Friends of Hamakua is gravely concerned over a proposed plywood/veneer plant and about the State Forest Hamakua Management Plan, which would imply the harvesting of 4,000 acres of old "non-native" plantations. There are several reasons for this concern. Access roads will have to be built into all of these, many forested areas. Once harvesting begins, all public access to these roads will be closed off due to liability concerns. Once the roads are in place, access will be gained to the few remaining native tree stands, which the plan says, may be removed if necessary.
Bulletin articles
The Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change -preceeded by a meeting of its Subsidiary Bodies in September in Lyon- will take place in The Hague in November. The obscure language used in the climate talks -and the even more obscure objectives of many governments and businesses- make it necessary to translate what's being negotiated into understandable concepts in order to facilitate very much needed public participation in the debate.
In 1997, the negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol came up with an ingeniously-named project: the "Clean Development Mechanism." For the lay person, the message was that the governments of the world had finally agreed to create a mechanism that would allow development atmospherically non-polluting. But what this wording hides is anything but clean.
In previous issues of the WRM bulletin we have included a number of analytical and informative articles related to climate change.
WRM Declarations
The WRM has produced two declarations directly focused on the Convention on Climate Change's negotiation process. The first one was disseminated at the fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (Buenos Aires, November 1998).
The second declaration, focused on the issue of carbon sink plantations, was issued in May 2000 .
The Carbon Shop: planting new problems
While climate change experts are trying to find "economically-viable" (meaning cheap) ways out of the climate mess created by Western-style economic development, indigenous peoples and local communities in many countries are in fact implementing a truly Clean Development Mechanism: they are banning oil and gas exploitation in their territories.
One of the main aims of some industrialized-country negotiators at the Convention on Climate Change is to have plantations accepted as carbon sinks within the so-called Clean Development Mechanism. The reasoning seems quite straightforward: while trees are growing, they take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix the carbon in their wood. They thus act as "carbon sinks" and therefore help to counter climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So what's the problem then? The answer is: plenty of things.
Deforestation contributes to climate change through the release of carbon in the forest biomass. Forest conservation and rehabilitation activities thus need to be promoted both to conserve carbon --in the case of primary forests-- and to absorb it --in the case of secondary forests allowed to regrow.
CDM schemes based on carbon sinks in the forestry sector, trumpeted as the panacea for climate change mitigation, are instead socially and environmentally dangerous. Nevertheless, the discussions going on at the official levels ignore those fundamental points. Undoubtedly some have much to gain from this marketing of nature. Who are the influential actors behind the scene at the carbon market? What follows is a brief description of some of the more relevant.
- Industry
The external debt is a heavy burden for Southern countries especially for the poorest ones and for the poorest sectors within them. Governments implement IMF/World Bank-promoted structural adjustment programmes in their economies to ensure punctual debt servicing, which divert funds that could otherwise have been devoted to satisfying basic needs of their population, such as food, education, housing and health.
Sweden, Finland and Norway rarely appear in the media. At least not in relation with the North's footprint in the South and even less so in deforestation-related matters. The US, Canada, Japan and many West European countries usually dominate the headlines. And they certainly deserve it, since corporations based in those countries are actively extracting ever increasing resources from the South and destroying the local and global environment in the process.
A report recently released on the situation of the forestry sector in Gabon confirms the existence of a negative trend that is leading to the destruction of the country's rich primary forests to the hands of a few foreign companies (see WRM Bulletin 28).
Blaming the victims is common practice in many places. In the case of Nigeria, such practice can only be defined as criminal. On July 11, more than 200 villagers from Adeje died when a gasoline pipeline exploded. Many others suffer from terrible injuries. The media reports that "the victims were villagers who were scooping up gasoline after the pipeline, which carries refined petroleum products from Warri to northern Nigeria, was punctured by thieves on Sunday night." So they were theives and those who punctured the pipeline were "vandals". As easy as that. End of the story.