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Global Forest Coalition
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Nš 18: March 2006 Contents:
About Forest Cover Welcome to the eighteenth
issue of Forest Cover, the newsletter of the Global Forest Coalition
(GFC). GFC was established by a group of non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and Indigenous Peoples Organizations (IPOs) to facilitate the
informed participation of NGOs and IPOs in intergovernmental meetings
related to forests. Forest Cover is published four times a year. It
features reports on important intergovernmental meetings by different
NGOs and IPOs and a calendar of future meetings. The views expressed
in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global
Forest Coalition, its founding members or the editors. Ex
Silvis: Compassion and Extinction At this very moment, we are facing mass extinction. Everybody acknowledges it, from peasants in the Andes to indigenous people in the remote Arctic. The United Nations estimates that 400-500 vertebrates, about 400 invertebrates, and approximately 650 plants have become extinct in the past 400 years and that 30 per cent of all fish, 24 per cent of all mammals, 12 per cent of all birds, and 8 per cent of all plants are already threatened with extinction. Guess what. One of the gravest causes of these extinctions is . . . climate change. In other words, the fossil fuel-friendly policies that are threatening human life through droughts, floods and the like are also exterminating many of the planet’s other living things. We always knew that the political and business leaders responsible for these policies had little compassion for most human beings. Now it appears that they don’t have much concern for other species either. These chaps are ready to make a buck out of everything – biodiversity, culture, land, landscapes – as long as they are other people’s biodiversity, culture, land and landscapes. If you won’t see them dancing any folk dances (they’ll get you to do it, and get the audience to pay them the price of admission), you won’t see them abandoning their businesses for the sake of the survival of the planet either. Their determination to keep on tapping cheap oil and coal to fuel their money-making furnaces has remained unchecked by the Kyoto Protocol or anything else. What’s the solution to this predatory behaviour? How can we make decision-makers care about Planet Earth and redirect their enormous power towards protecting life, biodiversity and the atmosphere? We’ve talked to them in hopes they would listen. After all, in some ways they are in the same predicament as everyone else. But little or nothing has changed. Their responses – private-sector partnerships and other commercial deals (even the ones aimed at biodiversity “conservation”) – are causing biodiversity to be lost at alarming rates, plagues to proliferate as a result of careless manipulation of biota and genomes, and whole landscapes to become ever more simplified. As Carlos Fuentes puts it, compassion is a synonym for goodness, piety, and above all commiseration with those who suffer pain. Lack of compassion is exactly the opposite: lack of commiseration towards those who need it most. This perhaps points to the answer to the question we have been asking throughout so many useless workshops, seminars and roundtables: who should be our partners? Do we still think out partners will be wealthy profiteers without compassion? Perhaps we should think again.
The
“Access of Evil”: A Phenomenon of the New Millennium? Remember when American politicians coined the phrase the “axis of evil” and used it to excuse their excursions into other peoples’ territories? Well, now we have a real axis – which is itself moving into other people’s territories. It’s operating under our noses at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in negotiations on “Access and Benefit Sharing”. Call it the “access of evil”. This new “access of evil” is a fluid bunch but has a central core group of Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the hidden direction of the United States. At times these parties are ably assisted by two other groups. The first is a network of countries that can be counted on to take over from the core group when everybody has grown bored with their interventions and change text on their behalf. The second is a group that helps the core group obstruct any attempt at genuine progress by pretending to be confused, jet-lagged or just plain stupid (or maybe they aren’t pretending). You only had to sit in the room at the working groups on traditional knowledge and Access and Benefit Sharing meeting in Granada (23 January – 3 February 2006) listening to nations like Argentina, Mexico, India and Malaysia spout off about what they claimed to think was going on to know that there was a deeper evil behind the apparent stupidity. Mind you, the two CBD working groups that met in January are