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.
Bulletin articles
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.
Few people know that the Southern US is currently the largest wood and paper producing region in the world. Successful efforts to protect the last remnants of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, resulted in the expansion of the industry into the recovering second-growth forests of the South. In the last 10 years, more than 100 industrial-scale wood-chipping facilities have been constructed in this region, while paper production alone has increased by one-third since 1985. Approximately 5 million acres of forests are clearcut every year in the region for paper.
The story of the Hoktek T’oi community of the indigenous Wichí people in the Province of Salta (in the north of Argentina) is a story of suffering caused by state policies linked to economic interests. Over the past years, far from finding a solution to end a hundred years of usurpation and injustice, the authorities have only continued to attack the rights and the very existence of the Wichí people, who protected the tropical forest where they have always lived.
What is happening in Espirito Santo --one of the smallest Brazilian states-- is historic. Mighty plantation and pulp company Aracruz Celulose has generated so much opposition stemming from its activities, that the state Parliament recently passed --almost unanimously-- a law banning further planting of eucalyptus until an agro-ecological mapping of the state is put in place, which will define where eucalyptus can and cannot be planted. The law was immediately vetoed --during a "solemn session"-- by the Governor and now Parliament must decide whether to lift or maintain the veto.