Bulletin Issue 97 - August 2005

Forests provide for the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people worldwide and particularly in the tropical areas. Whatever activities are carried out that imply deforestation or forest degradation will therefore impact directly on the means of survival of those people and thus also on their health. One of the immediate effects of forest loss is a decrease in the availability of the food provided by forest plants and animals, such as fruit, seeds, roots, honey, vegetables, mushrooms, insects, meat, and so on. The result will be malnourishment, which generates conditions for disease, particularly –though not only- in children.

The forest is the cradle of biodiversity, that is to say, the origin of life. When the forest is healthy, water springs from it, the air is purer and more fragrant, we can obtain shelter from its many resources, it gives us food, art is expressed in the myriad of colours and hues that are cyclically unfolded and concealed and in the midst of all this beauty and prodigality, it is possible in some way to feel the love that nature shares with all its beings.

In an attempt to build or recall a holistic vision of health as a balanced condition where the joy of living can emerge, it may be relevant to think over different sorts of living –very different from the allegedly advanced western modern life: hunter-gatherers, for example. Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it, the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. There are two possible courses to affluence: wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little.

“We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the Vegetable Life …” is what I read over and over again in the “Message to the Western World” sent by the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy -from the northwest of the North American continent- to the United Nations in 1977. Reading and re-reading this document time and time again causes a sensation of finding myself before a revealing message. Today I would like to share some of the personal experience that was generated by my becoming aware that my welfare, my health, my life itself are all related to the life of trees, to the life of forests.

Like many other Indigenous Peoples, the Katu in Laos depend on the forests for their livelihoods. Living in the heavily forested Annamite Mountains near the Vietnamese border, the Katu in Laos practise shifting cultivation and hunt and gather much of their food, fibres, medicines and building materials in the forest. Until recently, that is. A new study of four Katu villages in Sekong province in the southeast of Laos describes the impacts that a deteriorating environment and restrictions on traditional livelihoods are having on Katu people's diets, health, culture and livelihoods.

From 17 to 23 July in Cuenca, Ecuador, over 1,300 participants from 80 countries in the five continents met under the slogan of “The voices of the Earth are calling” to analyze global health problems and to draw up health promotion strategies for all. The final declaration at the end of the event identifies neo-liberal policies transferring wealth from the South to the North, from the poor to the rich and from the public sector to the private sector, as the main cause of the worsening of the health conditions of the majority of the world population. Privatization of public assets and “free trade” the brand of neo-liberalism, rely on the World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Financial Institutions to control factors affecting health.

Thousands of indigenous peoples are displaced from their land, which is militarized and expropriated in an unending genocide. Oil exploitation is carried out – causing damages that go uncompensated – without consulting the communities and with the connivance of the government of the time. Transnational companies such as Shell, Repsol, and Maxus appropriate territorial spaces under the pretext that they are of “public utility”, they contaminate bodies of water and river beds, they deforest virgin forests and generate impacts destroying the future.

In 1999, the World Bank's Economics of Industrial Pollution Control research team published a report titled "Greening Industry". The report, which was the result of "six years of research, policy experiments, and firsthand observation", described Asia Pulp and Paper's PT Indah Kiat Pulp and Paper as a "success story". Indah Kiat's operations at Perawang, Sumatra tell a different story, at least for local people. Indah Kiat started its first pulp mill at Perawang in 1984 with an outdated factory imported from Taiwan. The 100,000 tonnes a year pulp mill used elemental chlorine and wastes were discharged into the Siak River.

The herbicide glyphosate was identified in 1974 by John Franz, a scientist working for US-based agro-industrial multinational Monsanto. Today Monsanto boasts that its glyphosate products, which include the herbicide Roundup, are "among the world's most widely used herbicides". Glyphosate works by interfering with the metabolism of the plant and a few days after spraying, plants wilt, turn yellow and die. Glyphosate herbicides also contain chemicals which make the herbicide to stick to leaves so that the glyphosate can move from the surface of the plant into the plant's cells.

Between 1994 and 2004 the land converted from native forests and farms to monoculture tree plantations in Tasmania has increased almost fourfold – to 207,000 hectares. Most farms replaced were organic or used relatively few chemicals as compared to the highly chemically-dependent monoculture tree coupes that replaced them.

Annexation of Mapuche territory by the Chilean State and the imposition of its legal system on all the indigenous peoples that co-exist in the country have marked deep changes in the way of life of the Mapuche people. Between 1881 and 1907, stripped of their territory, their autonomy and their assets generated as an agricultural and cattle-raising society, the Mapuche people fell prey to hunger and to disease that took around twenty thousand victims.

The human health risks associated with plantations of genetically engineered trees, though virtually unstudied, are significant and further legitimize the call to globally ban GE trees. The health risks can be broken down into the following categories: exposure to hazardous chemicals (such as the herbicide RoundUp) applied to the plantations; the harmful effects of inhaling pollen from trees that produce the bacterial toxin Bt; the risks associated with consumption of fruit from GE trees; and the threats of using antibiotic resistant markers in the development of GE trees.

Indonesia’s forests are once again on fire. Smoke from fires in Sumatra caused the worst haze conditions in Malaysia since 1997. An unhealthy smoky haze (a mixture of dust, ash, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide) has been covering Malaysia's main city Kuala Lumpur and 32 other towns. Schools were closed, and hospitals filled with patients complaining of respiratory ailments. Data from Indonesia’s Riau Health Service reported that more than 1990 people have been experiencing upper respiratory infection and eye problems. Malaysia declared a state of emergency on August 11 as the air pollution index rocketed to extremely hazardous levels on its west coast. Rain and breezes scattered the smog last August 12, carrying it north.