Bulletin Issue 64 - November 2002

The Forest Stewardship Council will be holding its general assembly this month in Oaxaca, Mexico and we wish to share our concerns regarding the certification of plantations with FSC members, particularly from environmental and social organizations. The WRM has been campaigning for many years against the spread of monoculture tree plantations and has documented both the interests behind their promotion and the widespread social and environmental impacts they entail. Within that context, FSC certification of plantations has added to the problem by providing those same negative plantations --and their corporate owners-- with a "green" label which strengthens plantation promoters and weakens local communities and NGOs campaigning against them.

The last two blocks of continuous tropical rainforest subsisting in the Upper Guinea forest in West Africa, are to be found in Liberia. The Upper Guinean forest, recognised as one of the twenty-five hot spots for world biodiversity, comprises a belt of fragmented forests located along the West African coast. It totally or partially covers some ten countries, starting at the west of Guinea and ending at the southwest of Cameroon. Of the world's twenty-five hot spots, this one hosts the greatest diversity of mammals. The Upper Guinean forest contains 551 different species of mammals and half the known species of mammals of the African continent.

Many independent states have shown little interest in revitalizing local level systems of authority, which were purposely destroyed by past colonial regimes. The new independent governments, just like past colonial regimes do not like very much the idea of local political forces challenging its legitimacy. Thus, many forests became the property of the state, as in the case of Tanzania. This responsibility was assumed by the Tanzanian state despite other pressing problems like: governance, economic development, self reliance and political stability. As such meager resources were mostly directed towards these causes and managing forests was not accorded priority and they were left to deteriorate.

As we have already informed in previous bulletins (see WRM bulletins 36, 42), the $550 million Bujagali hydroelectric dam project on the Victoria Nile proposed by the US-based AES Corporation --counting on loans from the International Finance Corporation (IFC)-- has encountered strong opposition by local groups supported by international action. The detrimental impact of the project has been acknowledged by the Inspection Panel, the World Bank's independent investigative body (see WRM bulletin 59).

In late July NGOs wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture to request that Forest Concession Management Plans and Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs), submitted by concessionaires to the Department of Forestry and Wildlife, be released for public comment. Three and half months later, an edited version of these documents is to be released, to allow for just over two weeks of public comment. This, the World Bank has decided, is sufficient a period of time to justify the release of the final tranche of their Structural Adjustment Credit (SAC).

"Nature can never be managed well unless the people closest to it are involved in its management and a healthy relationship is established between nature, society and culture. Common natural resources were earlier regulated through diverse, decentralized, community control systems. But the state's policy of converting common property resources into government property resources has put them under the control of centralized bureaucracies, who in turn have put them at the service of the more powerful."

Until the late 1970s, the approach to community based forest management in Nepal implied community resource relations along the lines of the indigenous system of forest management prevailing in Nepal's hills. During the 80s and early 90s, community based forest management became a government priority programme and the new policy framework set up implied an interface between communities, natural resources and government bureaucracy. Further on, community forestry has been understood and conceptualised in terms of stakeholders relationship. There has been an increasing emergence and growth of mutually influencing community forest user groups, service providing agencies and organisations with diverse interests.

In June 2001, two teak plantations managed by Thailand's Forest Industry Organisation (FIO) were awarded a certificate as "well managed" under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) system. The plantations, at Thong Pha Phum and Khao Krayang, were assessed by SmartWood, a non-profit organisation run by Rainforest Alliance, a US-based NGO. Despite the fact that the certified area covers less than 3.5 per cent of FIO's total plantation area, the certificate enables FIO to claim that it is practising "sustainable forest management". Before the assessment was carried out, FIO's Chittiwat Silapat told the Bangkok Post, "It's a major step towards the end of deforestation and the beginning of sustainable development."

At daybreak on 7 November, under the leadership of the NGO, CODDEFFAGOLF and of REDMANGLAR (the Mangrove Network), over 2,000 fisherfolk and peasants abandoned their humble dwellings in the coastal wetlands of the Gulf of Fonseca, internationally known as "Ramsar Site 1000," to launch a mobilisation in protest over the destruction of the mangrove forests, lagoons, marshes and other wetlands that host a wide biodiversity, and are their source of food and income.

Bordering with the Republic of Colombia, the Province of Darien is located at the extreme East of the Republic of Panama and is one of the areas in the Central American Isthmus with the greatest biodiversity. However, at present it is undergoing resource destruction at a fast pace. The region is inhabited by peoples of four ethnic groups: Afro-Colombians, Embera-Wounan indigenous people, Darienite peasants and settlers from other regions of the country --landless peasants seeking to improve their living conditions.

