• Indonesia: Proposed UFS pulp mill threatens forests and nearby communities
• Malaysia: MTCC certificates logging concession disregarding Penan’s rights and will
• Sri Lanka: The Wanniyala-Aetto make use of their right to return to their forest
• Thailand: Big conservationism at odds with indigenous peoples’ lives

LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS

Indonesia: Proposed UFS pulp mill threatens forests and nearby communities

The existing Indonesian pulp and paper industry is currently generating a tremendous strain on forests. In that context, a new $1.2 Billion huge pulp and wood chip mill is planned to be built in the province of South Kalimantan.

The project is owned by the company “United Fiber System (UFS)” which is owned, among others, by Swedish capital investors. The new pulp mill would worsen the current depletion of forests in Indonesia, and the national and local problems connected to it.

Currently pulp industry feeds mainly on tropical forests and rampant illegal logging. Approximately 75-80% of wood used in pulp industry in Indonesia originates in forests, and recent reports by international research agencies and international donors have indicated that the majority of timber harvested from Indonesia’s forests --up to 73%-- is illegally logged.

As long as the rate of deforestation and associated illegal logging caused by the pulp industry has not been eliminated, any investment in a new pulp mill would only compound the structural problems of deforestation. Every major pulp mill in Indonesia has caused either major social problems, pollution or deforestation -- in most cases all of these. Research indicates that the proposed pulp mill in South Kalimantan will be no exception.

Within the concession area of UFS alone there are 73,000 hectares of highly endangered forest, and the wood chip mill threatens another 40,000 hectares of precious lowland forests. As UFS admits, an expansion of the facility's capacity to 1,2 million tonnes of pulp production per year is projected for the near future, most likely destroying additional forest.

Furthermore UFS states in their Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA) leaked to the public --despite efforts by the company to keep it secret-- that a complete loss of aquatic sea life in the area of the pulp mill is to be expected, resulting in the loss of hundreds of livelihoods in traditional fishery. Also a massive regional increase in acute respiratory diseases as well as skin diseases and malaria is forecasted in the company's EIA. The construction of the deep sea port for the wood chip mill will destroy rare and precious mangrove forests and will significantly harm the aquatic sea life in the area.

CAPPA, the Community Alliance for Pulp-Paper Advocacy, an Indonesian NGO network, documented four fishing villages, including those dependent on shrimp farming which are likely to have their fishing grounds impacted by waste from the proposed mill. The shrimp breeding grounds utilized by the local communities are a mere 400 meters from the proposed mill site. In addition, CAPPA's findings indicate that the proposed location for the mill is on an ancestral gravesite. According to CAPPA, the initial phase of obtaining land for the mill has led to community conflicts.

The proposed UFS pulp mill and wood chip mill do not contribute to the sustainable development of Indonesian Borneo, but, on the contrary, contribute to widespread deforestation, and to a further degradation of nature and human living conditions in the region.

Article based on information from: “Environmental organisations oppose the building of the new pulp mill in Indonesia”, Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, Friends of the Earth and Finnish ECA Reform Campaign, http://www.vientiluotto.net/Epretxt.html#070604; Letter to James D. Wolfensohn Concerning proposed MIGA Guarantee for the Controversial $1.2 Billion United Fiber System Pulp Mill in South Kalimantan, WALHI, https://www.mpi.org.au/kampanye/hutan/strukturisasi/lamp_sp_wksel_150304/; Joint international NGO letter to Austrian companies involved in the pulp mill project, disseminated by Daniel Hausknost, Friends of the Earth Austria, E-mail: daniel.hausknost@global2000.at

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Malaysia: MTCC certificates logging concession disregarding Penan’s rights and will

The Penan in Sarawak have been struggling for their rights to land and forests for more than twenty years, not only by setting up logging road blockades, but also by legally claiming their Native Customary Rights (NCR) in court. In spite of their ongoing resistance against logging and plantations on their native land, the Sarawak government and its concessionaries --logging and plantation companies-- continue to disrespect the Penan's rights on their land.

