FORESTS AT THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM

The following articles summarise the activities carried out jointly by WRM, the Delhi Forum and the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers of India at the World Social Forum. The articles aim at sharing the issues raised there with all those interested in forests and forest peoples who were unable to attend.

• Moving forward: The Mumbai Forest Initiative
• The impacts of conservation
• Global Environmental Politics: The cheating game
• Displacement: The end result of “development”
• A Focus on Monoculture Tree Plantations

- Moving forward: The Mumbai Forest Initiative

A number of organizations concerned about forests and forest peoples’ rights held a strategy meeting at the World Social Forum to discuss ways of moving forward on those issues. The result was a draft statement of principles aimed at creating a global movement based on a common approach to forest conservation and to the respect of forest peoples’ rights.

All people concerned about this issue are invited to share their views on the draft statement to make comments and suggestions for improvement and to join this process.

The Mumbai Forest Initiative

We, a number of participants at the World Social Forum 2004 in Mumbai, who believe that forests issues are in essence social and political, and that forest communities are increasingly affected by globalisation, agree on the need to create a global movement to ensure forest conservation and peoples´ rights over forests, based on the following principles:

1- The people living in and using forests for their survival needs are the true managers and governors of these forests and enjoy inalienable rights over forests.

2- The protection and conservation of forests demand that these rights be ensured.

3- The institutional mechanism for the social control of forest people -including indigenous peoples and other forest dependent communities- over forests will evolve according to the socio-ecological and economic needs of the communities and will take separate shapes according to the varied cultural profiles of the communities in various parts of the world.

4- Governments must ensure an enabling environment for the community management of forests.

5- Governments must ensure that legislation and policies comply with the above principles.

6- Society at large benefiting for the broad range of products and services provided by forests must support forests communities in their efforts to manage and conserve forests.

7- NGOs and other civil society organizations at national and international level committed to the conservation of forests and to the protection of forest peoples´ rights should have a supportive role to peoples´ initiatives to protect and manage the forest.

8- So-called development and conservation projects which lead to deforestation and forest degradation and to the displacement of forest communities and livelihoods, cannot be allowed.

9- Given the past and present record of the World Bank and other International Financial Institutions in the socio-environmental degradation of forests areas, these institutions must have no role at all in forest policy formulation and forest-related projects.

10- The attempt of corporations, governments and international institutions to convert nature and forests into commodities is not acceptable.

This draft statement of principles is intended to be a first contribution towards initiating a global process of solidarity building among movements, groups, and individuals working on forest issues, at local, national, and international levels. We appeal to all of you to share your views on this draft statement, to add to it and to join this process.

Mumbai, 20 January 2004. World Rainforest Movement, Delhi Forum, National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers of India, Jharkham/Save the Forest Movement (India), New Trade Union Initiative (India), Friends of the Earth International, WALHI/Friends of the Earth Indonesia.

If you wish to send comments or to sign on, you can either send an e-mail to wrm@wrm.org.uy (including your name, organization and country), or do it through our web page at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/statements/form_Mumbai.html

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- The impacts of conservation

The workshop organized at the World Social Forum on “Displacement and Forest Communities” (1) enabled participants to better understand the essential injustice of the prevailing approach to forest conservation and at the same time to realize that it is incapable of conserving forests.

The world is deeply concerned about deforestation, particularly in the tropics. However, forest loss is directly linked to a development model based on the exploitation of the resources contained in forest areas: wood, minerals, oil, hydroenergy, soils for tree plantations and other profitable monocultures. The end result is not development but deforestation and forest degradation leading to loss of livelihoods, impoverishment and displacement of communities dependent on forests.

Although that development model is increasingly challenged by peoples’ movements, governments are unwilling to change it. At the same time, some corporate interests are pushing for the conservation of those resources they need to protect: biodiversity and water. In most cases, this means the conservation of pristine forest areas, which contain high levels of biological diversity and are the sources of water. Those resources are strategic for the pharmaceutical and the biotechnology industries. For the former, it implies potential profits through medicinal plants while for the latter it means maintaining a wide genetic pool available for genetic engineering. Transnational water companies are increasingly interested in accessing the same type of forest areas, rich in water resources. In the three cases, they have an interest in preserving those forest areas as intact as possible, but no interest at all in the survival of the people that inhabit the forest areas they wish to appropriate.

The mechanism promoted worldwide to ensure forest conservation is consistent with the above interests: the demarcation of “protected areas”, void of people. The areas chosen are usually the most biologically rich and are in most cases occupied by forest peoples that have managed the forest sustainably. In fact, the area was already protected by them. But once the government declares it as “protected”, it implies the eviction of the people living there. This outrageous injustice is rarely perceived by the public at large, who either ignore the existence of forest peoples or believe -influenced by the government through the media- that forest people are a threat to forests and that therefore need to be removed to ensure forest conservation.

Through the implementation of that mechanism, millions of people have been evicted from their home -the forest- and have thus lost their means of livelihood. This process is continuing until now, in the name of nature conservation.