negotiating matters that are at the heart of Indigenous rights. These are the protection of traditional knowledge related to genetic resources and biodiversity, and the sharing of the benefits of that knowledge. Governments of what is called the “like-minded” group of megadiverse countries may pretend that the two issues are distinct. But they’re not. The medicinal plants, seeds and other genetic resources that have the greatest commercial value are almost always already known by Indigenous Peoples’ and other local communities. Tapping that knowledge is corporations’ best short cut to raw material for their pharmaceutical and seed industries. Thus it’s no accident that the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBio) prefers to hire Indigenous people as bioprospectors. Nor is it implausible, as it is rumored, that bioprospectors in Africa pretend they are ill when they arrive at a local community so that they can spy on the medicine-men or -women who treat them. But if traditional knowledge is big business these days, the question is: big business for whom? For industries like Monsanto and Bayer? For private institutions like INBio? For national heritage committees like the one the Brazilian federal government set up, to which Indigenous Peoples are invited as “guests” only? And has anyone ever asked Indigenous Peoples whether they want this big business in the first place? If governments had just, for once, listened to the statements of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity during the discussions on traditional knowledge and access and benefit sharing last January, they would have realized that Indigenous Peoples are not talking about big business. They’re not talking about selling genes. They’re talking about respecting rights – including the internationally recognized human rights of Indigenous Peoples – and about protecting knowledge and sacred values. They emphasize time and time again that traditional knowledge cannot be private property and thus cannot be patented or otherwise commodified. The point of the above-mentioned subterfuges is always to enable industry to get its hands on environmental resources, so many of which lie in Indigenous Peoples’ territories. For example, skilful use of negotiating tricks can help ensure industry’s market access by restricting communities’ access to the CBD itself. “Pure paranoia!” I hear you say. Really? Then why did we get a flurry of new registration requirements just weeks before the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD (20 to 31 March 2006)? Why is access to the COP and thus to the Ministers themselves restricted to “approved” organizations? Is it really because people are applying to come to the COP simply to “get out of their own countries” (a claim that comes from the pen of a secretariat staffer) or is that just an excuse for the secretariat to do the bidding of the new “access of evil”? “Pure conjecture!” I hear you say. Well, if it is, why then did Canada introduce text that would restrict Indigenous representation to government delegations? If the intent was simply to ensure better quality representation, why did the New Zealand delegation, in the person of the Minister himself, assure us that there would be no “stakeholders” on their delegation? Isn’t the decision not to include Indigenous representatives indicative of the level of effective participation these delegations want? This COP is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it could turn out to be the one that used “efficiency” as an excuse for reversing the current practice of trying to ensure effective participation. We need above all to defend our right to have our say, the right of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to effective participation and free prior and informed consent. Requirements for certificates of origin or disclosure of legal provenance are not going to protect Indigenous rights any better than aspirin is going to treat cancer. How dare governments talk about an international regime to ensure “prior informed consent” when there is so clearly no prior informed consent of Indigenous Peoples with the international regime itself! What we need at this
COP is to find just one country with enough guts to face down the “access
of evil” and deny consensus to the anti-Indigenous Canadian proposal
and all the other similar proposals the “access” might dream
up. We need one country that doesn’t need the trade deals that
the “access of evil” offers, or its overseas aid, or its
bribes. Do you think we will find it? Clean
