Bulletin Issue 86 - September 2004

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was founded in 1993, with the mission of promoting "environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests. FSC forest management standards are based on FSC's 10 Principles and Criteria of responsible forest management." Unfortunately, the FSC decided to also include tree plantations within its scope and this has resulted in widespread criticism, particularly in the South, where many local communities and NGOs are opposing the spread of large-scale tree plantations.

A project to build a hydroelectric dam on the River Lom, a few kilometres downstream of its confluence with River Pangar, presented 13 years ago and suspended in 1999, has been resumed in October last year. The Cameroonian government decided to go ahead with the plans of the Lom-Pangar hydroelectric project, which includes a 50 meter high barrage flooding an area of 610 sq.km and a hydroelectric plant of approximately 50 MW. The first step in the process is a new environmental impact study. A so-called "panel of the independent experts" charged with controlling and evaluating the environmental studies carried out, and to deliver its opinions on the measures, had its first visit to the area to be affected by the dam.

National Parks are not playing a key role in the economic development of Central African countries. However, they are seen as the cornerstone of the world’s conservation efforts. Thus the president of Gabon, El Hadj Omar Bongo Odimba, announced the creation of thirteen National Parks at the Earth Summit, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002. Encouraged by notable international NGOs, Bongo Odimba enacted these parks in 2003; some of them have been selected as the key priority landscapes in the framework of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership, an international initiative whose goal is to halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystems functions in the Congo Basin for the benefit of the people of Central Africa and the global community.

The forest of Sakoantovo in southern Madagascar is sacred for the people that inhabit it. In general, a sacred forest is a place that is venerated and reserved for the cultural expression of a community, and its access and management are governed by traditional powers. Sacred forests cover a total area of 60,000 hectares in the Spiny Forest ecoregion of Madagascar, one of the biologically richest drylands on earth.

Even though Nigeria’s forests are only some ten percent of the size they were just two decades ago, they still provide an incredibly rich and diverse habitat. From the tropical highlands to the lowland rainforest, from the plateau grasslands to the savanna, from the swamps to the mangrove forests. The forests of Cross River State in southeastern Nigeria are the last remaining rainforests in Nigeria and are home to 2,400 native forest communities comprising 1.5 million people, the highest primate diversity on the planet --including the world’s most endangered gorillas--, and an estimated 20 percent of the world’s butterfly species.

The Sundarban, covering some 10,000 square kilometres of land and water, is the largest contiguous block of coastal mangrove forests in the world and is part of the world’s largest delta formed from sediments deposited by the three great rivers —the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna— which converge on the Bengal Basin. The UNESCO had declared a portion of the Bangladesh Sundarban as World Heritage site in 1997, and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) has funded projects to save it from degradation. The total area of the Bangladesh part of the Sundarban is 5,771 square kilometres (almost 62 per cent of the total), of which 4,071 square kilometres is land and the rest water. The rest lies in India, stretching along the Bay of Bengal.

Indonesian Law No. 14/1999 bans open-pit mining activities in protected forests and prompts several mining companies to suspend their operations. In July, the Indonesian Parliament endorsed a Presidential decree to amend this law (Perpu No. 1/2004), which stipulates that all mining contracts signed before Law No. 41/1999 on forestry came into effect are valid for the remainder of their terms. The decree provides political justification for 13 mining companies to operate in protected forests. This is the point of entry for a process of destruction in the days to come. Inevitably, the other 145 mining companies which were not named in the presidential decree will demand the same dispensation from the government.

Representatives of the Murut, the Kadazandusun, and the Rungus, and some 30 more tribes coming from the remote region of Tongod, traversed in July of this year northern Borneo to reach the gleaming office of Sabah’s Deputy Chief Minister of Land, Datuk Lajim Haji Ukin at the capital city of Kota Kinabalu. The group was there to demand the government to abide by its own laws, recognize native rights to protect and manage their natural resources, and halt reallocation of lands to logging and plantation corporations.

Ms. Mai of the Palaung ethnic community and mother of three children in Pang Daeng village of north Thailand has been camped in front of Chiang Mai City Hall for the past few weeks. Along with about hundred members of her community, she came to petition the Chiang Mai governor for the release of her husband Mr. Tan Bortuk and others. Thailand’s Royal Forestry Department (RFD) arrested and jailed Tan Bortuk along with 47 other ethnic peoples including elderly people and pregnant women from the Pang Daeng village on 23 August 2004 on charges of illegal encroachment into Chiang Dao National Forest Reserve. On September 9, the Chiang Mai Provincial Court released the 48 ethnic people on bail and will take up preliminary hearings on the case next month.

The Yaboti forest, 300 km to the east of Posadas in the Province of Misiones, was designated as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1995. In addition to its importance for biodiversity, it is the only refuge and means of subsistence of two communities of the Mbya Guarani ethnic group (Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’I Yvate), peoples who only recently got in touch with the outside world and who are now threatened by the interests of the Mocona Forestal S.A. company.

At the beginning of the year 2003, a ton of copper cost 1,800 dollars. At the beginning of this year the price rose to approximately US$ 3,600, double its value twelve months before. The deficit in supply was over 500 thousand tons. The scenario, completely different from that predominating over the past few years, could not have been more auspicious for the launching of operations in the largest copper mine ever to exist in Brazil. Even before the official opening, scheduled to take place at the end of the month in the presence of President Lula, the Sossego mine in Canaã dos Carajas in the State of Para, is already selling copper.

There seems to be no truce for the U’wa people in their long resistance in defence of their ancestral rights to life and to their land and in rejection of the oil exploitation projects on their traditional territory (see WRM Bulletins 10, 22, 29 and 38). The Colombia Plan, Ecopetrol and its associated oil companies, the neglectful government, are all threats to the U’wa territory, who believe that it is “the heart of the world. The veins feeding the universe run through this territory. If it is destroyed, the world will bleed to death.” Faced by the continuation of seismic exploration by Ecopetrol, the U’wa people have issued the following communiqué: “We wish to communicate to national and international public opinion” U’wa United Refuge, Cubara, 25 August, 2004

The integrity of the Yasuni National Park (PNY), located in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon is in serious danger from the imminent launching of oil activities by the Brazilian State oil company Petrobras (Petrobras Energia Ecuador). The PNY is the largest park in continental Ecuador and is located in one of the World's most biodiversity-rich areas. The Environmental Impact Assessment carried out by the Walsh Company for Petrobras, recorded 95 different species of plants in a 0.25 hectare plot. As this is Amazon flood forest, its soil characteristics make PNY an extremely fragile site from an ecological stand-point.

In the city of Cajamarca in northern Peru, thousands of peasants, students and social organizations are struggling against the plans of the Yanococha mining company (its main shareholder is Newmont, a US mining company, together with the Peruvian Buenaventura company and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation) to carry out exploration in Cerro Quilish, whose streams feed the Grande and Porcon rivers. The population demands that the Peruvian Government annul the resolution taken authorizing the Yanacocha Company to launch its activities (see communities' arguments, in Spanish, at http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Peru/Quilish.html ).

In Popondetta, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, representatives of all land owning communities from around the province gathered on 12th March 2004, in the first Oro landowners Forum on Land Rights and Community Based Natural Resource Management. They committed to ensuring sustainable resource management and to protect their rights as the rightful owners of those resources, declaring that: