• Bangladesh: A forest stolen for cash
• India: Local villagers rallied against polluter paper mill
• Malaysia: Logging company encroaches and abuses Penan villagers
• Sri Lanka: The US Tropical Forestry Conservation Act, a question of sovereignty

- Bangladesh: A forest stolen for cash

Plantation of exotics --rubber, acacia and eucalyptus in particular-- is one major factor that has changed the Modhupur sal forest (Shorea robusta) for ever, with severe consequences for the ethnic communities --Garos and Koch-- who have lived in the forest for centuries.

With loan money from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank in particular, the government has actually established plantations of alien species all over the public forestland. Except for the Sundarban, only fragments of native forests remain in Bangladesh.

Pineapple and banana plantations have also expanded in the Modhupur sal forest in the recent times, with too much use of pesticides, including DDT and imported hormone to make the fruit bigger and ripen quicker, posing a serious concern. Now both pineapple and banana production and trade are controlled by the Bangalee traders.

In Bangladesh “social” forestry on public forest land means big cash deal with loans coming from international financial institutions. The practice of “simple plantation” forestry has been passed for “social”, “community” or “participatory” forestry. The land belongs to the Forest Department (FD); loan money comes from the Asian Development Bank (ADB); and the FD establishes the plantations on public forestland, cutting native forests and bushes with the argument that the local species are less productive and grow slow. The locals and often outsiders are drawn into it as the so-called participants or beneficiaries who have no say about the selection of species, while the production and trade are controlled .

According to some appalling statistics about the state of the Modhupur forest given by the Tangail Forest Office, out of 46,000 acres in the Tangail part of the Modhupur forest, 7,800 acres have been given out for rubber cultivation, 1,000 acres to the Air Force, 25,000 acres have gone into illegal possession and the Forest Department controls only 9,000 acres.

In Modhupur, once abundant with medicinal plants, one can hardly find native species such as Gandhi Gazari, Ajuli (Dillenia pentagyna), Dud Kuruj, Sonalu (Cassia fistula) (Golden shower), Sesra, Jiga, Jogini Chakra (Gmelina arborea), Kaika, Sidha, Sajna, Amloki (Emblic myrobalan), and Gadila.

Currently, the Forest Department is implementing the second rotation of fuelwood plantation throughout the country with loans for the Forestry Sector Project from the ADB. The controversy, debate and protest that the first rotation of plantation (beginning in 1989-90) generated are still alive. The Forest Department continues to ignore all these protests and controversies around plantations.

Article extracted from: “Modhupur. A stolen forest, robbed Adivasis”, by Philip Gain, Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), sent by the author, e-mail: sehd@citechco.net

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- India: Local villagers rallied against polluter paper mill

The Kali Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save the Kali) made a dramatic move against the serious pollution that the West Coast Paper Mills (WCPM) is causing to the Kali River by discharging untreated effluents. For long local people have suffered enormously from the pollution as they were repeatedly threatened with job losses if WCPM was pressurized to be environmentally responsible.

On 30 September, villagers from worst affected Kariampalli, along with representatives of Environment Support Group, Parisara Samrakshana Kendra, Alternative Law Forum and Samvada, rallied through the Dandeli town and entered the WCPM campus in time for the Annual General Meeting.

Shareholders were met with individually and pressed to hold their company's leadership accountable for their lax environmental management and criminal neglect of affected communities. Clearly caught off guard, and deeply embarrassed, Mr. Chandak, Executive Director of WCPM, offered to meet with key 'leaders' of Kali Bachao Andolan. He was told that he must meet all, or none would meet him.