Development Mechanism or Climate Destruction Madness? The eleventh Conference of the Parties under the UN climate convention that was held in Montreal towards the end of last year may have been the most controversial international meeting of its kind since the Rio de Janeiro summit in 1992. While there is ever-growing consensus that humans are changing the climate, what to do about it remains disputed, and the disputes continued in Montreal. One of the most hotly-debated issues is the Kyoto Protocol, launched in 1997 but only implemented in February 2005 after Russia’s ratification brought the number of signatories to the required level. Kyoto’s coming into force was widely applauded as a breakthrough, but scepticism remains about its effectiveness. One reason is that the US government – the biggest greenhouse gas emitter – has failed to sign the treaty, along with Australia. Another is that Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – under which Northern countries can put off reducing greenhouse-gas emissions at source by investing instead in “green” projects in the South – is failing. The CDM appeals to Northern countries because it allows them to continue burning fossil fuels. It appeals to Southern countries such as India and Brazil because it promises investment. Meanwhile, it’s supposed to help with global warming by stimulating climate-friendly sustainable development in both North and South. Yet in spite of enormous investment in time, effort and spin, the CDM is not meeting anyone’s expectations. On the one hand, most CDM proponents’ proposals for counting the carbon “savings” their projects make are being rejected as unworkable by the UN. And, one by one, most proposed CDM projects are turning out to be incapable of harnessing the carbon market to create sustainable infrastructure, technology or jobs. Even the few CDM projects that have passed enough tests to be officially registered have demonstrated only very limited benefits. In South Africa, a brick factory converted its furnaces from coal to gas to earn its CDM badge, despite the fact that the coal previously burned will simply find its way to some other place to be burned, and the gas consumed could just as well been used in any other new project. In the context of South Africa’s lack of commitment to reduce overall emissions – the country plans to double coal consumption for energy generation over the next 20 years – such minor tinkerings with the fossil fuel economy are literally meaningless. A more promising-looking South African scheme was set up in the Kuyasa housing project near Cape Town to insulate houses and heat water with solar energy rather than coal-generated electricity. But the project can’t pay for itself by selling carbon credits and has to be heavily subsidized, making it unsustainable. Elsewhere, CDM projects that dispose of waste gases from garbage dumps and mines through flaring or capture would be likely contenders for an “opportunistic projects” award for desperate carbon-trading companies. Plantation firms looking to sell “plantation carbon sink” snake oil to unsuspecting polluters have also found themselves in a spot, trying to explain how socially- and environmentally-destructive industrial tree farms are supposed to soak up greenhouse gases when it is more likely that the opposite is true. Another wheeze struggling to find acceptance is geological “carbon capture and storage”, whereby carbon dioxide is drawn off from smokestacks and shoved underground. However, proponents of this technology have so far not been able to produce much evidence that it could work outside of a science fiction novel. Nor have they been able to explain why a technology designed to help sustain the production and consumption of fossil fuels is going to be a step toward climate security. Where does this leave the Kyoto Protocol and CDM? Many participants at the Montreal meeting will testify that the dominant agenda there was more how to make money out of climate change than anything else. Hordes of CDM consultants and wannabe carbon traders milled around the place, each trying to outdo the others with predictions of carbon market growth and benefits for poorer nations. Many NGOs, too, especially from the North, were flying high in the CDM hot-air balloon, not realising how soon it will have to come back down to earth with a pop, or maybe just a slow leak. It is perhaps a sign of the times that the organizers of the Montreal conference itself tried to bluff the world into believing that it was “carbon-neutral”, and that the flights of all the participants had done the climate no harm, just because they had bought a few over-valued “certified emission reductions.” The other side of the
Kyoto coin, real emissions reductions and real mitigation and adaptation,
seems to have been largely hidden from view by the big polluting nations
and even the UN. However, a small but increasingly vocal number of civil
society organisations are starting to challenge the paradigm, to question
the validity of the claims made in support of carbon trading, and to
call for global climate justice. At the same time, organisations like
the Global Forest Coalition have been challenging governments to do
what they have committed themselves to do: get to grips with the existing
threats to nature’s life-support systems rather than chasing a
fantasy.
