China: The usual quiz about eucalyptus plantations and water

Eucalyptus were first introduced into China in about 1890 and were originally planted as ornamentals and roadside shade trees. The primary high tide of Eucalyptus plantations mainly for timber production in China came after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. It was not until the 1950s that extensive areas of plantations were established by state forest farms for the purposes of supplying mining timbers (pitwood), poles for construction and fuel wood. Government-sponsored planting programs during the 1970s and 1980s increased the plantation estate to about 600,000 ha. In 1954, a large area of eucalyptus plantations was set up in Leizhou Peninsula, Guangdong Province. The introduction of eucalyptus began in southern, south eastern harbour and coastal cities, convenient for international traffic.

Current emphasis lies on establishing short term plantations --mainly Eucalyptus-- under intensive management methods, encouraging Departments at each level to manage them, to stimulate export trade, to set up eucalyptus chip production factories and to establish eucalyptus pulp factories. As a result, China has an area of almost 1.5 million hectares of trees planted to date (figure of 2004).

The southern province of Guangdong has an area of more than 677,300 hectares planted with eucalyptus trees. Coincidentally, the province has experienced a worsening drought in recent years. Local deputies to the Guangdong provincial people's congress and members of Guangdong provincial people's political consultative conference put forward their observations about the damage caused by eucalyptus trees to the province's ecological environment.

Even voices from the Academia have sounded an alert. Li Sidong, a professor from Guangdong Ocean University --and also a member of Guangdong provincial people's political consultative conference--, urged the forestry department to further strengthen the management of the planting of eucalyptus trees. Li said he was worried that large-scale eucalyptus planting would reduce soil quality, suck up moisture and create "a green desert."

According to the China Daily newspaper, the city government of Yunfu enforced a ban on planting eucalyptus in March of this year, and Zengcheng, a suburban city of Guangzhou, has decided to follow this move.

But, typically, many forestry experts have refused to believe that eucalyptus have absorbed underground water and contributed to the drought. Forestry expert Xu Daping, for example, rejected the possibility that eucalyptus had damaged local ecological environments and that the trees were harmful to the fauna on the grounds that "In Australia, the eucalyptuses are home to many small kangaroos and possums”. The argument of this forestry expert is based on a fully wrong conception: ¡that large scale tree plantations can be equated to forests!

Quite apart from any academic approach, this misconception --replicated all the way round by large-scale monoculture tree plantation promoters, by the way-- do away with any basic consideration of ecosystems and biodiversity. Eucalyptus --originated between 35 and 50 million years ago-- dominates the tree flora of Australian forests. Many eucalyptus trees grow over an understory of banksias (native wildflowers) and grevilleas (small shrubs with beautiful blossoms) and there are almost 600 species that can be found in almost every part of the continent, adapted to all of Australia's climatic conditions. How can this picture be compared to large high-yielding, intensively managed, short rotation plantations of 4 or 5 eucalyptus species?

While Chinese forestry experts launch an investigation to determine whether eucalyptus trees have done damage to the environment on the grounds that there is not enough evidence to prove that eucalyptus trees suck up large amounts of water, the people who suffer the effects on the field have a clear idea about that. They have already experienced and denounced that the increasing number of eucalyptus trees has partly contributed to the worsening drought in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

Direct experience has taught people what usually forestry experts are reluctant to accept --that large scale eucalyptus plantations have dire impacts on water. There are already plenty of cases all over the world that prove this. What else do they need?

Article based on information from: “eucalypts blamed for worsening drought”, Zheng Caixiong, China Daily, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2006-04/10/content_563658.htm ; Eucalypt tree improvement in China, Martin van Bueren, Centre for International Economics, December 2004, http://www.aciar.gov.au/web.nsf/att/JFRN-6BN9E8/$file/ias30.pdf

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India: End of Forest Evictions? New Forest Bill

Since India gained political independence in 1947, Protected Areas and development projects like large dams, mines, industries, roads and army cantonments displaced millions of people in the country. Planning Commission estimates suggest that 21.3 million people were displaced by development projects between 1951 and 1990 alone. Estimates of people evicted by Forest Department—to create new Protected Areas and to clear ‘forest encroachments'—are not available. According to various movement groups working among Indian forest communities, about 300,000 families were evicted in last five years! There was no rehabilitation, and people of all ages were driven away from their homes, forests and agricultural land, to make way for plantations and wildlife areas.