In an unprecedented move, the Malaysian Timber Certification Council MTCC issued a certificate for Forest Management to Samling Plywood (Baramas) Sdn. Bhd. for a logging concession on which a Penan landright case has been pending since 1998. This means that Samling now sells its timber from the area as being harvested "sustainably" and "legally"--timber extracted from Penan territories against the declared will of the communities. Despite repeated protests by the Penan, MTCC has refused to live up to its own (pretended) standards and to withdraw the abusive certificate granted to Samling in October 2004.

As the European Union is currently discussing to accept MTCC, and the Dutch Keurhout Foundation has already accepted MTCC (for timber from Peninsula Malaysia) as being of "legal" origin, the European NGOs Bruno Manser Fonds, Rainforest Foundation Norway and FERN have felt that governments should urgently be informed about the disregard of indigenous peoples' rights by MTCC and should be urged not to accept MTCC as a proof of sustainability or legality.

Consequently, they have issued the following statement which has been circulated among NGOs for their signature, urging governments and industry not to accept Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme MTCC based on its disregard for indigenous peoples' rights:

“We, the undersigned non-governmental organizations (NGOs), urge the European Union, European governments and the European timber industry not to accept the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme (MTCC) as a guarantee for sustainable or legal timber forest management because the MTCC does not respect indigenous peoples’ rights. We are particularly concerned about the recent certification of a Forest Management Unit in Sarawak, which openly disrespects the Penan people's rights. The undersigning NGOs support the Penan communities' call for an immediate withdrawal of this certificate.

The Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC) prides itself for guaranteeing the sustainable and legal origin of timber products marketed under its certification scheme. However, Malaysian NGOs have criticized MTCC's disregard for indigenous peoples' rights for years. The recent certification of Samling Bhd. --both the first private company and the first Forest Management Unit in Sarawak to be certified-- confirms MTCC's disrespect for indigenous communities in an appalling way: one of the most disputed forest areas in Sarawak was certified without consulting all of the affected Penan communities.

Large parts of the recently certified Samling Sela'an-Linau Forest Management Unit in the Ulu Baram area of Sarawak are in an area in which the Penan claim to have Native Customary Rights (NCR) and have submitted this to the Court in 1998. The case is still pending at the Sarawak High Court. By certifying the area, MTCC is in breach of its own certification standards according to which “long-term tenure and use rights to the land and forest resources shall be clearly defined, documented and legally established”.

Samling first entered the area in the early 1990s, relying on police force to break the indigenous peoples' resistance to logging. Ever since logging began, the Penan have been protesting against the destruction of their forests, on which they depend for hunting as well as for gathering wild sago, medicinal plants and rattan for their handicraft.

In January 2005, more than 600 sedentary and semi-nomadic Penan living in the area protested against the certification, a protest confirmed by a meeting of the community representatives on 18 August 2005.

In a letter of 25 January 2005, to MTCC, headman Bilong Oyau of Long Sait (Miri Division, Sarawak) wrote: “We strongly reject this certification (...) We have been living here in peace until the timber companies came to disturb our life and encroach into our forest.(...) Many of us have suffered due to the Samling logging operations: our rivers are polluted, our sacred sites damaged and our animals chased away by people who deprive us of our livelihood and culture.”

While MTCC continues its worldwide public relations efforts, it ignores the Penans' protest and refuses to withdraw the abusive certification of an area which is being logged against the will of the affected indigenous population.

Acceptance or rejection of MTCC as a standard of legality is truly important and can be seen as a barometer of what standards European governments will establish for “acceptable” tropical timber. This is particularly relevant in the light of decisions being made in the FLEGT licensing process and timber procurement policies of EU member states.

The NGO community disagrees with assessments made by EU member states, such as the UK and Denmark, and by the timber industry, such as the Dutch Keurhout Association which have deemed MTCC to be a guarantee of legality.