Devastating
Dis-synergies On the evening of 30 November 2005, a unique intergovernmental meeting took place. After years of hollow phrases about the need to ensure synergy and improved coordination between different multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), a joint session of the scientific advisory bodies of two important MEA’s took place. Making use of the coincidence that both bodies met between 28 November and 2 December 2005 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the Scientific and Technical Advisory Body of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC-SBSTA) met with the parallel body of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD-SBSTTA). Yet, while the term “synergy” has become one of the biggest buzzwords in international environmental policy, it is in fact what might be called “dis-synergies” that are growing rapidly between these two MEAs. Policies promoted under the CBD could lead to major emissions of greenhouse gases, while the FCCC and its Kyoto Protocol may become one of the biggest threats to forests and other ecosystems. Take some simple examples. It is absurd for the CBD to promote biodiversity conservation strategies like ecotourism that will lead to substantially increased carbon emissions by birdwatchers flown in to remote protected areas. And it is equally absurd for the Climate Convention’s Kyoto Protocol to promote international trade in biomass as a climate change mitigation strategy, when what this means is more forest-destroying monoculture plantations. One underlying problem with the Protocol is that it sets targets without reasonable rules about how they are to be met. The treaty gives the green light to nuclear plants, megadams, methane-burning projects and a range of other schemes that allow governments to claim they are reducing greenhouse gas emissions without actually moving away from fossil fuels. Among these schemes – as we have already reported several times in this newsletter – are destructive large-scale monoculture tree plantations promoted as “afforestation” and “reforestation” projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Genetically modified trees, engineered expressly to be used in such monocultures, will only add to their destructive impacts on forests and biodiversity, since GM tree seeds are able to contaminate natural forests over hundreds of kilometers. One of the few positive outcomes of the November 2005 CBD SBSTTA was a request to the executive secretary of the CBD for a report on the risks of GM trees for forests (and forest peoples, we hope). Many non-government and Indigenous peoples’ organizations hope that this report will convince governments of the need for a moratorium on their release. However, the SBSTTA failed to address other threats triggered by the Kyoto Protocol, like the devastating impacts of large-scale monocultures of crops like oil palm, soy, eucalyptus and sugar cane for biomass production. Considering the insatiable hunger of Northern consumers for any kind of fuel, the international trade in biofuel will create a diabolical incentive to convert thousands of hectares of forests, grasslands and other ecosystems into biomass monocultures. Expanding soy, oil palm and eucalyptus monocultures are already the most important cause of biodiversity destruction in many “megadiverse” countries, particularly Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia (especially the state of Sarawak). In the face of this reality, the slight preference for “sustainable development” projects recorded in the CDM’s rulebook counts for nothing. These days, any kind of profit-making counts as “sustainable development.” Regrettably, while many SBSTTA participants seemed to recognize such facts, the November meeting in Montreal produced little more than yet another version of the old mantra “governments should promote synergy”. Why so timid? Why not simply declare that it is totally unacceptable for there to be such major dis-synergies between the two most important Rio Conventions? The approach both conventions take is going to have to be built on recognizing that climate change causes biodiversity loss and the loss of forests and other ecosystems causes climate change. Remember how the famous
Tale of Two Cities ended? In death and destruction. Let us hope the
common fate of the climate change and biodiversity conventions will
be a better one.
UNFF