For people living in India's forests, this is an old old saga continued -of persecution, repression and eviction. Historically, the concept of forest remained rooted in the social and political ‘other', the space that shelters wild animals, the marginal and the vanquished, and hence something destroyed- or waged war on- as alien and evil. Inversely, forests have also been ‘valued' as land: to annex, colonise and settle subjects the state can control. It did not matter that autochthons living in forests perished -physically and culturally- in the process, in every recognizable period of Indian History.

The independence of the country brought greater misery to people living in forests. The new State made old colonial forest laws harsher, limiting people's access to forests. Meanwhile, in the name of production forestry, depletion of the natural forests went on. F orests kept on vanishing, and the raj of the 'Forest Mafia' started as a new breed of traders and contractors joined hands with an increasingly corrupt forest administration. The official/unofficial loot of forests destroyed the ecology of traditional communities. Poverty, unemployment and starvation forced both migrants and autochthons to become wage labourers under the forest Mafia, thus starting the process of proletarization of the forest people of the country.

There was also, officially, the ‘necessity' of bringing 33 % of India's geographical area under forest, following the new National Forest Policy of 1988, and the new “conservationist” avatar of the Forest Department who till then had hacked and lumbered more than half of Indian forests (between 1951 and 1979, more than 3.33 million hectares of natural forest were felled to make way for “industrial” plantations), took up the ‘challenge'. Instead of assessing various socio-economic factors behind deforestation, the department came up with the simplified logic of ‘encroachment', as if the forest cover of the country would miraculously increase if communities of landless people occupying and using forest land for subsistence level cultivation could be evicted. The juggernaut of conservation rolled on, evictions started large-scale and neither the Government of India nor conservation NGOs paid any heed to the fact that most of India's forests were taken away from communities by the colonial Government without settling any rights, and the real and biggest encroacher is the Forest Department itself! The Settlement of Rights process, which is mandatory under the Indian Forest act 1927 before declaring any area as Government Forests, never took place in many areas, and in many other, surveys were incomplete.

People with unrecorded rights inhabit a strict ‘state space', where they were treated as intruders, encroachers and enemy of the forest and wildlife. The Government does not need to justify any coercive action against them, and even physical abuses, sexual assault and murder are in order. The forest evictions in India are marked for the exemplary brutality which accompanies them. The recent (2005) report by the Tiger Task Force (appointed by the Prime Minister of India to probe into tiger deaths in various Tiger Reserves) describes this situation as “truly a war within, imploding inside reserves and taking everything in its wake.”

In the central Indian State of Madhya Pradesh a Korku hamlet of ten families was looted and burnt in July 2003. In Khandwa district, an adivasi was shot dead when he confronted the forest officials who picked up his wife after chasing the villagers away from their lands. The Special Reserve Protection Force (SRPF) was deployed in the Adivasi areas of Gujarat to help forest department officials. The villagers are threatened, their houses looted and the menfolk are frequently arrested and beaten up. In places like Bastar in Chattisgarh, villages are surrounded by the CRPF. At the slightest sign of opposition, Adivasis were branded as extremists, arrested or shot at and killed.

A marauding Central Empowered Committee (CEC) constituted by the Supreme Court and staffed with forest officials and hardcore wild-lifers and conservationists added to the muddle. The CEC has been going around the country issuing eviction orders at will. Around ten thousand fisherworkers drying fish on the southern Sunderban island of Jambudwip in the eastern State of West Bengal were evicted by its orders. West Bengal police lathicharged (beat with sticks) fisherworkers who went to the island on October 16, 2003, the World Food Day. Their equipment and food packets were destroyed and thrown into the sea. CEC was also held responsible for the massacre of the innocent, landless Adivasis who took shelter within the Muthanga Wildlife Sanctuary in the Wayanad district of Kerala .

