“The city of Vitoria in Brazil, owes its name to the “victory” of the colonialist Portuguese against the original indigenous inhabitants of the land. Today, the same name has a totally different meaning. The indigenous Tupinikim and Guarani peoples have retaken the lands that were stolen from them by the giant pulp mill corporation Aracruz Cellulose. They have been joined in the struggle against the company and its plants by other local communities and organizations from civil society who, through uniting in the struggle, have weakened the company’s power.
Bulletin articles
The negative impacts of tree plantations on forests and forest peoples have been highlighted by WRM since its creation in 1986. The 1989 “Penang Declaration” which set out the shared vision of the WRM's members, identified tree plantations as “part of the policies and practices leading to deforestation throughout the world in the name of development”.
From its beginnings in 1986, the World Rainforest Movement has been concerned about how forests, land and rural peoples’ lives are affected by industrial production of a whole range of commodities – soya, paper pulp, petroleum, timber, palm oil, maize, bananas, coffee and many more.
So it was only fitting that, in the mid-1990s, WRM began sounding alarms about another, brand-new export market that could also come to have severe effects on forests and the people who depend on them: the trade in biological carbon-cycling capacity.
The Mumbai-Porto Alegre (MPA) Forest Initiative is intended to serve as a platform for the joining of forces and for the building of solidarity between actors working on a wide spectrum of issues related to social and environmental justice and forests. As economic globalisation is increasingly affecting local communities, the need to create a global movement for ensuring peoples’ rights and forest conservation became an imperative that a number of participants to the World Social Forum decided to set in motion.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports outdoor field trials of GM trees worldwide in 16 countries. While the majority are located in the United States, there are also GE tree test plots in France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Chile and Brazil. China is the only country known to have developed commercial plantations of GM trees, with well over one million trees planted throughout ten provinces.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently published its “Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005”. The accompanying press release begins with the worrying statement, “Deforestation continues at an alarming rate”, but we are immediately reassured by the second line which states: “But net forest loss [is] slowing down”. This may perhaps be slightly cryptic to many. We might ask the obvious question: how can forest loss be slowing down when deforestation rates continue being alarming? That, of course, would miss the subtlety of the FAO experts.
Among other direct and underlying causes of deforestation, Africa's rainforest ecosystems are threatened by logging, as are virtually all of the world's remaining large, contiguous rainforests. These biodiversity rich rainforests provide critical habitat not only to local indigenous but all of the Earth's peoples and species.
Unsustainable production for unsustainable consumption. That’s the case with crude oil, the pillar of industrialization and the so-called modern “growth” advocated by globalised free trade.
It has a huge cost though, that goes on invisible, “externalized” by the macro-economists. But for local communities the cost is far from external. They suffer it in their lungs, their skins, their eyes, their wombs, their daily lives and deaths.
South African pulp and paper company Sappi is planning to increase the capacity of its Sappi Saiccor mill by more than 200,000 tons a year. Sappi Saiccor is the largest producer of chemical cellulose (dissolvable pulp) in the world. Its mill at Umkomaas, about 50 kilometres south of Durban Port currently produces about 600,000 tons of chemical cellulose a year. The chemical cellulose is used to produce things like cigarette filters, sweet wrappers, an additive to washing powder that stops dirt sticking to clothes and the stuff that makes vitamin tablets stick together.
The growing trend of establishing plantations of oil palm has taken its toll primarily on tropical forests, where this palm finds enough soil, water and solar energy to fill its needs (see WRM Bulletin 47).
The typical procedure is to log a certain area of forest and then establish the plantation aimed at the production of oil and kernel oil. But it also happens that plantation companies may “clear” the entire forest by setting it on fire –as has been the case with the notorious fires in Indonesia.
The existing Indonesian pulp and paper industry is currently generating a tremendous strain on forests. In that context, a new $1.2 Billion huge pulp and wood chip mill is planned to be built in the province of South Kalimantan.
The project is owned by the company “United Fiber System (UFS)” which is owned, among others, by Swedish capital investors. The new pulp mill would worsen the current depletion of forests in Indonesia, and the national and local problems connected to it.
The Penan in Sarawak have been struggling for their rights to land and forests for more than twenty years, not only by setting up logging road blockades, but also by legally claiming their Native Customary Rights (NCR) in court. In spite of their ongoing resistance against logging and plantations on their native land, the Sarawak government and its concessionaries --logging and plantation companies-- continue to disrespect the Penan's rights on their land.