Bulletin Issue 29 – December 1999

What happened in Seattle was historical. Regardless of whether the ministerial conference's failure to reach an agreement was the result of the action of the thousands of people in the streets or the result of the internal contradictions of governments -or a combination of both- the fact is that history was made in the streets and not in the "green rooms."

Between 70 and 80% of Nigeria's original forests have disappeared and nowadays the area of its territory occupied by forests is reduced to 12%, even if the entire country is located in the humid tropics. All of the country's remaining primary rainforest watersheds, covering about 7,000 km2, are located in Cross River state. This region also contains 1,000 km2 of mangrove and swamp forest, being oil exploitation an important cause of their degradation and destruction (see WRM Bulletin 22).

What is a woodlot? Is it a patch of land planted to trees for the purpose of supplying the fuel and timber needs of a rural community? Or is it a small portion of a giant industrial plantation, meeting the pulp and paper needs of first world industrial society? An exact answer to these questions would help to erase the uncertainty that exists in my mind. However, clear answers have not been forthcoming, and over the past twenty years, whilst living in Zululand, I have come to these conclusions.

Tanzania's forests are quickly disappearing and illegal commercial logging is the main cause of the problem. Not only does the government seem unable to address the present state of things, but forestry officials themselves have been accused of being directly involved in the illegal timber trade. Other suspects in the illegal timber business are timber product dealers, private individuals, sawmillers and logging companies (see WRM Bulletin 27).

By different means the World Bank is one of the major and most influential promoters of the prevailing monoculture tree plantation model. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) -a part of the World Bank Group, whose specific task is the promotion of private sector investment in "poor" countries- has been directly investing in projects linked to tree plantations, for example in Kenya and Brazil. The IFC has recently signed two agreements to fund two of these initiatives in West Africa. One of them consists of the reopening of a rubber company in Liberia that was shut down during the civil war, while the other is the set up of an oil palm plantation in Côte d'Ivoire.

Intentional fires, tree monoculture plantations and mining are direct causes of deforestation in Indonesia. Additionally, indigenous peoples traditional rights over their territories are ignored. As a result, the country's once vast and luxurious forests are vanishing and, according to two recent independent studies, deforestation rate is faster than what the authorities are used to admitting. A World Bank research, based on map studies, and issued last July estimates an annual forest loss of 1.5 million hectares during the last two decades. The results obtained by a research performed by the UK government-funded Regional Physical Planning Programme for Transmigration reveal similar figures to the previous one.

Several NGOs -among them the Borneo Resources Institute (BRIMAS), Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth), SACCESS, Keruan Association Sarawak, Centre for Orang Asli Concerned (COAC) and EPSM/CETDEM- took part at the first consultative meeting of the Malaysian National Timber Certification Council (NTCC) which took place from 18-21 October, 1999, in Kuala Lumpur. Even if the majority of the participants were representatives of timber companies and associations and Forest Department officials, the representatives of civil society were able to express their viewpoints on the issue.

  For years the Bakun Dam Project has aroused great concern among environmental and social NGOs and indigenous peoples' organizations in Sarawak and worldwide, which have opposed this megaproject since it is detrimental to Sarawak's remaining primary forests that lie in the catchment area and to the indigenous people that inhabit them (see WRM Bulletins 2, 9 and 24).

Only 3% of the dense rainforests that once existed in The Philippines is still standing and less than 1% of the former forest is still in a pristine state (see WRM Bulletin 27). The Province of Aurora, which comprises a strip of land between the Sierra Madre mountains and the Pacific Ocean, is an exception, because unlike most of the country, it still maintains over 50% of its original forest cover, even some as primary forests. Along the coastline there are 430 hectares of mangroves. The area is also home of the Dumagat and the Igorot indigenous peoples and shelters some endangered species.

Forests are trees. Forests are biodiversity. Forests are wildlife. Forests are lands. Moreover, forests are politics. Development is clearing of forests. Conservation means more and more consultancies. Protection means a wider and wider gap between the forest and the communities. Regarding the forest issue, the context in Sri Lanka is not much different from this reality.

In the Region Huetar Norte of Costa Rica, the forest area has been reduced to the lowlands of the San Juan River on the border with Nicaragua. What used to be a vast tropical forest that occupied more than 200,000 hectares has been reduced to a mere 30,000 hectares of fragmented forests, most of which severely logged. Unlike what happens in other regions of the country, in Huetar Norte there are no protected areas, all the remaining forests are categorized as wood production forests, and the region's biodiversity is in the hands of forestry management plans. A preliminary study of biodiversity in that area, performed by COECOCEIBA (Friends of the Earth - Costa Rica), identified 141 tree species per hectare, including only those individuals having diameters over 10 centimetres.

Bolivian social organizations, trade unions, IPOs and environmental NGOs have strongly condemned and taken actions to face a recent governmental decree, which in fact guarantees the activities of illegal logging performed by depredatory companies to the detriment of the country's forests and their people.

Nearly fifty years after their traditional lands were taken over and much of their population decimated by military forces, the Pataxó indigenous people decided to recover them and took over Monte Pascoal National Park last August (see WRM Bulletin 28).

As everybody knows, Brazil is one of the richests countries in the world regarding forests. Additionally to the Amazon, whose major area is located in the Brazilian territory, there are in Brazil other valuable forest ecosystems, such as the mata atlantica and the cerrado, or ecosystems with an important presence of trees, as the pantanal and the caatinga. In spite of that, as everybody also knows, forest biodiversity in that country is seriously menaced by a seemingly uncontrollable process of plundering and destruction.

