Bulletin Issue 75 - October 2003

In a world dominated by CNN-style news, it is difficult for people to have access to real information. Needless to say that serious analysis on almost anything (except perhaps football) is particularly absent. Train accidents, sports results, wars, Hollywood stars, hunger, biotechnology, human rights abuses or whatever mix of chaotic bits and pieces of news appear to be more an excuse to inflict advertisements on people than to provide them with relevant information to understand the world we are living in. Within that situation, it is possible that for most people –even within Latin America- the news about the ousting of the Bolivian government has not meant much. We believe it to be, however, one of the most important events that has happened in the recent years.

Three years ago a deal between the authorities of Gabon and a French logging company traded away 10,352 hectares of the Lope Reserve in return for 5,200 hectares of a previously not protected area of remote upland primary forests being added to the reserve (see WRM Bulletin Nº 38). The highly controversial deal was arranged by officials of the US-based organization Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC) --which was responsible for the crude oil leaking from June to December 1998 of a pipeline into the Oyara mangrove forests and its dispersion into surrounding water streams, farms and sacred sites of the Otuegwe community-- is now implementing the SPDC-E major oil Trunkline Replacement project. Major operations involved are land take, route clearing, trenching/excavation, stringing, welding, radiograph, back filling, hydro-testing and re-instatement.

Timberwatch, a coalition of environmental NGOs and individuals, has renewed an appeal made during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, calling on the South African government, as well as on the timber industry, to halt the planting of new industrial timber plantations in naturally vegetated areas, especially grasslands. Existing industrial timber plantations in South Africa cover more than 1,500,000 hectares concentrated in the higher rainfall areas of the provinces of Kwazulu-Natal and Mpumalanga (see WRM Bulletin 44). There is a further estimated 1,700,000 hectares which have been invaded by alien plantation trees, mainly Pine, Eucalyptus and Wattle, in a country which is home to unique and endemic species.

In August 2003, US-based power producer AES Corp pulled out of the World Bank sponsored dam project in Uganda, based on economic reasons. The decision --which implied that the company wrote off $75m it had invested in the project-- has raised questions about the future of the controversial dam.

Plantation of exotics --rubber, acacia and eucalyptus in particular-- is one major factor that has changed the Modhupur sal forest (Shorea robusta) for ever, with severe consequences for the ethnic communities --Garos and Koch-- who have lived in the forest for centuries. With loan money from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank in particular, the government has actually established plantations of alien species all over the public forestland. Except for the Sundarban, only fragments of native forests remain in Bangladesh.

The Kali Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save the Kali) made a dramatic move against the serious pollution that the West Coast Paper Mills (WCPM) is causing to the Kali River by discharging untreated effluents. For long local people have suffered enormously from the pollution as they were repeatedly threatened with job losses if WCPM was pressurized to be environmentally responsible. On 30 September, villagers from worst affected Kariampalli, along with representatives of Environment Support Group, Parisara Samrakshana Kendra, Alternative Law Forum and Samvada, rallied through the Dandeli town and entered the WCPM campus in time for the Annual General Meeting.

Long Lunyim is a Penan community from Sungai Pelutan, Baram, located in the Miri Division of the state of Sarawak, Malaysia which used to be a part of another village called Long Tepen. The people of Long Lunyim decided some years ago to leave the village of Long Tepen and establish as a separate longhouse altogether slightly further away over disputes with the Long Tepen's headman on the encroachment of logging activities onto their customary land.

Multilateral and bilateral agencies --World Bank, Asian Development Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID and Japan Bank for International Cooperation-- have long provided loans and grants for southern countries, throwing them into a debt trap. Sri Lanka is no exception. To repay its foreign debt, the country has overexploited --with an impact on future generations-- its natural resources, including large scale felling of timber, shrimp farming, cultivation of cash crops, mining and the privatisation of water supplies.