6 Fails to Lead the Way in Reversing Forest Loss Ten years ago, the world started up a major intergovernmental process to address the fact that previous attempts to save the earth’s forests had failed. Since then we have had an Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), an Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) and finally – to implement what came out of the first two forums and continue to develop policy – the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). The UNFF had five years to show its stuff. At the end of that period, it had failed to do anything significant. Nothing was implemented, and few were confident that its policy dialogues were producing agreements that could save the world’s forests. And it turned out it needed more money just to wrap up the five-year-old unfinished business from the IFF. That was the state of play as delegates prepared to descend on New York for the sixth annual session of the UNFF held 13-24 February. Little did they know that nature was also moving in, possibly to demonstrate its anger against those entrusted with power and resources to save the world. Two days before the conference opened, the biggest blizzard in the history of New York hit town. So severe was the storm that many UNFF delegates ended up being diverted to other cities in the US. It was as if New York’s patience had been exhausted and it wanted other towns to take over. Fortunately all of us were pardoned and eventually made it to the city, although many were late. As delegates gathered in the plenary to start their deliberations, it was clear that they were determined to get an agreement no matter what it took. Many delegates showed they were willing to make concessions to move things forward, and all previously-agreed texts were re-opened for negotiation. As a result, five days of the meeting were exhausted in creating a new document with almost all text in brackets to indicate that it had not yet been agreed on. Only one text was spared – a passage on Collaborative Partnership on Forests. By the second week, delegates were so far apart that new “contact groups” had to be created to help resolve the differences thrown up by the new text. By this time, delegates had been reduced to debating topics such as whether to discuss “deforestation” or “loss of forest cover”. At 6 pm on the meeting’s closing date, 24 February, not even the disagreements left over from UNFF’s fifth session on arrangements and means of implementation had been resolved. As the interpreters fled the scene, leaving English as the only language of negotiation, French-speaking delegates launched a protest. What were the concrete results of all this? First, the meeting deleted a proposal to set up a fund for the participation of civil society organizations (“major groups” in UN language), making it more difficult for major groups to participate in the UNFF. Second, delegates re-negotiated and watered down an agreement on global goals for forests from the previous year’s UNFF, in order that, instead of having to “achieve” targets by 2015, countries would be required merely to say that they were “working towards” them. Third, while many delegates were keen on loan facilities for Southern countries, they avoided making firm financial commitments to sustainable forest management, and Southern countries were not ready to agree on steps requiring them to reduce deforestation. Fourth, delegates went into a deadlock about whether the resolutions of the UNFF should be voluntary or legally binding that was only resolved late in the night of the last day. In the end, they agreed to leave the question open and conduct an evaluation of the UNFF in 2015. They further agreed to set up an ad-hoc working group which would meet for five days to map out a possible non-legally binding instrument. Delegates also agreed to meet for two weeks every two years, and to have closer relationships with regional forest meetings feeding into the UNFF process. UNFF’s seventh session will be held 16-27 April 2007. As the talks went on,
deforestation continued unabated. It may be time for non-governmental
organizations to consider carefully whether they should be a part of
the UNFF process in the future.
Forest
Law Conference Sets out Voluntary Programme St. Petersburg, Russia was the scene in November for the first ministerial conference of a new international process on forest law enforcement in Europe and Northern Asia. Supported by the World Bank and various donor countries, the conference brought non-governmenalt organizations (NGOs), business and experts together with government delegations to approve a voluntary framework for action by governments and civil society at the international, national, regional and Europe-Northern Asia levels. The conference, held from 22-25 November, was part of the Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Ministerial Process of Europe and Northern Asia (ENA FLEG), an initiative of the Russian Federation. Launched in Geneva in 2004 and continued at a preparatory conference in Moscow in June 2005 (see Forest Cover 16), it follows on from earlier FLEGs started up for East Asia and Africa. NGOs were active in what was felt to be a productive dialogue. At the invitation of the Secretariat, NGOs coordinated by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Taiga Rescue Network reviewed draft documents prepared for the conference. They also listed activities that could help realize the conference’s programme for action. NGOs will also try to insert FLEG issues into the agenda for the G-8 conference to be held in Russia next summer. Another ministerial conference, together with two expert meetings where key stakeholders will assess problems and successes in implementation, is planned in five years’ time. All in all, the ENA FLEG conference succeeded, as one NGO activist had hoped early on, in not being “FLEGmatic” (sluggish and apathetic).