In a co-ordinated move to thwart large scale evictions, the Adivasis and other forest communities in the States of Orissa, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh started filing thousands of claims towards ownership of their lands in the office of the respective District Collectors. This process of filing claims to their lands took the shape of a mass-movement. Campaign for Survival and Dignity, a platform of mass organizations of Adivasis and forest dwellers from 11 states, launched organized protests, coming out with details of what was happening, the legal position, how these were systematically violated and what should be done.

To diffuse the rising tension in tribal areas of the country, and to make amends, the government issued two new circulars in 2004 that prescribed regularization of lands cultivated by tribals since 1993 and conversion of all forest villages (plantation workers colonies on forest land) into revenue villages within 6 months. These were stayed by the Supreme Court of India. In December 2004, a further set of guidelines barred eviction of tribals except “ineligible encroachers” (which meant that evictions would continue). On May 12, 2005, yet another guideline barred evictions of any forest dweller without a due process of verification. A final set of guidelines were issued on November 3, 2005, that for the first time provided for a village-level process of recognising rights. However, evictions continue to this day, and in this month, people were evicted from forest land in the tiny Himalayan State of Sikkim.

Political compulsions of the present Government and sustained and effective lobbying by forest movements led to the controversial Forest Rights Bill 2005 which for the first time in India's History talks of tribal stake and rights in forests, and promises to safeguard those. The bill proposes 13 specific rights, heritable but not alienable or transferable like, amongst others, ownership of land up to 2.5 hectares, rights to forest produce and grazing, restoration of illegal cancellation of titles, grants and leases to lands, traditional and customary rights, rights to common community resources, habitat rights for primitive tribal groups, right to access to bio-diversity and community right to intellectual property and traditional knowledge, and right to protect forests.

The Bill had Indian ‘Conservation' lobby up in arms, with NGOs and forest officers crying foul. They objected to the bill on the grounds that the law will distribute forest land to tribal families, undermine forest protection, and because wildlife and people cannot co-exist. The Bill was interpreted to mean ‘the end of Indian Tiger'! The Bill was also opposed by forest movements because they found it too vague. The Government had to send the Bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee, which only now has concluded its Report on the Bill, after recording depositions from both forest movements and ‘conservationists' for the last three months. The Report is not yet made public, and one has to wait to see what the Government of India decides to do about it. But there is no doubt that the Bill heralds a new beginning of India's forest history, and things are going to change, whether for good or for bad.

With the proposed Forest Rights Bill, the struggle of India's forest communities enters a more decisively ‘political phase', where forest movements need to be on constant vigil, to reach possible benefits and relief from the Bill to the downtrodden and the poor among the ethnically and economically diverse groups of people living in and around India's forests. There is a need to ensure that the agenda of establishing social control of forest communities over India's forests do not get eclipsed by the sudden and dubious ‘communalization' of this country's strong Paper/Pulp Lobby and the World Bank, and the zeal to see the end of state hegemony over forests, does not mean playing into the hands of these forces who also are seriously advocating ‘pro-community' legislative and policy reforms in forestry sector. The struggle for people's rights and the forest bill thus becomes a struggle against the imminent corporatization or privatization of forests. Though physical contours of this struggle are not too defined yet, it is wiser to be on guard, and not get lulled into a sense of false security and euphoria that the Bill might bring.

By Soumitra Ghosh , e-mail: soumitrag@gmail.com , and C.R. Bijoy. Data acknowledgement: Campaign for Survival and Dignity, National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers.

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Indonesia: Expansion of pulpwood plantations including Acacia

In 2004, the Minister of Forestry, through Decree No. 101/Menhut-II/2004, issued a policy on accelerating pulpwood development to supply the pulp and paper industry. The policy received broad acceptance in the province of Jambi by PT Wira Karya Sakti (PT WKS), a forestry company subsdiary of the giant Sinar Mas Group (SMG).

