A new report on the social impacts of development on Solomon Islands’ communities has found village-based enterprises strengthen family and village life. The report, “Caught Between Two Worlds”, concluded that, in contrast, large-scale industrial enterprises such as logging and plantations often create tension, more work for women, and damages villagers’ way of life.
Bulletin articles
Transnational corporations are increasingly dominating all economic sectors where profits can be made. Most of them have incorporated social and environmental concerns to their discourse, though few of them actually comply with their own declarations in this respect. Regardless of their good intentions, the sheer scale of their operations make environmental sustainability practically impossible, while competition to dominate global markets has made social concerns almost antagonistic to profitability.
Cameroon, with a population of around 15 million and a territory of 475,440 sq km, has an estimated 22 million hectares of forests, 64% of which are tropical rainforests lying at the southern part of the country, while the remaining 36% are in the central and northern Savannah areas. Atlantic coastal forests grow in areas with relatively fertile soils and hold some of the greatest biodiversity found anywhere in Africa.
The Republic of Congo, often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville, has a total area of 342,000 sq. km, 60% of which is covered by rainforests (21.5 million hectares), mainly located in the scarcely-populated north of the country. The forest and its resources are the main source of livelihood for most of the rural population living there.
Equatorial Guinea is a forest-rich country, and its valuable species --Okoumé, Ilomba, Andouk-- have attracted the logging industry, particularly since the early 1990s. Most of the country --some 2.2 million hectares-- is covered by forests, which provide for the livelihoods of between 80-90% of the population, which obtains fuelwood, food, medicines, building materials and other products from it.
Efforts to conserve certain threatened species or habitats have in too many cases been implemented at the expense of local peoples throughout the world. Although modern conservation thinking has been shifting away from its original anti-people bias, it has yet to redress many of its past abuses and to accept that people are part of the environment. The following quotes from the conclusions of a study on Tanzania carried out by Neumann (see details below) may prove useful to that debate.
Elected forest councils (Van Panchayats) have been the only existing example of reasonably autonomous legal space for community forest management in India. After having managed for years demarcated village forests in Uttarakhand, the hill region of Uttar Pradesh, Van Panchayats are being replaced by top-down “participatory” forestry projects pushed by the World Bank.
Hydroelectric dams have always enormous social and environmental impacts. The construction of these megaprojects is a major cause of forest loss, as well as resulting in widespread human rights violation. As stated in the World Commission on Dams' report, the construction of dams has caused the displacement of 40-80 million people worldwide. More than 40,000 dams have already been built and the Mamberamo dam in West Papua is in the process of becoming one more.
In spite of the potentially devastating impacts it might entail, Japanese paper manufacturers are carrying out research on genetic engineering aimed at the "creation" of trees yielding more cellulose.
The process to review, discuss and improve the Malaysian Criteria, Indicators, Activities and Standards of Performance (MC&I) for Forest Management Certification has been subject to disapproval by several Malaysian non-governmental, community based and indigenous peoples' organisations. Though they have been part to the process, they have decided now to withdraw on the grounds that their participation has been somewhat constrained and misconstrued as giving consent and approval to the present MC&I.
Once again, a foreign company is the cause of conflicts for the inhabitants of the Province of Puntarenas. The Río Minerales company, a subsidiary of the transnational Canadian mining company Wheaton River Minerals Ltd. was granted environmental permits to establish an open cast gold mine at Bellavista de Miramar, for the extraction of 60 thousand ounces of gold per year over a 7 year period, by means of leaching in ponds, using cyanide.
In the previous issue of our Bulletin, we reported on the forestry plan prepared for Mexico by the Finnish consultancy firm, Indufor. In the article we pointed out that the consultancy firm itself emphasised that “the uncertainty of social consequences associated with large scale plantations, has produced a cautious attitude on the part of the rural communities.” We translated this as an elegant way of avoiding the use of a more appropriate word: opposition.