Before cutting any trees, Tasmania's timber industry divides the forests into coupes. It bulldozes roads through the forest. When the coupes are clearfelled only the large logs are taken. The vast amount of wood remaining is heaped into piles. Helicopters drop what the industry calls liquefied diesel gel (and the rest of us call napalm) and the remains of the forest are burnt. Huge clouds of smoke hang over Tasmania for weeks.
Bulletin articles
On last April 27, an international team of representatives including from the Ghanian Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining (WACAM) called on Newmont Mining, the world's largest gold producer, to urgently reform its human rights and environmental practices at its global operations and to permanently cancel plans for new, open-pit mines on densely populated farmland in Ghanaian forest reserves, in Romania, and on a mountain in Peru that is a source of community drinking water.
In October 2002, the World Bank adopted a new policy on forests. Reversing the previous policy which had prohibited the Bank from funding projects that would destroy primary moist tropical forests, the new policy, adopted with the encouragement of the WWF, was aimed at encouraging greater involvement in forestry. The aim was to help the World Bank achieve the targets set by the World Bank-WWF Alliance for securing 200 million hectares of forests under responsible logging (‘independently certified sustainable forest management’).
In 2004, the task manager for the World Bank’s Forest Concession Management and Control Pilot Project (FCMCPP) described Cambodia’s forest concession system as "inadequate on paper, dysfunctional in reality". He might have added that all the concessionaires had committed legal or contractual breaches and extensively looted what the World Bank termed "Cambodia’s most developmentally important natural resource". Such considerations have not, however, prevented the World Bank from investing five years in supporting this same flawed management system and its piratical operators.
Despite years of controversy surrounding World Bank forestry projects in India, the Bank is pressing ahead with major plans to make the way for large loans for further forestry projects in several States. In 2005, the Bank has pilot “community forest management” (CFM) and participatory forest management (PFM) projects beginning in Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand states. These pilot projects are intended to precede major loans for full-scale State-wide forestry projects.
Indonesia has the third most extensive area of tropical forest on earth and is one of its richest centres of biodiversity. It is also the world's second largest palm oil producer with an output of over 11 million tonnes of Crude Palm Oil (CPO) in 2004. With Indonesia’s forests disappearing at 3.8 million hectares per year, the land area converted to oil palm plantations has doubled during the past decade to nearly 5 million ha - an area roughly the size of Costa Rica. Most oil palm plantations in Indonesia are established on land which was, until very recently, mature rainforest.
Back in 1989, when Australian company Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation was hired to produce a World Bank-funded feasibility study of Nam Theun 2 hydropower dam, the project under study was a dam to generate electricity for export to Thailand.
Letter to the President of the World Bank: Mr. James D. Wolfensohn
cc’d to:
- Executive Directors and Alternates
- Bank Group Senior Management
- Vice Presidents, Bank, IFC and MIGA
4 April 2005
President Mr. Wolfensohn,
In Brazil, in the past 60 years, soya agriculture has expanded from nought to over 21 million hectares of cultivated land. Soya cultivation was initiated in the more arid Southern states of Brazil, but has now extended to the central and western areas, encroaching principally upon the cerrado (the Latin American savannah woodland) and to a lesser extent the Amazon Rainforest. Driving the expansion of soya agriculture, amongst others, has been the huge expansion of cattle ranching in Brazil, primarily in the states of Mato Grosso, Pará and Rondônia.
The Forest Stewardship Council's Plantations Review is finally under way. The 12 member committee elected to implement the first part of this process (the “policy phase”) held its first meeting from 9-11 March in Stockholm, Sweden. Four members –two northern and two southern- from each of the three chambers (social, environmental and economic), will have the task of leading this process and elaborating clear guidelines for future certification of plantations. A possible second “technical phase” is now being discussed by the committee members.
Oil is a big problem at the global level, where its use is resulting in climate change through the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At the same time oil is an even bigger immediate problem in the areas where it is extracted, particularly in the tropics. In these regions, oil exploration and exploitation impact heavily on local peoples, whose lives and livelihoods are destroyed though deforestation, forest degradation and coastal ecosystem destruction, all accompanied by widespread human rights violations and impoverishment.
With an area of 27,834 sq km, landlocked Burundi is a battleground between the Rwandan army and militia from the Congo, and is plagued by a protracted civil war, which has claimed the lives of thousands of Burundi civilians.
The over 5 million Burundi population is unevenly distributed geographically, with large populations displaced by economic crisis and war, forced to change their livelihoods.