But nature is not being conserved. The declaration of protected areas implicitly declares at the same time which areas are “unprotected”: all the rest. When a government proudly declares that “10% of the country is under a protected area system”, it is also declaring that 90% is left unprotected and open for destruction.

Additionally, the eviction of forest peoples implies that the forest is no longer truly protected and that illegal activities (logging, hunting) will begin to deplete the forest resources.

Experience worldwide shows that the best way for ensuring biodiversity conservation is to incorporate conservation to production systems. Experience also shows that the best way to protect forests is to empower those communities that have a real stake in forest conservation: forest communities. They are the traditional and true guardians and recognizing them as such is the starting point in forest conservation.

(1) Workshop organized by the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers, Delhi Forum and World Rainforest Movement. Panelists: Ricardo Carrere, WRM; Usha Romanthan, lawyer, researcher and activist; Milton Fornazieri, International Secretariat/MST; Ashish Kothari, Environmental Action Group; Anil Garg, activist; Smithu Kothari, Lokayan. The following people gave their testimonies on the impacts they suffered under the type of conservation summarized above: Phubri Devi, from the region of Kaimu, the district of Soubhadra; Shamila Ariffin, activist from Sahabat Alam Malaysia; Babu Uram, from the Pathri region, district of Haridwar; Kanak Sing from the Munda tribe, Jharkhand State, member of the Save the Forest Movement.

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- Global Environmental Politics: The cheating game

A workshop on global environmental politics (1) brought up a number of issues and actors of relevance to forests and forest peoples: protected areas, climate change, biodiversity, the World Bank.

The different “solutions” to global environmental problems (deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change) were contextualized as part of the approach of appropriation of nature for profit, carried out through agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF and the FAO and through entirely new mechanisms supposedly created to protect the environment.

The World Bank and other actors promote what they call “sustainable logging”, facilitating the intrusion of the most rapacious capital into virgin forests. As a result, forests have been degraded and the remaining forests -particularly tropical- are threatened throughout the world. Along with the forests, huge numbers of species are disappearing. This has impacted on forest communities, which are broken up and individuals are left to fend for themselves. In India alone, since independence, some 35 million people have been displaced and similar processes are occurring throughout the tropics.

The Convention on Climate Change has not only been unable to fulfil its role in the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases but has been instrumental in the promotion of so-called carbon sink plantations (tree monocultures), thus enabling corporations to continue polluting, while further impacting on local peoples livelihoods and on nature.

Global environmental politics were described as a “cheating game”. People are being cheated by governments and made to believe that that they are doing what needs to be done to address global environmental problems, while in fact doing practically nothing. As a result, climate change, biodiversity loss and deforestation continue putting the future of humanity at risk.

To facilitate this cheating, an entire language has been invented and the environmental movement’s language has been appropriated by power, changing its meaning. The Climate Change Convention’s “Clean Development Mechanism” was used as a good example of this. While not being “clean” at all (having been created to allow polluters to pollute) and while having no relationship whatsoever with “development” (unless the creation of carbon dumps in the South is considered to be a form of development), it gives the uninformed public the impression that it is aimed at the type of clean development that most people would like to happen.

The World Bank was identified as one of the most prominent actors in this “cheating game”. After years of providing loans for road building to open up forests for exploitation, loans for large-scale hydroelectric dams, loans for industrial forestry, oil exploitation, mining and every imaginable cause of deforestation and forest degradation, the Bank suddenly decided to be good and approved a new forest policy, which would prevent the Bank from further destroying tropical forests. This was of course to a large extent the result of years of NGO campaigning against Bank lending. But the fact was this was part of the cheating game: the Bank never implemented the policy. Ten years later it carried out a much publicised and participatory process to review that policy. The result was the approval of a much weaker policy which will probably only see the implementation of its worse aspects.

It was stressed that the World Bank has a big brother (the International Monetary Fund) and that they both work together. One of the major well-documented causes of deforestation are the IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes, carried out through World Bank lending, but this is -of course- not addressed by the Bank’s new forest policy. Anyway, the World Banks role is not to protect forests nor, in fact, to eradicate poverty –which is only in its mandate for cheating purposes. The World Bank’s role is to open up spaces in the South for northern corporations and at that everyone will agree it has done a brilliant job.

Global environmental problems are however very real and governments and international organizations must not be allowed to continue playing this cheating game. Things need to be done, and fast. Another world is in fact possible.

(1) Organized by: National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers, Delhi Forum and World Rainforest Movement. Panelists: Praful Bidwai, Roy Burman, Medha Patekar and Ricardo Carrere

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- Displacement: The end result of “development”

The forest issue was also present at one of the conferences of the World Social Forum, under the broader issue of “Development Induced Displacement. Perspectives and Strategies.” (1)

All speakers stressed the relationship between so-called development and displacement -forced and “voluntary”- of local people affected by “development” projects. Logging, dams, plantations, mining, protected areas, tourism, had a common result: the appropriation of local communities’ lands and resources and the displacement of millions of people affected by those projects.