The city of Esquel is located in an enclave on the banks of the Esquel river, between hills with slopes forming an impressive amphitheatre, set off by the marginal forests of the sub-Antarctic forest region and in particular, the Valdiviana forest in the Province of Chubut, to the West of the Argentine Patagonia. Its 31,000 inhabitants live and enjoy surroundings that they describe as a city where nature surprises travellers at all seasons because of the landscapes of unusual beauty, thousand-year old trees, rivers and hundreds of pools and lakes protected by enigmatic forests. The city's inhabitants are proud to announce that they cultivate respect and care of nature. They belong to a region where "we who inhabit it, hope that our children and grandchildren can enjoy it."

A group of seven researchers assessed the certifications of the V&M Florestal Ltda. Company (Vallourec & Mannesman), which obtained FSC certification in 1999 for its whole area of 235,886 hectares, through the certification firm SGS. They also assessed those of Plantar Reflorestamentos S.A., which obtained SCS certification for an area of 13,287 hectares. With this certification, V&M Florestal became the company with the largest certified area in Brazil.

The Mapuche People in Chile have been struggling against national and transnational forestry companies and against the State to recover their lands for years now. The encroachment of monoculture tree plantations in the VIII, IX and X Regions, where the Mapuche population is over 337,000 inhabitants, has involved Mapuche territorial ethnocide. The scarcity of land and the cultural and environmental destruction in the ecosystem of communities neighbouring the plantations, has made many of them rise up in self-defence. However the economic power of the companies under the sponsorship and protection of the Chilean State, represses any Mapuche mobilisation either through the courts, the police or through action by third parties.

In Uruguay, all forests are protected by law and their exploitation is forbidden unless expressly authorised by the bodies in charge of ensuring their protection. Therefore, certification in this country is totally unnecessary to ensure forest conservation. However, it is enough to enter the FSC web page's "certified forest list" to discover that there are 75,000 hectares of certified "forests" in this country. Of course, on looking into details, one learns that in all cases these are plantations and not forests.

Preolenna, in NW Tasmania, has dramatically changed from what it used to be just five years ago (see WRM bulletin 36). Under the Federal Government's plan labelled Plantations 2020 Vision ( http://www.plantations2020.com.au ), this former farming community has seen their farms which used to feed people replaced by farms which feed woodchip mills. The pattern of large-scale monoculture tree plantations has swept through more than 35 farming towns in the North West hinterland from Circular Head to Wilmot.

Landowners of Maisin and Wanigela customary lands, in the Collingwood Bay area of Oro Province, have something to celebrate. In May 2002, the Waigani National Court returned customary land which had been leased to the State in early 1999 under a lease-lease back agreement by Keroro Development Corporation, a local landowner company. The plan was to clear the area and plant oil palm trees. The land concerned comprises 38,000 hectares of rich volcanic soil with an extensive forest area. The Collingwood Bay people considered illegal the 'lease' on their land so they mounted a test case to determine whether the rule of law and justice can be flouted by logging companies, their agents and corrupt individuals in government.

On 30th October, the World Bank's Board of Executive Directors approved a new Forests Policy. After one of the longest and most controversial consultation processes the Bank has ever carried out, the revised policy was pushed through in two days of unprecedentedly strong debates, despite objections from some governments. Although the final text of the policy has yet to be officially released, the main elements are already clear. Reversing the 1991 policy which had proscribed World Bank funding of logging in primary moist tropical forests, the new policy is instead meant to prevent all Bank operations from causing 'significant' damage to 'critical forests' , while forestry projects are in addition to be subject to certification.

A press release from the FSC UK recently claimed that the FSC label on timber and timber products gives the public an "assurance that the timber used comes from forests managed to the highest environmental, social and economic standards" and that "anyone buying FSC certified products is helping to ensure a safer future for the earth's forests and the people and wildlife that depend on them".

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands was signed in the city of Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 and entered into force in 1975. Ramsar is the only environmental convention that addresses a specific ecosystem, that of the wetlands. Wetlands, as recognised by the Ramsar Convention, fulfil essential ecological functions, as regulators of hydrological regimes and as habitats for a very rich biodiversity and are a resource of great economic, cultural, scientific and recreational importance that must be preserved.

According to the Danish Data Protection Agency, the environmental NGO Nepenthes is not allowed to advise Danish consumers against purchasing from shops where they risk buying garden furniture whose production has contributed to the destruction of rainforests.