SMG is a leading conglomerate operating in USA, Australia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong and the Netherlands, covering a wide range of businesses: oil palm plantations, property, finance via Bank International Indonesia/BII, and pulp and paper industry. Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) is SMG's business group dealing with pulp and paper (see WRM Bulletin Nº 101) . This giant group has two pulp factories in Indonesia --PT Lontar Papyrus in Jambi and PT Indah Kiat Pulp & Paper (IKPP) in Riau-- and has been granted two pulpwood concessions: PT Arara Abadi (Riau) and PT Wira Karya Sakti (Jambi).

As a matter of fact, the supply for APP comes not from these two concessions, but also from converted natural forests. APP collapsed throughout 2000, the New York Stock Exchange even suspended its stock sale in January 2001, and its debt rose to US$13.4 billions. However, it could manage to ‘maintain' its business kingdom.

Currently, it is expanding its operation (pulpwood development) by taking over more land . In Jambi and Riau alone, it managed to expand its concessions up to 490,000 hectares. In South Sumatra its new concession encompasses 380,000 hectares. It has also taken over PT Finnantara in West Kalimantan, formerly owned by Finnish company Stora -Enso. More than twelve financiers and Export Credit Agencies are involved in its development, among others Barclays (United Kingdom), Norddeuscthe Landesbank (Germany), Dresdner Kleiwort (UK/Germany), ING (the Netherlands), Credit Suisse (Switzerland) and Hermes (Germany).

PT WKS in Jambi is developing Acacia mangium, the raw material for pulp, and is the major supplier for the pulp-paper company PT Lontar Papyrus Pulp and Paper (LPPI) which is currently greatly expanding its area of operations. To date, the area having been and to be turned into ‘acacia land' by the company has fetched 500,000 hectares in the province, a dramatic increase since 2004. This Sinar Mas subsidiary's concession lies in 4 districts in Jambi, namely Tanjung Jabung Timur, Tanjung Jabung Barat, Muaro Jambi and Batanghari .

More than 100,000 hectares of forest land which were previously logging concessions will become part of the Sinar Mas Group's industrial timber plantation. Some time ago, PT WKS took over 38,000ha which used to be a logging concession. Apparently this was not enough: PT WKS has also taken over 65,000 ha of concessions which had belonged to PT Sadarnilla and PT Lokarahayu and were then controlled by the state-owned company PT Inhutani V. The company justifies its expansion by saying this is abandoned, neglected, ‘critical land' where illegal logging is taking place. In fact, PT WKS already controls a 190,000ha industrial timber concession.

Meanwhile, a Jambi-based activist, Deni Kurnia, denounced the financial ‘surprises' delivered by PT. WKS and PT. LPPI, both to the state and all the parties/people involved. Not only the alleged financial gain offered by the companies is by no means comparable to the environmental consequences of the destructive and evil practices, but also the government grants lots of facilities each year for the two companies to achieve their ‘production target'. Furthermore, the business expansion of the giant group has come into conflict over boundaries and tenure with the local peoples, indicated by the large number of “claims” and “re-claims”.

The industrial plantation scheme came with promises of foreign currency generation for the State, but local reports tell about its outcome of legal digression, bureaucracy complexities, and sociocultural, economic and environmental degradation.

Article based on information from: “Cooking Acacia in Policy Spices. Policy and Social Analysis of PT Rimba Hutani Mas/Sinar Mas Group, Jambi”, Helmi Rivani Noor, Community Alliance for Pulp Paper Advocacy (CAPPA), December 2005; “ Position Statement for the withdrawal of the permit extending the area of PT WKS”, December 2004, presented to the Indonesian Minister of Forestry, MS Kaban in Jakarta, by several organizations and individuals.

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"We want to hold accountable those companies that built or profited from the dam - the Korean company that built it or the Belgian company that owns the dam now. There should be letters sent saying, 'You are making money from this, why don't you take some responsibility and help all those people impacted by this project - allow them to move back?' We need to have enough land for us to be able to farm, which means moving to areas we consider our old territory, and we need to be given the right to live there with self respect and independence."

