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Uganda:
Why Is FSC Certifying Land Disputes and Human Rights Abuses at
Mount Elgon?
Mount Elgon has seen
major land disputes since it was declared a National Park in 1993.
Villagers were evicted from the park in 1993 and again in 2002.
The area surrounding the park has a high population density and
farmers have little choice other than to keep going back into
to the park to plant their crops. Violence has flared between
the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA), the agency responsible for
managing the park, and villagers trying to make a living. Villagers
say that UWA officials have threatened them, shot at them and
sexually abused them. Several people have been killed.
The situation is
further complicated by a carbon offset tree planting scheme run
by the Dutch FACE Foundation together with UWA. The FACE Foundation
has been planting trees around the boundary of Mount Elgon since
1994. The trees are supposed to store carbon and the Carbon Neutral
Company has been selling carbon credits from Mount Elgon since
2002 (the FACE Foundation and the Carbon Neutral Company share
the same director, Denis Slieker). Currently the Carbon Neutral
Company is not selling credits from Mount Elgon and UWA-FACE is
not increasing the area of trees planted (currently around 8,000
hectares) because of the disputes.
The 25,000 hectare
UWA-FACE project area has been certified by the Forest Stewardship
Council since 2002. In April 2007, SGS Qualifor, the FSC certifying
body, visited Mount Elgon to carry out a reassessment of the tree
planting project. After SGS's assessors had arrived in Uganda,
UWA requested SGS to certify the entire Mount Elgon national park.
At a stroke, the area to be assessed increased from 25,000 hectares
to 112,100 hectares. Undaunted, SGS's team of four people assessed
the entire National Park in three days.
SGS raised three
major corrective action requests during their April 2007 reassessment.
To comply with FSC rules, the certificate could only be issued
once these corrective action requests had been met. SGS, however,
issued a six month extension of the certificate. After a "close-out
visit" by one SGS auditor in August 2007, SGS issued the
certificate. This "close-out visit" did not involve
visiting the area certified, or talking to any villagers.
Accreditation Services
International (ASI), a subsidiary of FSC, is responsible for checking
that certifying bodies comply with FSC's rules. ASI was also in
Uganda in April 2007, carrying out an annual audit of SGS. ASI
reported that SGS's certification of Mount Elgon was based on
hoped for future improvements, rather than what was actually happening
in the National Park. ASI comments that "Major CARs [corrective
action requests] have been closed based on documents and procedures
to be implemented rather than field performance," and adds
"Compliance with FSC certification requirements is not clear."
The audit at Mount
Elgon is actually the fourth time that ASI has noticed that SGS
is not complying with FSC rules: "This issue is a recurring
nonconformity which has already been pointed out following ASI
field surveillance audits in Russia, Poland and Guyana."
SGS is responsible
for a series of controversial certifications. As documented by
WRM in 2006, these include Mondi in South Africa and Swaziland,
Norfor in Spain (now the subject of a formal complaint by Spanish
NGO Asociacion Pola Defensa da Ria), V&M Florestal in Brazil
(certificate since withdrawn, after a V&M guard shot and killed
a villager), Smurfit Carton in Colombia, EUFORES and COFOSA in
Uruguay and another project involving the FACE Foundation, FACE
PROFAFOR in Ecuador. SGS also certified Barama, the Guyanese subsidiary
of Malaysian-based logging company Samling. The certificate was
withdrawn when an audit by ASI in November 2006 revealed that
SGS had issued the certificate without an "appropriate evaluation
against FSC certification requirements".
Having discovered
that one of FSC's Certifying Bodies is systematically not certifying
in accordance with FSC rules, surely the only sensible course
of action for ASI to take is to suspend SGS from issuing FSC certificates.
Instead, ASI requested that SGS "implement appropriate measures
to correct the nonconformity detected". ASI made the same
request a year earlier after auditing SGS's certification of the
Regional Directorate of State Forest in Bialystok in Poland. At
Mount Elgon, ASI found that SGS had not taken any measures whatsoever,
appropriate or otherwise.
When SGS's assessors
visit villages around Mount Elgon, they do so in the company of
UWA staff. Not surprisingly, SGS found that villagers were reluctant
to talk about sexual abuse or human rights abuses at the hands
of UWA rangers. In its public summary of the reassessment at Mount
Elgon, SGS acknowledges that there are disputes over land at Mount
Elgon. It also acknowledges that people have been killed. FSC
criterion 2.3, which states that "Disputes of substantial
magnitude involving a significant number of interests will normally
disqualify an operation from being certified." How many more
people must die at Mount Elgon before SGS accepts that this is
a dispute of "substantial magnitude"?
In July 2007, Stephan
Faris, a journalist from Fortune magazine, visited Mount Elgon.
He reported serious land rights conflicts around the National
Park and found that half-a-million of the FACE Foundation's trees
had been cut down in 2006. Villagers planted the cleared land
with maize, green beans, passion fruit, avocado and bananas.
But SGS prefers the
ostrich position when it comes to news which might affect its
decision to certify Mount Elgon. In September 2007, I wrote to
SGS's Gerrit Marais to ask him how SGS could issue the certificate
given the land disputes at Mount Elgon. I sent Marais a link to
the article in Fortune magazine and asked for his comments. "I
am not aware of the article in Fortune," he replied.
By Chris Lang,
http://chrislang.org
