Bulletin articles

 

 

For a long time, WRM, along with other organizations and social movements, has denounced the certification of projects that are destructive to forests and their web of life. These projects have also proven to be detrimental to communities living in and depending on forests. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification not only legitimates industrial logging in tropical forests and vast areas of monoculture plantations, but has also been associated with carbon markets, by certifying trees planted for “carbon capture".

For several years now the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has celebrated the International Day of Forests on March 21. This year’s theme is: “Forests, Climate, Change.” But the changes we see that the FAO promotes only increase the problems of the peoples who depend on forests, such as the trend in Southern countries, like China, Malaysia, Brazil and Chile, to promote commercial plantations of genetically engineered trees.

 

 

 

 

  Transgenic forestry in Chile is shrouded in mystery, secretiveness and corporate lobbies. While state agencies deny that transgenic trees have been released into the environment, laboratories, universities and companies devoted to forestry-related biotechnology multiply in the country, supported by public funds. Schizophrenia, a sudden scientific interest or reprehensible political irresponsibility?

30 years ago, during FAO's World Forestry Congress in Mexico in June 1985, the Tropical Forestry Action Plan (TFAP) was adopted as the new international framework for forest-related action (1). In November of the same year, representatives of bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, supported by some international NGOs, also accepted the TFAP (later renamed into Tropical Forests Action Programme) as a framework for their bilateral and multilateral activities and funding related to tropical forests.