Over the past decade, tens of millions of dollars have been invested by funding agencies to improve forest management in Laos with the stated aim of aiding rural development and livelihood security. Despite these investments – including multi-million dollar projects backed by the World Bank, the Government of Finland and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), among others – mismanagement of Laos’ production forests remains the norm.
Bulletin articles
Everyone seems to agree on the need to protect the world’s remaining forests … while forests continue to disappear at the same alarming rate as usual. It is therefore important to distinguish between those who are truly committed to forest protection and those whose deeds and words go in opposite directions. For this purpose, most of the articles included in this issue of the WRM bulletin serve as good examples.
Forest conservation is back on the international climate agenda…big time!
More and more Northern and Southern governments, bilateral development agencies, multilateral development banks and big conservation NGOs are arguing that “countries” should be compensated for protecting the “carbon reservoirs” in standing forests. Under some plans, Southern governments’ forest protection plans would generate pollution rights that the governments could then sell to Northern industries to allow them to continue business as usual.
On April 26, the Swedish Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry organized in Stockholm the seminar “Tilting forest industries from North to South”, aimed at discussing the growing tendency of the Swedish tree plantations and pulp industry to invest in Southern Countries such as Brazil, Uruguay and Indonesia.
Botnia is currently building the world's most controversial pulp mill at Fray Bentos in Uruguay. It is doing so with hundreds of millions of tax payers' dollars funnelled through the World Bank, the Finnish export credit agency and the Nordic Investment Bank. The profits produced, along with the pulp, will be exported.
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 Association of Ecologist Communities La Ceiba – Friends of the Earth Costa Rica (Asociación Comunidades Ecologistas La Ceiba- Amigos de la Tierra Costa Rica - COECOCEIBA- AT), which includes members from various social sectors (academics, professionals, ecologists and peasants), considers that it is time to creatively develop new models of forest cover restoration. It is time to give the opportunity to autochthonous reforestation models based on some of the basic principles that the country’s main natural ecosystem itself -the tropical forest- is silently teaching us.
In the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo lies the large, dense, mountainous Ituri rainforest, which spans approximately 70,000 square kilometers. It is an area rich in natural resources. Tropical timber is harvested (legally and illegally) on a large scale. Minerals such as gold and coltan (used in mobile phones) are exploited intensively after the trees have been cut down.
After 12 years, powerful multinational mining companies have been unable to bend peasant resolve in the zone of Intag, Canton Cotacachi, Imbabara Province in the northwest of Ecuador.
This nightmare began in 1991, when an anonymous Japanese man started to travel around the area in his vehicle. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing. Towards 1995, it became known that he was “prospecting for mines” that is to say, he was looking for minerals in the subsoil.
Late last year, Norconsult, a Norwegian consulting firm, won a US$1.5 million contract to supervise construction work of the Xeset 2 dam in the south of Laos. Norconsult won the contract, which is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), without any competitive bidding.
Uganda has witnessed growing protests in recent weeks over government plans to give over 7,100 hectares of Mabira Forest, a nature reserve since 1932, to SCOUL for sugarcane growing. Razing the forest could devastate a fragile environment, sparking soil erosion, drying up the climate and removing a buffer against pollution for Lake Victoria. Technical, professional and expert advice against the project as well as public protests culminated in the resignation of the Board and senior technical staff of the National Forestry Authority (NFA).
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”.