Bulletin Issue 49 – August 2001

Transnational corporations are increasingly dominating all economic sectors where profits can be made. Most of them have incorporated social and environmental concerns to their discourse, though few of them actually comply with their own declarations in this respect. Regardless of their good intentions, the sheer scale of their operations make environmental sustainability practically impossible, while competition to dominate global markets has made social concerns almost antagonistic to profitability.

Cameroon, with a population of around 15 million and a territory of 475,440 sq km, has an estimated 22 million hectares of forests, 64% of which are tropical rainforests lying at the southern part of the country, while the remaining 36% are in the central and northern Savannah areas. Atlantic coastal forests grow in areas with relatively fertile soils and hold some of the greatest biodiversity found anywhere in Africa.

The Republic of Congo, often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville, has a total area of 342,000 sq. km, 60% of which is covered by rainforests (21.5 million hectares), mainly located in the scarcely-populated north of the country. The forest and its resources are the main source of livelihood for most of the rural population living there.

Equatorial Guinea is a forest-rich country, and its valuable species --Okoumé, Ilomba, Andouk-- have attracted the logging industry, particularly since the early 1990s. Most of the country --some 2.2 million hectares-- is covered by forests, which provide for the livelihoods of between 80-90% of the population, which obtains fuelwood, food, medicines, building materials and other products from it.

Efforts to conserve certain threatened species or habitats have in too many cases been implemented at the expense of local peoples throughout the world. Although modern conservation thinking has been shifting away from its original anti-people bias, it has yet to redress many of its past abuses and to accept that people are part of the environment. The following quotes from the conclusions of a study on Tanzania carried out by Neumann (see details below) may prove useful to that debate.

Elected forest councils (Van Panchayats) have been the only existing example of reasonably autonomous legal space for community forest management in India. After having managed for years demarcated village forests in Uttarakhand, the hill region of Uttar Pradesh, Van Panchayats are being replaced by top-down “participatory” forestry projects pushed by the World Bank. In the village of Pakhi in Chamoli district, from where the Chipko movement against commercial forest exploitation had begun in the early 70's, neither the women nor the poor --targetted as primary beneficiaries of these new forestry projects-- were consulted and their existing management system was not even taken into account.

Hydroelectric dams have always enormous social and environmental impacts. The construction of these megaprojects is a major cause of forest loss, as well as resulting in widespread human rights violation. As stated in the World Commission on Dams' report, the construction of dams has caused the displacement of 40-80 million people worldwide. More than 40,000 dams have already been built and the Mamberamo dam in West Papua is in the process of becoming one more.

In spite of the potentially devastating impacts it might entail, Japanese paper manufacturers are carrying out research on genetic engineering aimed at the "creation" of trees yielding more cellulose. Eucalyptus is the most widely used tree by the paper industry as raw material for the production of cellulose. The wood from this tree is composed of more or less equal quantities of cellulose and lignin and therefore the latter needs to be removed to obtain cellulose. In their quest for more profits, paper companies are thus working to genetically modify eucalyptus so that its wood will contain less lignin and more cellulose.

The process to review, discuss and improve the Malaysian Criteria, Indicators, Activities and Standards of Performance (MC&I) for Forest Management Certification has been subject to disapproval by several Malaysian non-governmental, community based and indigenous peoples' organisations. Though they have been part to the process, they have decided now to withdraw on the grounds that their participation has been somewhat constrained and misconstrued as giving consent and approval to the present MC&I. The organisations sent a joint letter to the National Timber Certification Council, (NTCC) stating the reasons for their withdrawal. They highlight several matters that have not been answered or have been unsatisfactorily answered.

Once again, a foreign company is the cause of conflicts for the inhabitants of the Province of Puntarenas. The Río Minerales company, a subsidiary of the transnational Canadian mining company Wheaton River Minerals Ltd. was granted environmental permits to establish an open cast gold mine at Bellavista de Miramar, for the extraction of 60 thousand ounces of gold per year over a 7 year period, by means of leaching in ponds, using cyanide. Open cast mining is an industrial activity with high environmental, social and cultural impacts. It is also by definition, an unsustainable activity, insofar as the exploitation of the resource involves its depletion. It uses large amounts of cyanide, a very toxic substance, in order to separate the gold from the other materials removed.