In terms of indigenous peoples' rights, the certification of the Samling Sela'an - Linau concession in Sarawak is totally unacceptable and a further proof that MTCC's "sustainability" and "legality" does not include the basic rights of the affected indigenous population.

We urgently encourage the responsible ministries and the timber industry to reconsider the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme MTCC in the light of this new evidence.

[Firms follow]”

For more information a report about the MTCC concession can be found at: http://www.bmf.ch/en/pdf/selaan-linau-report.pdf

Sri Lanka: The Wanniyala-Aetto make use of their right to return to their forest

The Wanniyala-Aetto ("forest beings") are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka, gentle hunter-gatherers who have lived in a sustainable relationship to their tropical forest environment for the past eighteen thousand years.

Having survived 2,500 years of settlement of their island, first by Sinhalese and later by Tamil migrants from India, five centuries of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisation, and two world wars, the Wanniyala-Aetto were evicted from what was left of their ancestral forests by the Government of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka became independent in 1948. The new Government set about reorganising the country. With funding from the World Bank in 1955, it began construction on the Gal Oya Dam, which flooded the Wanniyala-Aetto's best hunting-and-gathering lands, including their best honey-bee sites and favourite forest caves.

Most of the people were resettled in rehabilitation villages in agricultural areas. But their wisdom keeper and spokesperson, Uru Warige Tissahamy, led many of his people deeper into the forest. In 1977, the World Bank provided the Government with funding for the construction of a huge hydro-electric irrigation project involving the country's largest river system, the Mahaweli Ganga. The river's water was diverted for hydro-electricity, and channelled into reservoirs and irrigation canals. Vast areas of the rain forest were logged, and 11,000 hectares of the Wanniyala-Aetto's last hunting-grounds were clear-cut. Thousands of Sinhalese and Tamil settlers moved in.

Then, at the stroke of midnight on November 10, 1983, the Government evicted the Wanniyala-Aetto from the last remaining stand of their forest homeland, declaring it a catchment area for three new reservoirs financed with Official Development Assistance (ODA) from various foreign donor agencies including USAID. These reservoirs were created to provide irrigation water for so-called "green revolution" intensive agro-production of rice in paddy fields at the edge of the forest. The Government designated the area of forest between these reservoirs as the Maduru Oya National Park which was then set up under the World Conservation Strategy jointly managed by WWF International - World Wildlife Fund for Nature, IUCN - The World Conservation Union, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The Wanniyala-Aetto were forced to resettle into three different districts, splitting up their community and destroying the highly-integrated social structure on which they traditionally depend. These resettlement areas are situated outside the forest, in rice-growing areas totally unfamiliar to and unsuitable for their traditional swidden agriculture, which has become impossible and it is hard for them to grow enough food in the tiny plots they have been allocated. Suffering human rights abuses and maltreatment of every kind, they have also been banned from hunting and gathering in the forest. Presently, a few men have a hunting permit in a small area of the park, but those who do not have it risk fines or prison sentences if they are caught hunting. Over the past few years, three hunters, all with permits, died from shots received from park wardens.

Today only 2,500 Wanniyala-Aetto survive. Their very ancient culture, spiritual traditions, ethnobotanical medical knowledge, and ecological expertise in the management of tropical forest fauna and flora are on the brink of being lost forever. But they have not lost the recall of their land. "I was born in the forest. My ancestors come from here. We are the forest beings, and I want to live and die here. And even if I were reborn only as a fly or an ant, I would still be happy so long as I knew I would come back to live here in the forest" (Uru Warige Tissahamy, 97-year old elder Wanniyala-Aetto wisdomkeeper).

For this reason, over twenty years after having been evicted, one hundred indigenous Wanniyala-Aetto have resorted to their legal right to return to their own land. The park wardens have threatened to take to court those who have returned to the park in an attempt to make them leave once again.

