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Ecuador: Zero community benefits from FACE
PROFAFOR certified plantations
In
1999, the FACE Forestación del Ecuador S.A. programme, known as
PROFAFOR, hired the Swiss certification firm SGS-Société
Générale de Surveillance to assess the forestry management of
20,000 hectares of its monoculture tree plantations in the Ecuadorian
Andes. In 2000, SGS granted a certificate to PROFAFOR's
plantations for absorbing carbon dioxide emissions (this was the
first case in which storage and uptake of carbon dioxide were
certified in tree plantations and not in real forests), and in
December 2000 granted the Forestry Certification Seal accrediting
that PROFAFOR fulfils “FSC Principles and Criteria.”
What is
FACE-PROFAFOR? FACE (acronym meaning Forest Absorbing Carbon dioxide
Emissions) is a Dutch Foundation that was established in 1990
by the Board of Management of the Dutch Electricity Generating
Companies, N.V. Sep, with the initial objective of establishing
150,000 hectares of tree plantations to compensate for the emissions
from a new coal fired electricity generation plant to be set up
in the Netherlands. The new project was to represent millions
of tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Due to
the costs involved, they turned to the establishment of tree plantations
in developing countries. This is how FACE came to Ecuador where
it established the FACE Forestación del Ecuador (PROFAFOR) programme,
and funded the PROFAFOR del Ecuador company to establish monoculture
tree plantations of exotic species (pine and eucalyptus) to “store”
atmospheric CO2.
Following
the serious negative environmental and social consequences generated
by the establishment of the tree plantations, in 2005 the Ecuadorian
organization “Acción Ecológica” carried out a research, resulting
in the report “Carbon
Sink Plantations
in the Ecuadorian
Andes.
Impacts of the Dutch FACE-PROFAFOR monoculture tree plantations’
project on indigenous and peasant communities”, available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Ecuador/face.html
The field
work identified that - in addition to not guaranteeing economic,
social and environmental benefits to the communities under a certified
forestry project - in the case of the indigenous communities in
the Ecuadorian Andes, FSC Certification has led to a situation
which is precisely the contrary, insofar as the communities find
themselves obliged to absorb the costs of the project as well
as its impacts.
Additionally,
with certification FACE PROFAFOR has improved its image and managed
to make the negative impacts generated by the project invisible.
The local communities affected by certified projects must face
the force and weight of the “Green Label” which deprives their
struggles and claims of credibility.
The report
has identified what PROFAFOR obtains from the communities: land,
labour and money.
Under the
terms of the contracts signed, FACE does not pay any kind of rent
for the community-owned lands where the “Carbon Intake and Storage”
that it is negotiating on the international market, takes place.
FACE PROFAFOR keeps 100 per cent of the Rights for Absorbing Carbon
while it requires that the communities do not use these lands
for any activity other than maintenance of the carbon sink during
the 25-30 years duration of the contract.
Furthermore,
the project's offer to “generate
employment” is
fictitious. Indeed, the communities have
to absorb the negative impact of the project
as, in order to comply with the FACE
PROFAFOR contract,
on occasions they have
had to resort to hiring people from other places, either because
they do not possess the necessary skills to carry out certain
jobs in conformity with technical specifications or because the
plantations are located in places of difficult access and subject
to extreme climatic conditions.
Regarding
money, out of the figure originally offered to the community,
over the first three years PROFAFOR deducts the “cost” of the
plants and technical assistance it provides. In addition to the
communities receiving almost half of what was initially offered,
the contracts oblige them to use the resources provided by FACE
exclusively for the Plantation Contract, but these resources are
generally insufficient to cover the communities’ expenses in completing
the establishment of the plantations.
Additionally,
the contracts ban activities such as grazing. In many cases this
implies that the families owning cattle have to rent land for
their animals, an expense that previously did not exist.
Sometimes due to lack of grazing land they have to reduce their
heads of cattle.
To improve
its image, FACE alleges that its activities are carried out on
degraded lands and at altitudes where agriculture is impossible
and where grazing is not profitable.
The true
situation is very different. FACE introduces pine plantations
in primary ecosystems, not on degraded lands. The plantations
are established in a very fragile ecosystem, of great hydrological
importance: the Paramo, fundamental for the regulation of regional
hydrology and a source of water for most of the population in
the Andes. The great amount of organic matter enables these
soils to retain much water. The implantation of alien tree species
in the Paramo does NOT favour ecosystem stability. On
the contrary, it transforms and damages
the fragile soil structure, causing serious cracking due to the
changes in the water regime. It also affects the flora and the
fauna and determines that the plantations have a poor yield, which
finally leads to prejudicing the carbon sequestering it intends
to achieve.
Eight years
after launching its activities, FACE obtained FSC Certification.
It was of scant relevance that to establish its plantations primary
systems were destroyed, nor did it matter that no measures to
mitigate the impacts generated by the project were demonstrated.
Summing
up, FSC Certification in the FACE PROFAFOR plantations in Ecuador
does not guarantee that the communities “benefiting” from the
project receive economic, social or environmental benefits. Rather
it shows a considerable – and questionable – “flexibility” in
the application of FSC Principles and Criteria.
