Bulletin Issue 38 – September 2000

Government delegates from all over the world met this month in Lyon, France, in a Preparatory Conference prior to the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Climate Change which will be held next November in the Hague, Netherlands. The only positive thing that can be said about the Lyon meeting is that delegates worked very hard, late into the evenings, and that some delegates -- unfortunately too few -- actually tried to do something about climate change. But the general character of the meeting was one of blackmailing, arm-twisting, marketing, bribing and trading among the various elites present. Most of the time was spent discussing money for programmes which actually have little or no relevance to climate.

Last July the government of Gabon, logging companies operating in the country and some environmental groups --among which the World Wildlife Fund-- reached an agreement to keep the Lope Reserve out of the reach of commercial logging. However, the deal includes a redrawing of the boundaries of the reserve substracting 10,352 hectares of land on the southeastern flank --that holds the richest stands of valuable okoume trees-- and adding about 5,200 hectares of a previously not protected area of remote upland primary forests.

The Kenyan coast is estimated to hold more than 10% of the world's unexplored deposits of titanium, a metal used in the pigment industry, and increasingly in the manufacture of many objects of modern life. A drilling recently performed in the Kwale area delineated a reserve of 150 million tons of sands containing rutile, ilmenite and zircon, the minerals used to make titanium.

Indigenous peoples of the oil-rich Niger Delta region continue to suffer environmental degradation, poverty and violence to the hands of oil companies that operate in the area. The companies themselves, together with the Nigerian and Northern country governments are responsible for the present state of things.

The image of the last tree in a dry region of Africa being cut down by a poor peasant --ultimate responsible for environment destruction-- is widespread. Nevertheless, such image is more based on propaganda than on empirical evidence. On the one hand, reliable data on key environmental resources in this continent is scarce, and on the other hand quantitative studies --for example of West African forests and in Kenya-- have shown that the assumption of systematic environmental degradation is wrong, and that smallholders actually improve their environmental resources through investments in natural capital.

UPM-Kymmene Corporation --one of the world's largest forest products companies and paper producers, with industrial plants in 15 countries-- the APRIL Group (Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd.) and APRIL's majority shareholder have recently signed an agreement to sell APRIL's 51% interest in the Changshu paper mill to UPM-Kymmene. The value of the transaction is US$ 150 million. As a consequence of the agreement, the Finland-based UPM-Kymmene has now become the sole owner of the Changshu paper mill. At the same time, it has been agreed that APRIL will enter into a six and a half year contract for supplying bleached hardwood kraft pulp to the Changshu paper mill.

Two visions are confronted in relation to the conservation of protected areas. One of them --originated in the conservationist circles of the North-- considers that they have to be kept as natural scenarios, void of people. To make it possible, indigenous peoples and other local dwellers are seen as a menace which needs to be removed. From the modern viewpoint, nature needs to be considered in its coevolution with human cultures, and forest peoples constitute an essential part of this relationship, having a crucial role in forest biodiversity conservation.

For years indigenous peoples of Sarawak have been fighting to defend their land and forests against "development" plans involving logging, oil palm plantations, pulpwood plantations, hydroelectric dams, mining activities and resorts development. These activities, which count on the support of the national and local authorities, are not only destroying their livelihoods but also --as in the case of the nomadic Penans-- are putting at risk their existence as a culture. Nowadays there are only about 10,000 Penans left in Sarawak's interior region. As well as other Dayak people, they have been and still are victims of all kind of abuses --including physical violence-- to the hands of the police force and intimidations by thugs deployed by timber companies.

Palawan is an island of the Philippines, located in the Western part of the archipelago and surrounded by the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea. As a result of the democratic process started in 1992, the local government, in agreement with local communities and the private sector, cancelled existing logging concessions, and new legislation was issued banning all commercial logging on the island.

Vietnam has a history of tree plantation programmes dating back to 1956. According to a report by Nguyen Ngoc Lung, Director of Vietnam's Forest Development Department, between 1956 and 1992 an area of over 1 million hectares was planted with trees. However survival rates have been poor and much of the wood produced has been exported as wood chips to Japan or Taiwan.

In 1999 local residents of Placencia Lagoon --a shallow water body fringed by mangroves and very rich in terrestrial and aquatic wildlife, located in southern Belize-- organized themselves to resist a project to build a two-lane causeway and a bridge across the Lagoon. The works would have caused a severe environmental impact, damaging ecotourism, the main activity in the area, as well as small scale fishing (see WRM Bulletin 23). A new threat is now pending on this rich ecosystem: industrial shrimp farming.

The East of Nicaragua is known as the Atlantic Coast (Costa Atlántica), and is geographically divided in a Northern and a Southern region. This area is characterized by being mostly inhabited by indigenous peoples --mainly Miskitos-- and for being the richest area concerning natural resources. Some 500,000 people (8% of the national population) live in this area (42% of the Nicaraguan territory), representing six ethnic groups who obtain their livelihoods from agriculture and fishing.

