Europe (general)

By Chris Lang

The European Forest Institute recently announced a statement in favour of research into genetically modified trees. Several of EFI's 131 member organisations (consisting of research institutes, universities and companies) are involved in research into GM trees. EFI's chairman from 2004 to 2006 was François Houllier, a scientific director at theFrench National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) which is carrying out research into GM trees.

Indigenous Peoples have achieved a major victory at the United Nations level. After more than 20 years of negotiations, on September 13 the United Nations General Assembly finally adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The entrance to the bank has nothing to do with human scale. Built of steel and glass, the building towers over visitors like a spotlessly cleaned, giant machine. A machine for swallowing people and making money, perhaps.

At the end of April this year, the Brazilian Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) was host at its Florestan Fernandes National School (Guararema, Sao Paulo) to almost 80 members of social movements and organizations from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe attending the International Meeting on Monoculture Eucalyptus Plantations. The aim of this meeting was to define an agenda for joint action against the advance of monoculture tree plantations and pulp mills at global Southern level.

The hegemony of the G8 in international forums such as the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change means that global climate policy is been chosen for its compatibility with the existing economic system rather than its effectiveness in reducing emissions.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has the task of carrying out periodic assessments on the state of the world’s forests. In order to do this, it has developed a number of definitions one of which –obviously- is about what can be considered to be a forest. This should have been a relatively easy mission … were it not for the fact that the FAO decided to define plantations –included those of alien species- as “planted forests”.

As it does every two years, FAO has published its report “State of the World’s Forests 2007” (http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0773e/a0773e00.htm), where “progress towards sustainable forest management” is examined. Although it admits, “Deforestation continues at an alarming rate of about 13 million hectares a year,” the report’s overall conclusion is that “progress is being made” and it adds: “but it is very uneven.”

Biofuels are flavour of the month for car-makers and politicians keen to be seen as green without directly addressing the problem of ever-rising transport emissions. The buzz has also caught on strongly in the EU. On 10 January, the European Commission presented its new energy and biofuels blueprint. It can be summed up in just seven words: bad news for people and the climate.

The present eagerness of the European Union to favour the use and import of biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels has risen serious concerns among those who are aware that global warming should be tackled globally and demand drastic changes in the current Western consumer, commercial and production patterns.

In 2003, a committee of the 9th Conference of the Parties (COP 9) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Milan, established that GE trees could be used within the so called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in plantations created to allegedly offset the carbon emissions from factories in the industrialized North.

The modalities of biofuel consumption and production are already causing a negative impact on food security, rural livelihoods, forests and other ecosystems, and these negative impacts are expected to accumulate rapidly. Large-scale, export-oriented production of biofuel requires large-scale monocultures of trees, sugarcane, corn, oil palm, soy and other crops. These monocultures already form the number one cause of rural depopulation and deforestation worldwide.