It was also made clear that the problems presented were not unique, but that repeated themselves in most -if not all- countries of the South. Dams are destroying forests and peoples livelihoods in countries ranging from India to Brazil; logging had the same result in Africa as in Latin America and Asia; mining was as damaging in South Africa as in the Philippines. The countries mentioned were thus “cases” in a wide sea of destruction throughout the South.

Within the many cases presented, it seems relevant to highlight that of the less well-known impacts of tourism on coastal forests and fishing resources. One of the speakers (Hare Krishna Devnath, leader of the Fishworkers Movement), began by saying that “mountains, seas and forests attract people” and that they “are given to tourism to satisfy the pleasure of those who have the money and the leisure to enjoy them.” To enable that to happen, “fisherpeople are evicted from those places.” Particularly during the last two decades in “countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and India, tourism has displaced thousands and thousands of fishermen from their forest, and land has been given to the big industry.” Given that tourism has become a global industry, this type of “development” constitutes a major threat to numerous communities throughout the world.

So-called development was thus shown to mean improvement for a few and detrimental to the majority. In the case of forests it means the displacement of those who inhabit them for the benefit of the companies that destroy them.

So-called conservation was also shown to create serious problems to forest communities -including forced eviction- while not addressing the true causes of deforestation, rooted in the prevailing development model.

Within this context, it was important to provide ideas for moving forward in challenging both the prevailing development model and its anti-people “solution” to conservation.

The Mumbai Forest Initiative was thus officially launched at this conference, as a symbolic way of stressing the social aspect of deforestation and forest conservation as well as highlighting the fact that it was born within the context of a World Social Forum.

(1) Organized by: National Alliance of People’s Movements, India; Brazilian Movement of Dam Affected People (MAB), Brazil; Anti Privatization Forum, South Africa; Focus on the Global South , Philippines; Lokayan, National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers; Mines, Minerals and People; Narmada Bachao Andolan; Delhi Forum, India and the World Rainforest Movement. Panelists: Smithu Kothari from Lokayan, Programme Director of Seeds of Hope and Tribal Self Rule; Trevor Nwane, Anti Privatization Forum, South Africa; Indu Netam, Mines, Minerals and People, India; José Josevaldo de Oliveira, Brazilian Movement of Dam Affected People (MAB), Brazil; Hare Krishna Devnath, leader of the Fishworkers Movement; Ricardo Carrere, World Rainforest Movement, Uruguay; Ashok Choudari, National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers, India; Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South, Philippines; and Medha Patkar, National Alliance of People’s Movements, India.

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- A Focus on Monoculture Tree Plantations

Industrial tree plantations have a long history of negative social and environmental impacts. It was therefore felt that there was a clear need to raise the issue in a specific workshop at the World Social Forum. Participants shared their experiences from a broad range of countries.

The meeting began with an overview of the plantation problem and the confusion generated by the use of false definitions such as that of “planted forests”. Participants agreed that monoculture tree plantations have nothing in common with forests, except for the fact that trees exist in both. Plantations do not play any of the roles that forests play regarding ecosystem functioning and, on the contrary, impact negatively on water, soils, flora, fauna and people.

One of the main impacts of plantations is the appropriation of large areas of land which until then provided to the survival needs of local people. In cases such as that of Sarawak (Malaysia), plantation companies are considered to be far worse than logging companies. The reason for this is that logging companies cut the best trees and degrade the forest, but they eventually leave, while plantation companies cut all the trees, plant their own, and stay. The appropriation of land is total and permanent, thus depriving people of all the resources they used to have.

In all cases, plantations are promoted with the promise that they will generate employment, but reality shows that the opposite is true. The case of Indonesia was brought up as proof of this: in all plantation areas the end result is net employment loss. As forests and agricultural lands are substituted by industrial tree plantations, people lose their sources of income and livelihoods, while the few temporary jobs provided by plantations are no solution to the employment problem they generate.

Impacts usually perceived as environmental are at the same time social. Such is the case of the impacts on water. In Thailand, much of the struggle against eucalyptus plantations was based on their depletion of water resources in areas where water is crucial for rice growing. In this country, local people call eucalyptus “the selfish tree”, precisely because of the way it depletes the water resources.

It was emphasized that eucalyptus was not the problem and that other major plantation species (pines, teak, gmelina, acacia, oil palm) were equally negative in both social and environmental terms. It was interesting to note that while the first documented struggles against eucalyptus plantations took place in India, a participant from this country raised the issue of the impacts of an old teak plantation in his region, which is until now depriving his community of the benefits that forests used to provide them with.

Certification also came up in the discussion and a number of examples were shown to prove that certification was weakening local struggles against plantations. While it was understood that plantations should never be certified as “forests” (because they are not forests), it was also put forward that FSC’s principle on plantations was so weak that it allowed for the certification of almost any plantation.

Participants reaffirmed their commitment to oppose the further spread of socially and environmentally destructive monoculture tree plantations in the South and to collaborate with each other to strengthen the struggle.