In over two hours of deliberations that followed, Leo Saldanha, speaking for KBA and the affected villagers, charged the company with:

* Willful negligence causing serious pollution of the Kali River, and its ecology and extracting water far in excess of consented quantities.
* Causing grievous injury and harm to villagers downstream of the effluent discharge point.
* Criminal neglect of villagers affected by the pollution incident which on 29/30 June 2003 led to an epidemic outbreak of gastroenteritis and death (see http://www.narmada.org/related.issues/kali/documents/cm.complaint.20030714.html ).
* Lax approach to statutory warnings requiring the company to install a state of the art effluent treatment plant. Further, carelessly discharging fly ash from the power plant, including in a local college campus.
* Gross violation of production limits set, as the company was on record that it was producing more than twice the consented quantity. This resulted in more fresh water intake, and doubling of pollution, with consequent adverse impacts on public health and environment.
* The regulatory authority appears to have colluded with the company by not examining report details and failing to take appropriate action.
* The company has behaved in a manner as to threaten the local communities with dire action if they questioned its errant behaviour.

Mr. Chandak had little to offer in explanation. He was also unable to deny any of these charges. Consequently he made the following commitments:

1. WCPM will undertake the expenses of providing drinking water to all villages affected by pollution of Kali due to discharge of effluents.
2. WCPM will invest in a mobile medical unit to provide immediate health relief to affected villages.
3. WCPM will accept monetary claims from all affected families. These claims would include cost of loss of income and livelihood due to disease, death and disease of cattle and failure of crops.
4. One year's livelihood support would be extended on claim to Jahnu, a Gowli who suffered acute renal failure, and also his sister-in-law, who lost a new born infant, due to pollution from WCPM. Mr. Chandak also confirmed that the production process would be modernized to make it elemental-chlorine free, but not soon.

This protest marks an important departure in the nature of events in Dandeli; local people have now been shown the way ahead in negotiating a better deal for themselves and those who work in this large paper mill.

Article based on information from: “KBA Protest Enters West Coast Paper Mills”, press release 6 October 2003, issued by Environment Support Group, e-mail: esg@bgl.vsnl.net , on behalf of Kali Bachao Andolan; “Epidemic Outbreak of Gastroenteritis and Death due to Pollution of Kali River by West Coast Paper Mills”,
http://www.narmada.org/related.issues/kali/images/dandeli.protest.html

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- Malaysia: Logging company encroaches and abuses Penan villagers

Long Lunyim is a Penan community from Sungai Pelutan, Baram, located in the Miri Division of the state of Sarawak, Malaysia which used to be a part of another village called Long Tepen. The people of Long Lunyim decided some years ago to leave the village of Long Tepen and establish as a separate longhouse altogether slightly further away over disputes with the Long Tepen's headman on the encroachment of logging activities onto their customary land.

The logging company Lajong Lumber, a subsidiary of Rimbunan Hijau, has been showering the chief of Long Tepen with cash and his sons with jobs with the company in exchange for the people's land. The company's operations started to get nearer and nearer to Long Lunyim and eventually encroached onto its individual farms and communal forestland. When the Long Lunyim people went to the company to complain and to demand Lajong Lumber to stop their operations, the company would simply reply that it had already paid their chief and that he had allowed them to enter the land.

The Long Lunyim community had written several letters from 2000- 2003 to several local authorities and the company itself asserting among others, that they no longer belonged to Long Tepen or the authority of its chief and committee and since they far outnumbered the latter the company had no right to buy their consent from Long Tepen.

In August 2003, a blockade was put up by Long Lunyim which was then dismantled after six days when the protestors were invited to see the General Manager of the company in Miri, who showed receptive to all of their demands.

However on September 4, the police came looking for a member of Long Lunyim, Mr. Semali Sait, promptly arrested him and confiscated his father's gun, which by the way, does possess a valid licence. They handcuffed him all the way to the Marudi Police Station, a journey by land and river which could have taken some 6-7 hours.

His fellow villagers became highly traumatised in the process, a bad thing when you are about to begin your planting season. The next day his father Sait Kiling went to the nearest police station to demand explanation and he too was then arrested, handcuffed and brought to the Marudi lockup. Both father and son were under remand for 8 days and were then wrongfully charged under Section 506 of the Penal Code for alleged criminal intimidation. They are now out on bail.

The arrest and charges were based on a police report lodged by Lajong Lumber's Camp Manager and a worker who claimed that they were threatened and intimidated by five Long Lunyim villagers, including Semali and his father. The two of them however vehemently denied the accusation and they have proof to back their claims.