The Government qualified as a joke the intention of the Harken Energy oil company to claim, through arbitration, 57,000 million dollars from the country. The company filed a request for arbitration with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes – ICSID. This body is attached to the World Bank and has its headquarters in Washington, USA. The threat of the Harken Costa Rica Holdings oil company disappeared both quickly and surprisingly. This happened precisely when wide discussions are going on in Costa Rica on the Free Trade Association of the Americas with the United States and its influence and when the United States is insisting, time and time again, on trade opening for two of its favourite businesses (telecommunications and energy/oil).

The Hoktek T’oi community of the Wichi People (Province of Salta, Argentina) has just won a resounding victory in the court action they brought against the Provincial government for the permit granted in 1996 by the Environmental Secretariat to the Los Cordobeses S.A. company, for the deforestation of 1,838 hectares of the community’s traditional territory (see WRM Bulletin 49). Before the permit was granted, the Hoktek T’oi Community had contested it at administrative level. Three years later, when the deforestation company requested an extension of the permit, the Community again contested it.

During the second half of September this year, the Ecuadorian NGO Acción Ecológica organized a national meeting in Quito on the subject of “Plantations are not forests.” On 20 and 21 September, approximately 40 organizations representing Ecuadorian Indigenous movements, peasants, people of Afro-Ecuadorian descent, NGOs and parliamentarians, together with representatives from Brazil, Chile and Uruguay analysed the issue of plantations and exchanged experiences. The gathering took place in the framework of the on-going discussions in Ecuador regarding the government’s forestation plan that may imply the promotion of large-scale monoculture tree plantations in wide areas of the country.

Like so many other countries in the South, Uruguay has been convinced (by FAO, the World Bank and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, among others) that it should promote large-scale tree plantations. From the start, it was very clear that the objective was to produce sufficient raw material for pulp production and for this reason, fundamentally, the plantation of eucalyptus was promoted.

The Imataca Forest Reserve’s native forest, located in the extreme east of the country, of imposing scenic beauty and rich biological diversity, fulfils a fundamental role in soil and water protection – of the rivers Yuruan, Cuyuni, Orinoco, Brazo Imataca, Rio Grande, Botanamo, Barima, Orocaima – and is a cultural and sacred reserve for the Indigenous Peoples. Imataca covers an area of 38,219 square kilometres, of which over three million hectares, that is to say 80% of its surface, are rainforests. Six out of each ten square metres of the territory are legally under some kind of environmental protection, but will now be affected by the Bill on the Imataca Land Planning and Use Regulation, prepared by the Ministry of the Environment.

My family's individual struggle and victimisation is typical of what is happening across the populated and high-rainfall areas of rural Australia. In 1984 we moved to North West Tasmania and chose a relatively isolated area to live --one that was away from farms that used chemicals and where the stands of native bush were extensive and beautiful. All that changed in the mid 1990s when the State and Federal Governments pushed the Regional Forest “Agreement” and the Plantations 2020 Vision onto ordinary citizens. The native forest was largely destroyed as a result and it was replaced by a huge monoculture tree plantation using an exotic [to Tasmania] species of Eucalyptus called 'Nitens'.

As we said in our last bulletin “the winds of change blow with increasing strength”. One of such winds was felt at the meeting of the “Network for Women in Natural Resources Management”, held during the last World Forestry Congress (WFC) in Quebec last September. For the first time in this kind of event a group of women with a diversity of interests gathered together to share their views on gender issues.

Just prior to the Vth World Parks Congress, a consortium of mining, oil and gas companies announced that they would accept that all World Heritage Sites were off limits to further exploitation. However, during the Congress, representatives of the extractive industries could not be persuaded to accept the Amman Recommendation passed by the World Conservation Congress in Amman in 2000, which called for an end to oil, mining and gas extraction from all protected areas in IUCN categories I, II, III and IV (‘strict nature reserves’, ‘wilderness areas’, ‘national parks’, ‘natural monuments’ and ‘habitat management areas’).