Various organizations are appealing for support for the Wanniyala-Aetto people and propose writing to the President of Sri Lanka asking for the Government to allow those Wanniyala-Aetto who so desire to return immediately to their lands, to hunt for their personal consumption and gather the fruits of the forest in the park without fear of eviction, harassment or violence. (The letter should be addressed to: Her Excellency the President of Sri Lanka, Mrs. Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga, Presidential Office, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka, Fax: +94 112 4333 46)

Article based on information from: "Los wanniyala-aetto regresan a la selva", 21 Oct 2005, Survival, http://www.survival.es/news.php?id=1114 ; "The Wanniyala-Aetto", Global Vision, http://www.global-vision.org/srilanka/

In a recent outburst of “environmental enthusiasm” stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked "paper parks," few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.

The Karen are the most populous of six tribes found in the lush, mountainous reaches of far northern Thailand. Khon Noi, a matriarch of a remote mountain village, huddles next to an open-pit stove in the loose, brightly colored clothes that identify her. Her village of sixty five families has been in the same wide valley for over two hundred years. She chews betel, spitting its bright red juice into the fire, and speaks softly through black teeth. "The government has no idea who I am," she says. "The only person in the village they know by name is the 'headman' they appointed to represent us in government negotiations. They were here last week, in military uniforms, to tell us we could no longer practice rotational agriculture in this valley. If they knew that someone here was saying bad things about them they would come back again and move us out."

"Men in uniform just appeared one day, out of nowhere, showing their guns," Kohn Noi recalls, "and telling us that we were now living in a national park. That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated . . . no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more ‘slash and burn.’ That's what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we've been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years. Soon we will be forced to sell rice to pay for greens and legumes we are no longer allowed to grow here. Hunting we can live without, as we raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo. But rotational farming is our way of life."

In November 2004, six thousand conservationists attended the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. At that conference and elsewhere, big conservation has denied that they are party to the evictions while generating reams of promotional material about their affection for, and close relationships with, indigenous peoples. Financial support for international conservation has in recent years expanded well beyond the individuals and family foundations that seeded the movement to include very large foundations like Ford, MacArthur, and Gordon and Betty Moore, as well as the World Bank, its Global Environment Facility, foreign governments, USAID, a host of bilateral and multilateral banks, and transnational corporations. During the 1990s USAID alone pumped almost $300 million into the international conservation movement, which it had come to regard as a vital adjunct to economic prosperity. The five largest conservation organizations, Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World WildlifeFund (WWF) among them, absorbed over 70 percent of that expenditure. Indigenous communities received none of it. The Moore Foundation made a singular ten-year commitment of nearly $280 million, the largest environmental grant in history, to just one organization --Conservation International. And all of the big international NGOs (BINGOs) have become increasingly corporate in recent years, both in orientation and affiliation. The Nature Conservancy now boasts almost two thousand corporate sponsors, while Conservation International has received about $9 million from its two hundred fifty corporate "partners."

With that kind of financial and political leverage, as well as chapters in almost every country of the world, millions of loyal members, and nine-figure budgets, CI, WWF, and TNC have undertaken a hugely expanded global push to increase the number of so-called protected areas (PAs) --parks, reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, and corridors created to preserve biological diversity. In 1962, there were some 1,000 official PAs worldwide. Today there are 108,000, with more being added every day. The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet's surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected.

More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a "protected" land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan—particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas?

Market-based solutions put forth by concerned groups, which may have been implemented with the best of social and ecological intentions, share a lamentable outcome, barely discernible behind a smoke screen of slick promotion. In almost every case indigenous people are moved into the money economy without the means to participate in it fully. They become permanently indentured as park rangers (never wardens), porters, waiters, harvesters, or, if they manage to learn a European language, ecotour guides. Under this model, "conservation" edges ever closer to "development," while native communities are assimilated into the lowest ranks of national cultures.

It should be no surprise, then, that tribal peoples regard conservationists as just another colonizer --an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony.

If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.

Adapted from “Conservation Refugees”, by Mark Dowie, The Orion Society, November December 2005, http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-6om/Dowie.html