In a new chapter of their seemingly endless struggle to defend their land rights, a group of two hundred U'wa indigenous people -including women, children and tribal elders- established on November 14 a permanent settlement at the site of Occidental Petroleum's planned oil well Gibraltar 1. Their aim is to block the drilling planned to begin operating in the near future, thus avoiding that their Mother Earth be profaned. Hundreds of more U'wa and other supporters are expected to continue arriving to the settlement in upcoming days to reinforce this action. Tribal leaders consider that this permanent settlement is a necessary action to block the drilling after legal battles and direct appeals to the company and the government have failed to date.

The Urra hydroelectric dam megaproject on the Sinu River, at the Cordoba Department in the Atlantic region of Colombia has provoked concern and resistance since its very start in 1977. The Embera Katio indigenous people, ancestral dwellers of the affected area, who live on fishing and hunting, and whose livelihoods and existence are severely menaced by this project are fighting an unequal battle against both the company Urra and the Colombian government which openly supports it. More than 7,000 hectares of forests will be flooded by the dam reservoir of the projected dam, whose total cost will reach the sum of U$S 800 million.

The "success" of the Chilean forestry model -based on pine and eucalyptus monocultures- was based on a combination of the appropriation of the Mapuche indigenous people's lands and ruthless repression. Now, when the old dictator is under arrest in England, his shadow is still present in the democratically-elected government, which seems unable -or unwilling- to repair the injustices committed during the dictatorship years.

Mache-Chindul rainforests and mangroves, located in the Province of Esmeraldas in the Ecuadorian Pacific region hold high levels of biodiversity. Additionally, this province is a multicultural complex formed by different ethnic groups -indigenous, black and "mestizos", as the Chachi, the Emperas, the Awa, Afro-Esmeraldian population and landless peasants who arrived there as colonists expelled from other regions of the country. For about three decades the province has been suffering a deforestation and forest degradation process: in 1958 there were 2,750,000 hectares of forests and nowadays only 500,000 remain, having the rest been transformed into agricultural or pasture lands.

Papua New Guinea still contains one of the major tropical rainforests in the world, hosting high levels of biodiversity. Together with the government's policy regarding forests -which considers them as a mere source of roundwood to be exported- and its collusion with powerful forestry companies (see WRM Bulletin 22), the activities of foreign logging companies constitute a threat to these rich ecosystems and to the people that inhabit them.

Impacts of tree monocultures are usually analysed under two broad headings: environmental and social. The former involves impacts on water, soil, biodiversity and landscape, while the latter includes social and economic impacts. Though useful as an analytical tool, such division can however hide the fact that all impacts are -in the short or in the long run- social, since it is local people who live nearby plantations or who are displaced by them who suffer the consequences.

Because of Aracruz Celulose's move to apply for FSC certification for its eucalyptus plantations in the state of Bahia -avoiding at the same time the polemic issue of the dispossesion of Guarani and Tupinikim's lands as a consequence of the company's plantations in the neighbouring state of Espirito Santo- a large number of concerned organizations and individuals held a seminar last October in Vitoria, Espirito Santo, to analyse this menacing scenario. Given that the certifying firm SCS had not complied with a number of FSC's requirements for participation and consultation, on October 22 they addressed a letter to the questioning the partial certification process and requesting the postponement of the consultation meetings (see WRM Bulletin 28).

Last November we received a message from the Tasmania based NGO Native Forest Network-Southern Hemisphere (NFN), informing that the Australian giant North Ltd. was planning to invest in pulpwood plantations in Uruguay.

Multinational corporations, with support from some academic institutions and governments, are working hard to create and grow genetically engineered trees. Such development is causing great concern among informed sectors of the public, who reasonably fear that these artificially created organisms pose a threat to the environment, and could cause irreparable imbalances in the world's forest ecosystems. Critical reports, protests and even direct actions have been undertaken to curb this process (see WRM Bulletins 23 and 26).

Some of the conclusions and recommendations of the Latin American Workshop on the Impacts of an Eventual Millenium Road of the WTO, held on 6 and 7 November in Quito, Ecuador, are strongly related to the problems posed by the dominant tree plantation model.

The Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus, convened and sponsored by the Indigenous Environmental Network USA/CANADA, Seventh Generation Fund USA, International Indian Treaty Council, Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, the Abya Yala Fund, and TEBTEBBA (Indigenous Peoples’ Network for Policy Research and Education), issued a statement on 1 December 1999 in Seattle, on the occasion of the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization. In their "Seattle Declarations", they begin stating that "We, the Indigenous Peoples from various regions of the world, have come to Seattle to express our great concern over how the World Trade Organization is destroying Mother Earth and the cultural and biological diversity of which we are a part."

The World Bank is currently undertaking its Forest Policy Implementation Review and Strategy Development (FPIRS) and will carry out a number of consultation meetings throughout the world to feed this process. Within this framework, it seems important that the Bank takes seriously on board recent events in India, when more than 300 Adivasis (indigenous people) from the Indian state of Madya Pradesh, representing all mass-based Adivasi movements, jumped over the fence of the World Bank building on the 24th of November. They blocked the building, covering it with posters, grafitti, cow shit and mud, sang slogans and traditional songs at the gate, and went back only after Mr.

The 4th National Conference and International Conference on "Paramos" (high plateau grassland ecosystems) and Cloud Andean Forests, which took place in Malaga, Santander, Colombia on November 1999 -including representatives from Colombia, Venezuela and Costa Rica- summarized its viewpoints in a declaration which is available in Spanish in WRM's web site: http://www.wrm.org.uy/english/tropical_forests/paramos.html