But the company acted cold blood. While the people were either in jail, worried sick in Marudi for the two and the other three who were never detained but named in the police report, or scared to death back at home, the company managed to push in 10 tractors, 2 units for road construction and 8 for logging, into the people's forest reserve area, to grab all the timber there very quickly. “As-is” business.

If you wish to express your support to the Penan struggle, please visit:
http://www.wrm.org.uy/alerts/october03.html#2

Article based on information provided by: Sahabat Alam Malaysia/FoE Malaysia; e-mail: sammarudi@yahoo.com , sent by Damien Ase, e-mail: dase@celcor.org.pg

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- Sri Lanka: The US Tropical Forestry Conservation Act, a question of sovereignty

Multilateral and bilateral agencies --World Bank, Asian Development Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID and Japan Bank for International Cooperation-- have long provided loans and grants for southern countries, throwing them into a debt trap. Sri Lanka is no exception. To repay its foreign debt, the country has overexploited --with an impact on future generations-- its natural resources, including large scale felling of timber, shrimp farming, cultivation of cash crops, mining and the privatisation of water supplies.

On the other hand, large-scale loans and grants for unsuccessful conservation projects --such as tree planting, watershed management, coastal conservation, pollution control, wildlife, medicinal plant conservation-- have added to the foreign debt of the country with no improvement in the environment sector in general.

Now, the Sri Lankan government is planning to sign an agreement under the US Tropical Forestry Conservation Act --US Public Law 105-214, for Debt Reduction for Developing Countries with Tropical Forests--, to bind Sri Lanka's forests for external debt. Under the provisions of this legislation, if a tropical country possesses at least one globally important tropical forest, then that country may sign an agreement with the United States of America to reduce the debts to the former. This may be achieved by debt buyback, by debt for nature swap or by loan restructuring.

However, the key element in the TFCA is the concept of Tropical Forest Funds. These are intended to be established, under the laws of the debtor country, as endowed trust funds to be managed in perpetuity. They would make grants for the conservation, maintenance and restoration of tropical forests in the debtor country, primarily to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved with environment, forestry, conservation and indigenous peoples and other local or regional entities.

The rationale of the agreement is that it would ensure that resources would be allocated to the protection of the forests --that would not otherwise have been so used--, by alleviating indebtedness. But the primary aim of the TFCA is for the US Government to obtain control over the forest resources of tropical countries. It is unrealistic to expect a foreign country such as the US to behave totally altruistically in managing Sri Lanka's forest resources.

One of the reasons for the TFCA is the protection of the plant and gene bank which is only available in tropical forests, while one of the activities envisaged under the Tropical Forest Funds is research into the medicinal uses of tropical forest plant life indicating that this issue was not far from the minds of US legislators. The US may, therefore be expected to benefit fully from research into the plant and gene resources of Sri Lanka's forests, to the detriment of the local population. US pharmaceutical companies are well known for getting patents for plant based pharmaceuticals, sometimes of substances that have been in use for millennia.

Additionally, the TFCA may allow the US to maintain its high C02 emission levels. If the US were to eventually ratify the Climate Change Convention's Kyoto Protocol, it could use the tropical forests that it declares to protect as sinks under the Clean Development Mechanism to absorb its C02 emissions.

Under the TFCA, the forests would be managed by a committee comprising representatives from the US government, international NGOs other than local representatives. But there are many threats of bringing international NGOs to protect local resources. Some of them are infamous for biopiracy and some of them keep biodiversity sites with military support, and their approach is removing people from the forest and buffer zones --not a suitable option for Sri Lanka.

Therefore, the question of sovereignty remains the main issue. If the Government of Sri Lanka is unable to protect its natural resources, then the state is no longer viable in that it cannot protect the interests of the country. Furthermore, can the government sign such an agreement without any public consultation?

Article adapted from: “Tropical Forest Conservation Act and Ecological debt”, by Hemantha Withanage, Environmental Scientist, published in The Island Newspaper, October 1, 2003, sent by the author, e-mail: hemantha@efl.lk