In the previous issue of our Bulletin, we reported on the forestry plan prepared for Mexico by the Finnish consultancy firm, Indufor. In the article we pointed out that the consultancy firm itself emphasised that “the uncertainty of social consequences associated with large scale plantations, has produced a cautious attitude on the part of the rural communities.” We translated this as an elegant way of avoiding the use of a more appropriate word: opposition. And, in fact, opposition has not been long in coming. The leaders of the five most important social forestry organisations in the country have made public their serious questioning of the so-called Strategic Forestry Plan for Mexico.

Few people know that the Southern US is currently the largest wood and paper producing region in the world. Successful efforts to protect the last remnants of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, resulted in the expansion of the industry into the recovering second-growth forests of the South. In the last 10 years, more than 100 industrial-scale wood-chipping facilities have been constructed in this region, while paper production alone has increased by one-third since 1985. Approximately 5 million acres of forests are clearcut every year in the region for paper.

The story of the Hoktek T’oi community of the indigenous Wichí people in the Province of Salta (in the north of Argentina) is a story of suffering caused by state policies linked to economic interests. Over the past years, far from finding a solution to end a hundred years of usurpation and injustice, the authorities have only continued to attack the rights and the very existence of the Wichí people, who protected the tropical forest where they have always lived.

What is happening in Espirito Santo --one of the smallest Brazilian states-- is historic. Mighty plantation and pulp company Aracruz Celulose has generated so much opposition stemming from its activities, that the state Parliament recently passed --almost unanimously-- a law banning further planting of eucalyptus until an agro-ecological mapping of the state is put in place, which will define where eucalyptus can and cannot be planted. The law was immediately vetoed --during a "solemn session"-- by the Governor and now Parliament must decide whether to lift or maintain the veto.

The farmers and peasants from the valleys of Tambogrande, San Lorenzo and the Locuto and Nacho Távera communities in the Department of Piura have received a hard blow with the announcement made by Alejandro Toledo’s Prime Minister that the country is to become a leading mining country. This does not consider the decision of the populations settled in the area for hundreds of years.

On 13 August, the presidents of Venezuela and Brazil, Hugo Chávez and Fernando Henrique Cardoso respectively, finalised an agreement made in 1997 and inaugurated an electric transmission line extending from Venezuela to the north of Brazil, in the state of Roraima. The 676 kilometres of high voltage cables which cost 400 million dollars and were the work of Electrificación del Caroní, a branch of the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana, will transmit 65 megawatts per hour. By the year 2020 this could increase to 200. But this project has wounded to death the Gran Sabana, the Canaima National Park, the habitat of the Pemon indigenous people and the centre of Venezuela’s biological diversity and water wealth.

CDC Capital Partners is a major actor in Papua New Guinea’s oil palm plantations. A former UK foreign aid programme, it later became a public private company and invests in PNG through Pacific Rim Plantations Ltd., holding 76% of its shares. Pacific Rim Plantations Ltd. owns and manages about 23,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in three locations: Northern Province (Popondetta), Milne Bay Province (Alotau) on PNG’s north coast and at Kavieng on New Ireland island. It operates in joint venture with the PNG government, which has a 20% stake.

A draft “Revised Forest Strategy for the World Bank Group” was recently placed on the World Bank’s web page ( www.worldbank.org/forestry ). The draft strategy is scheduled to be discussed by a Sub-Committee of the World Bank’s Board in late September and to be adopted by the full Board by the end of 2001. Strategies intend to provide guidance for World Bank staff but their recommendations are not binding. Operational Policies (OP) on the other hand are binding documents and provide the most important yardstick against which civil society groups can hold World Bank staff accountable.

The World Bank has just forwarded its revised draft resettlement policy to the full Board of Executive Directors for discussion and approval. Starting August 20th, Executive Directors will be returning to their offices from a two week recess, and it is crucial to capture their attention immediately about the resettlement policy. We believe that it will be placed on their agenda shortly after the recess. Thanks to the strong public mobilization on earlier drafts of this policy, the Bank has responded to some concerns by defining more terms and removing some offensive language of its previous document.

The indigenous Shawi people repeat their call for protests in defense of their territory in the tropical rainforest. This time the threat is in the form of the world's leading gold mining company: Barrick Gold Corporation.