A Nya Heun man, from Champasak province in the south of Laos, said this to Oxfam Australia's Melanie Scaife in November 2005. The dam he's talking about is the Houay Ho dam built by a consortium of Daewoo (South Korea), Loxley (Thailand) and Electricité du Lao. Electricity from the 150 MW dam is exported to Thailand. In 2001, Belgian company Tractebel Electricity and Gas International bought up a majority share of the dam. In 2003, after a merger, Tractebel EGI became Suez Energy International, a wholly owned subsidiary of multinational corporation Suez.

Melanie Scaife's interview with a Nya Huen man who she called Boun, to protect his identity, is published in International Rivers Network's April 2006 issue of World Rivers Review.

"Before the dam was built we used to have enough to eat," Boun told Scaife. "We fished the rivers, collected vegetables in the forest and had plenty of rice. We lived on our own without having to depend on aid or support from anyone else. Now in the resettlement areas, we are totally impoverished and dependent on others."

Boun was moved to a resettlement area about 30 kilometers from his home. "We need enough land - this is the basic problem of our people," Boun said. "We don't have access to resources now because we have been moved into an area with no forest or land to call our own. My people used to live in a very big forest and were used to living in an expansive area with a lot of natural resources. Now we've been put in a very concentrated area where all the resources around us are owned by somebody else and it's a huge shock for us, a huge change from what we were used to."

Since being moved to the resettlement area, many villagers are forced to sell their labour to survive, working in nearby villages weeding other people's land. Some villagers have started moving back to areas near their old villages. "We are returning as close as we can to our old territory, to land not flooded by the reservoir," Boun said. "We are not allowed to move back to our old areas, so officially we are living in the resettlement sites but in reality we are hardly there at all. Last year about half of the families abandoned the resettlement sites - this year it's up to two thirds. At this point the government has not actively stopped us from moving back but in the future, who knows?"

In 2004, Proyecto Gato, a Belgian NGO, filed a complaint under the OECD's Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, arguing that Suez Energy International should be responsible for adequate compensation for the people forced to move to make way for the dam. Proyecto Gato also asked Suez Energy International to make basic health care, education equipment and medicine available to the resettled villagers.

Suez Energy International argued that it was not responsible because the resettlement was carried out before they bought into the project. The OECD supported the company's argument, citing a letter from the Lao Minister of Industry which stated that Energy International had fulfilled its contractual obligations to the Lao government.

In February 2005, as a result of the pressure from Proyecto Gato, Suez Energy International repaired several drinking water wells in the Houay Ho resettlement area. But issues crucial to the Nya Heun's livelihood such as land remain unresolved.

In October 2005, the Vientiane Times reported that the Houay Ho Power Company (of which Suez Energy International owns 70 per cent) planned to invest US$20 million to expand electricity production from nine hours a day to 24 hours a day. The work would include diverting water from two other rivers into the Houay Ho reservoir.

By coincidence, before I read Melanie Scaife's interview with Boun, I had written three times to Pascal Brancart, Senior Vice-President Sustainable Business Development at Suez Energy International. I asked Brancart for a copy of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion, as well as a full list of all the documents produced on this project. I asked whether the work involved the construction of any new dams (either by Suez Energy International or any other companies). I asked whether the work would result in any new evictions. I asked about studies of the downstream impacts of diverting water into the Houay Ho reservoir. I asked whether Suez Energy International considers that the resettlement problems associated with the Houay Ho dam are now resolved. And I asked for a copy of the environmental assessment report (which Swiss consultants Electrowatt completed while dam construction was underway in the 1990s) and the due diligence report (carried out by the engineering consulting firm Knight Piésold before Tractebel bought a majority share in the dam) - documents that the company has repeatedly declined to release.

Brancart did not reply to my e-mails. So far he has not returned my phone calls. I intend to keep trying. When I do speak to him, I'll pass on Boun's message to Suez Energy International: "One: take responsibility for the dam's impacts. Two: help us return to our home."

By Chris Lang, e-mail: http://chrislang.org , www.chrislang.blogspot.com