Reports on Other Forest-Related Meetings The WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong: Chronicle of an Announced Failure Pascal Lamy, Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), played a very clever game before the fifth WTO Ministerial meeting, which took place 13-18 December 2005 in Hong Kong. When Lamy realized in August 2005 that chances were near zero that governments would reach a final agreement on all the elements of the so-called “Doha Development Agenda” as the current set of negotiations is called, he started putting all his efforts into one strategy: play down the expectations. Suddenly no WTO official was allowed to remind the media or the public that in July 2004, WTO officials had proudly announced that the WTO was “on track” again, and that the current set of negotiations could easily be wrapped up in Hong Kong. Seldom has an organization so actively played down expectations for its very own ministerial meeting. And so it was that millions of dollars were thrown away on flights, hotels and ministerial dinners – to say nothing of the hundreds of police who kept order and maltreated dozens of farmers – for a meeting that was not expected to deliver anything concrete in the first place. Yet downplaying expectations had the virtue of making the meeting to seem to “succeed” just enough to hold the WTO together. Add a few pledges from Northern countries that looked good on the outside, but were hollow inside, and the scam was complete. On the overwhelming majority of issues that were on the table in Hong Kong, very little progress was made. As far as it concerns negotiations on forest product liberalization under the Non-Agricultural Market Access agreement and negotiations on environmental services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), this relative lack of progress is good news for the world’s forests and forest peoples. These negotiations are heavily opposed by the NGO community because they seriously undermine governments’ ability to protect their own forests through temporary import or export measures or policies to promote socially and environmentally sustainable production. Alas, however, Hong Kong did manage to produce a few negative results. One was a new kind of structural adjustment policy developed to align the South with the trade liberalization ambitions of the North: the so-called “Aid for Trade” initiative. This initiative might look good to the new breed of naïve rock stars and movie stars who fly all over the world in private jets to express their concern about climate change and poverty. But is not what it seems. In practice it means more money for roads, ports, and institutions like trade ministries that are dedicated mainly to exporting the natural resources of the South for whatever low price the North wants to pay for them. Needless to say, these investments will have devastating impacts on the world’s forests. Worse, most of the “aid” supposedly “offered” under the “Aid for Trade” program is money that is already being spent on education, health care, environmental protection and other non-trade related “luxuries” and would be redirected to building roads and other facilities to export timber and other natural resources. It is high time governments reject the WTO as an institution that determines development priorities. Just as it would be
illegitimate for the WTO to judge whether genetically modified organisms
(GMOs) are safe or not – and happily the dispute settlement body
of the WTO has clearly stated that the WTO is not the right body to
judge on the safety of GMOs – it would be inappropriate for the
WTO to determine countries’ forest policies, intellectual property
laws or development priorities. New International Tropical Timber Agreement An agreement “equally unsatisfactory to all” was how the president of the recent UN session on the tropical timber trade described it. Yet the fact that any agreement at all came out of the fourth round of the United Nations Conference for the Negotiations of a Successor Agreement to the International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA) (Geneva, 16 to 27 January 2006) was probably a relief for many timber producers and consumers. On the positive side, ITTA 2006 mentions sustainable forest management as an overarching objective. It also commits itself to strengthening the capacity of members to improve forest law enforcement and governance and address illegal logging and other aspects of the tropical timber trade. The agreement is also better- and more securely-financed than its predecessor. However, the new agreement is still all about commodities. It pays very little attention to the rights and needs of Indigenous Peoples and other forest peoples. It is thus very unlikely that ITTA, 2006 will play an effective role in reducing deforestation and eradicating the poverty of forest peoples. For more information, please visit: http://www.itto.or.jp 
topCalendar of Forest-Related Meetings More information on these and other intergovernmental meetings can be found at: http://www.iisd.ca/linkages The eighth
Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity
will take place from 20-31 March 2006 in Curitiba, Brazil.
Participants will discuss, amongst others, the international regime
on biopiracy, and a report of the working group reviewing the implementation
of the CBD’s forest work program. See also the reports by Sandy
Gauntlett and Simone Lovera. The fortieth session of the International Tropical Timber Council will be held from 29 May to 2 June 2006 in Merida, Mexico. For more information, please visit: http://www.itto.or.jp. The twenty-fourth sessions of the subsidiary bodies of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will be conducted from 15 to 26 May 2006 in Bonn, Germany. Among other topics, the meetings will discuss a proposal to offer countries compensation for reduced deforestation. See also the report by Wally Menne and Simone Lovera. For more information, please visit: http://unfccc.int. The second
Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol and twelfth Conference
of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
will take place from 6 – 17 November in Kenya. See also the reports
by Wally Menne and Simone Lovera. For more information, please visit:
http://unfccc.int. This publication was made possible through a financial contribution
from Netherlands Development Assistance. |
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