Bulletin Issue 59 – June 2002

In the run-up to Johannesburg where governments from around the world will debate how to protect the global environment, the World Bank has released its long awaited draft policy on forests. Although called a “safeguard policy”, the world forests will not be made safer by the adoption of this policy which flies in the face of demands of civil society and ignores most of the advice given to the Bank by its own Technical Advisory Group. In addition, it fails to address the main causes of deforestation which the Bank’s own Operations Evaluation Department identified as being driven by the powerful forces of globalization and economic liberalization, as well as by poor governance.

Some conceptual errors are hard to die. Such is the case of the concept of "planted forests". Although increasingly weakened as a credible definition, the draft plan for implementation agreed upon in Bali during the last Preparatory Conference for the World Summit on Sustainable Development insists on calling plantations "forests."

The following statement was issued by a number of African NGOs (see below) present at the African Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Ministerial Planning Meeting held in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo on June 18 - 21, 2002: "There is little doubt that forest crimes is pervasive and causing enormous damage to the environment and the economy as well as hurting the poor the most. Almost everywhere, forest resources are under the threat of criminal activities by unscrupulous loggers, traders, and corrupt government officials.

The rainforests of the Central African Republic’s Dzanga Sangha national park are inhabited by the Ba’Aka indigenous people, which counts with some 20,000 members. Like many other so-called “Pygmy” groups of neighbouring countries, they have been hunter-gatherers living in the heart of the forest and have developed a whole body of knowledge on the local rainforest resources.

The Democratic Republic of Congo contains over 50 percent of Africa’s remaining tropical forests; of its 2.3 million square kilometres, nearly half is forestland. Only Brazil and Indonesia have larger areas of tropical rainforest. Although natural resource exploitation did not cease during the war, many foreign logging operations halted their activities. The Malaysian company Innovest, for example, has sold assets in DRC due to financial losses incurred. On January 18, 2002 Innovest announced that they had entered into an agreement with Man Fai Tai Congo Ltd S.A.R.L to sell machines and equipment that were purchased in 1997 for the logging concessions in DRC and the Republic of Congo.

In July 2001, Ugandan civil society groups had filed a complaint with the World Bank's Inspection Panel, claiming that the Bujagali dam project violated several World Bank policies and that it would cause social, economic, and environmental harm to the local people. As a result, the Panel took up the case and on May 30 submitted a confidential report to the Executive Board, which concludes that the planned Bujagali dam --detailed in WRM bulletin 42-- violates five key World Bank policies. The Panel report suggests a series of corrective measures to rectify the project's problems.

While not related to the pulp and paper industry, rubber plantations and oil palm plantations have similar impacts on local communities to fast-growing tree plantations. Rubber and oil palm plantations also involve using large areas of land, often land which is crucial to local people's livelihoods. During the 1960s, especially in the northeast of Cambodia, many highlanders were evicted from their traditional lands to make way for rubber plantations. The plantations, Prince Norodom Sihanouk's assimilation policies in the northeast and the bombing by the US airforce meant that the northeast was a prime recruiting ground during the first years of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

The world has something to celebrate: there is good news for the Jarawa. This largely uncontacted people who inhabit the Andaman Islands in the Indian ocean and have voluntarily chosen to continue almost completely isolated, have been harassed by encroachment on their lands by British and Indian settlers in the last 150 years.

The loss of access to forest resources does not only occur with deforestation of primary forest, but also where commercial tree plantations replace primary forests. It is a well known fact that tree plantations of introduced species planted for commercial purposes for local and international markets, do not have the non-timber forest products of primary forests, particularly resources used for housing, household items, food, fuel, handicraft and medicines. Less well-known are the specific impacts that commercial tree plantations have on women, particularly those related to changes in the availability of resources commonly found in forests and scarce or absent in plantations. A study carried out in Indonesia shows that, among other, these types of impacts on women include:

Tree plantations are a growing problem worldwide and this is particularly clear to people living near the plantations. For instance, the Chief of Xiang Khai sub-district of Xaibouli district, in Laos, says: “Eucalyptus plantations are causing forest, soil and water resource degradation. I do not want anyone to grow any more eucalyptus trees in my sub-district.”

The certification granted by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or what is now known as the “green label” guarantees that a company’s wood with this qualification, has been obtained on the basis of sustainable forest management practices. That was the purpose inspiring the idea. But perhaps it is hard to believe that on this world scenario of “mercantilisation” of nature and life, of opening up markets at any price, of exploitation of resources in function of the interests of rapid and short-term profit, that this “green label” will not be swallowed up and become just another marketing device.

Panama has lost 60% of its forests in a deforestation process during which, according to the latest report by the Forestry Service, some 50,000 hectares of forest disappear each year.. The reasons leading to this situation are multiple and complex, ranging from external to internal causes. Although official circles usually accuse the poor peasants for the disaster, in fact it is the last link of a long chain of causalities originating both from unjust national policies and from the impact of the globalisation process and its multiple actors.

Corporate interests in oil palm, (see WRM Bulletin 47) have found in Mexico, and more precisely in Chiapas, an ideal spot for their business, basically due to the climatic diversity of the zone, the availability of cheap labour (more so because of its condition as frontier state with Central America, where undocumented workers abound), and the possibility of easy access to peasant community land. The peasants, pushed and pressed by the powerful market forces expressed in agrarian policies, become salary earners on their own land, which is no longer the base of their food security.

The Argentine forestry sector is weeping. The fat business of planting large-scale monocultures of fast growing alien tree species, aimed at the pulp industry, has foundered. Faithfully copying the forestry programme applied all over the world --counting on political support and money from multilateral institutions binding the countries-- Argentina engaged itself by law (No. 25,080, of 1998) to subsidise this type of plantation. At the beginning it started with great force, and projections for that year were to plant 140,000 hectares, and then 200,000 hectares annually in the successive years.

The semi-intensive production system used in shrimp farms located in the Department of Cordoba, in the Atlantic region of Colombia, has caused great disruption in the surrounding environment. Among other things, this system implies the constant dumping of large volumes of water saturated with organic waste into the estuary of the lower basin of the Sinu river. The shrimp industry established in this estuary in 1982 already covers some 700 hectares and has been an important promoter of the Urra 1 hydroelectric dam (see WRM Bulletin No. 51). This dam which is already in operation, involved the flooding of over 7,000 hectares of forests, with a direct impact on the means of living and very existence of the Embera Katio indigenous peoples and the fishing communities in the area.

The Plywood Ecuatoriana S.A. logging company, belonging to the Alvarez – Barba family will end up by destroying the last primary forests existing in the zone of the Ecuadorian Choco, specifically in the province of Esmeraldas. However, this company that depredates forests has recently decided to dress in green. In fact, by means of a forceful advertising campaign, that is to say, over half a page in the Quito newspaper “El Comercio,” on Sunday 3 February this year and in a entire “Trade supplement” covering four pages in the same newspaper on Tuesday 12 March, 2002, the managers of Plywood Ecuatoriana S.A. have tried to embellish, not only the company’s face, but its whole image, by presenting itself to the public as a sacrificed ecologist body.

Many Latin American governments, in order to obtain income and satisfy the conditions of the IMF structural adjustment programmes, and supported by World Bank loans, have placed the natural resources of their country at the disposal of multinational companies, and grant concessions to those, who at any cost, wish to perpetuate the exploitation model to their own benefit. Many Latin American peoples have also understood that if they get organised they can defend their lands, their forests and their very survival.