Mexican "justice" has once again ruled against justice. Rodolfo Montiel, a "campesino" leader imprisoned for leading a successful opposition movement against logging operations by the US-based Boise Cascade in the state of Guerrero (see WRM Bulletin 26), was found guilty and received a sentence of six years and eight months, in a sentence issued by Fifth District Court Judge Maclovio Murillo. Montiel, together with his colleague Teodoro Cabrera, have already been imprisoned for 15 months. Cabrera was also found guilty and given a 10-year term.

Coinciding with the conquest of the vast territory of Argentina by the Buenos Aires centralized government, started in the second half of the 19th century in the name of modernization, forests in different regions of the country entered a period of decline which has continued until present times. The two cases mentioned below are only examples of a process happening throughout the country.

The basin of the Beni River in western Bolivia, which comprises part of the Andean region and part of the Amazon forests, is being threatened by a hydroelectric megaproject, that is generating grave concern among local communities, environmental NGOs and academic circles.

The U'wa indigenous people are maintaining a long conflict with the Colombian state and the oil company Occidental Petroleum in the defense of their traditional territories. The permit granted to the company and the beginning of the works of oil prospection at the Bloque Samoré, located in the premontane forest region along the border between Colombia and Venezuela, constitutes a threat por the U'wa's life and environment. To the U'wa culture, oil is Mother Earth's blood, and to drill it would be a desecration. Their struggle has been long and the U'wa have suffered violence to the hands of the government's armed corps.

The inclusion in the Venezuelan National Constitution --approved in 1999-- of a chapter that establishes legal rights for indigenous peoples and indigenous communities in line with International Labour Organization Convention 169 led to the idea that indigenous peoples in that country would be in a better position to protect their environment and their traditions against the powerful interests that in the name of "progress" want to destroy them. However, things appear not to have changed much in real life. The Pemon indigenous people continue to fight against the construction of a high-voltage power line in the south-eastern Gran Sabana region, that will cross the Brazilian border.

It is already a well-known fact that large scale tree monocultures result in a large number of social and environmental impacts. However, we had not yet heard of a situation such as that of Fiji, where plantations generated such acute social and economic tensions that they eventually led to a coup d'etat. The roots of the issue can be traced back to the 1950s and 60s, when the former British colonial administration decided to implement two large-scale plantation projects, one based on pine trees and the other on Honduran mahogany. The land occupied by the plantations was leased to Fijian landowners at a nominal price of some 10 cents per hectare per year. Many of the leases gave landowners rights to share profits at harvest.

Friends of Hamakua is gravely concerned over a proposed plywood/veneer plant and about the State Forest Hamakua Management Plan, which would imply the harvesting of 4,000 acres of old "non-native" plantations. There are several reasons for this concern. Access roads will have to be built into all of these, many forested areas. Once harvesting begins, all public access to these roads will be closed off due to liability concerns. Once the roads are in place, access will be gained to the few remaining native tree stands, which the plan says, may be removed if necessary.

The following are some quotes from indigenous peoples' representatives at Lyon, which --in sharp contrast with government delegates-- address the true issues at stake, in a climate change process which has until now ignored indigenous peoples (the Forum of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change also issued in Lyon a declaration, which is available at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/english/IPlyon.htm ): "Developed country proposals to buy the right to continue polluting the atmosphere by planting more trees makes a farce of the climate change negotiations," said Héctor Huertas, an indigenous leader from Panama.

In WRM bulletin 35 we exposed the conflict of interest among some of the experts who produced the IPCC special report on land use, land use change and forestry last June ("Sinks that stink"), resulting from their direct involvement in companies which would economically benefit from the inclusion of sinks in the Kyoto Protocol. One of the named experts --Richard Tipper-- replies in the current issue of Multinational Monitor magazine that "you could say all scientists have vested interests when they participate in such a panel because they're interested in advancement or research money" and adds: "if you disagree with somebody then you should be able to make a coherent argument, not just slag people off."

A project implemented in Uganda by Norwegian company Tree Farms to set up between 80,000 and 100,000 hectares of plantations of pines and eucalyptus to act as carbon sinks has been severely questioned because of its negative social and environmental consequences. It has been defined as a "loss-loss-loss" situation, where the profits for the company are doubtful, local peasant communities are losing their lands and working for miser salaries, and Uganda is losing its sovereignity in relation to the management of its territory and natural resources (see WRM Bulletin 35).

Although the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Climate Change has not yet approved plantations and forests as carbon "offsets", the carbon shop is already very active. What follows is an e-mail message advertising Brazil as a place where cheap land and cheap labour is available for energy utilities to dump their carbon emissions: "From: OMNITRADE aaa@yawl.com.br Sent: Friday, July 14, 2000 2:25 AM Subject: Greenhouse gas emissions - An alternative