the survival of the planet. It is a day aimed at raising public awareness of these issues.

India continues to be one of the ‘hottest’ locations for carbon ‘offset’ projects despite the global carbon market slump: as of now, about 1700 projects claim to have achieved emission-reduction, and hence eligibility to sell carbon credits. Large Indian corporations control most of these projects irrespective of sector and geographical location, and instead of cleaning up the atmosphere the projects almost uniformly pollute people’s lives and the environment. Hydro-power projects are prominent in India’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) kitty: 176 Dam projects in various parts of India have applied for CDM status. More than half of these are in the Himalayas, perhaps the biggest ones. The tiny state of Himachal Pradesh to the North of the India alone hosts 55 projects.

In Mexico, deforestation is advancing at a rapid rate alongside various megaprojects: the expansion of industrial monoculture plantations of oil palm and jatropha for biofuel production, the building of dams, mining concessions, the creation of resettlement centres of prefabricated housing complexes strategically established in locations of resource extraction and land conversion, large-scale tourism development, and highways to facilitate these projects.

SAY NO to mining in Palawan Province, the home of the best-conserved and most ecologically diverse forest in the Philippines. Sign the on-line signature petition to deliver a strong message to the Philippine and Palawan governments demanding for an immediate stop of ongoing and pending mining activities in Palawan and for the non-endorsement of new mining applications.Here is the link to the petition launched by the Save Palawan Movement: http://www.intellithink.com.ph/wordpress/

The non-recognition of the territorial rights of indigenous and other traditional peoples has been identified as one of the major underlying causes of deforestation. In India, inequalities in land tenure stemming from deep-rooted social structures as well as from disruption brought about by colonialism have resulted in the takeover of forest land by the state. The typical process has been forest being lost to a plethora of commercial enterprises that have displaced forest communities who had defended the forests from colonialist assaults and resisted several commercial exploitations in the post colonial era.

On April 4, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an organ of the Organization of American States (OAS), officially requested that the Brazilian government immediately suspend the authorization and construction of the Belo Monte Dam Complex in the state of Pará. According to the IACHR, all of the traditional communities who live in the Xingu river basin and would be affected by the construction of the dam must be consulted through a process that is "free, prior, informed, of good faith and culturally appropriate."

For a number of years, peasant farmer communities in the province of Niassa, in northern Mozambique, have been fighting back against the expansion of monoculture pine and eucalyptus plantations. This expansion has caused serious problems because it is taking over land from machambas, small family farms used to grow food. Now the struggle waged by these communities has received a significant boost.

On the evening and early morning of 27 th and 28th February, women of the Landless Rural Workers Movement from all over the Extreme South of Bahia gathered in the area that would become the Camp Sister Dorothy Stang. Many brought their children and looked like they were going to the best party in the world. On 28 th March, round about 4am, before the sun rose on the horizon, hundreds of useless eucalyptus trees were falling on an area planted by Veracel Cellulose, the largest land owner in the state of Bahia. And that’s how they resisted for the next 10 days.

Powerful countries and corporations have targeted the African continent to become a commodity supplier for their industrial needs. This has led to intense land grabbing with industrial oil palm plantations becoming in recent years a new source of land grabbing in many African countries. However, industrial oil palm plantations are not new in some African countries. WRM electronic book “Oil Palm in Africa: past, present and future scenarios” (http://wrm.org.uy/countries/Africa/Oil_Palm_in_Africa.pdf), gives an overview of how industrial plantations have been promoted in several African countries since colonial times:

On April 20, the Finnish-Swedish giant of the forestry industry Stora Enso held their annual shareholder meeting in Helsinki where it planned to distribute part of its 2010 EUR 817.4 million profit. A press release by Friends of the Earth International, Brazilian Cepedes (Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas para o Desenvolvimento do Extremo Sul da Bahia) and MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), Friends of the Landless Finland, and WRM (World Rainforest Movement) warned that “Stora Enso's profit comes on the back of violations of environmental and labor laws and the criminal code in Latin America.”

This month a new UN round of climate change negotiations took place in Bangkok - the first session after the Cancun conference last December. Many key pending issues over which there was not agreement in Cancun had to be negotiated in the talks. In a context where alternatives have gone from bad to worse, women groups have raised their voices to strongly ask for real solutions.

“Forest in exhaustion” stems from a controversial proposal by Brazil under the UNFCCC negotiations in Poznan. The interest of Brazil to amend the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in order to include “Forests in exhaustion” is that it would allow the CDM to award credits under the Kyoto Protocol for reforestation projects on forest land that has been so over-exploited as to become “exhausted”, and without additional money from the carbon credits would not be replanted. However, it’s not about forests but tree plantations, a main economic activity in Brazil and other Southern countries.

At WRM we have been opposed to FAO’s definition of forests for many years. We believe that it actually serves as an indirect cause of deforestation. According to FAO, a forest is merely “land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ” (*), which means that industrial monoculture tree plantations fall under this definition. As a result, industrial tree plantations “disguised” as forests continue to spread throughout the world, often replacing real forests.