• The Mumbai Porto-Alegre Forest Initiative
• Forests and plantations: An essentially social issue
• Taking climate back to people’s hands
• Another forestry profession is possible
• Monoculture tree plantations targeted by a Latin American network

 

- The Mumbai Porto-Alegre Forest Initiative

A number of participants at the World Social Forum 2004 met in Mumbai and believing that forest issues are in essence social and political and that forest communities are increasingly affected by globalization --and new forms of trade and economic liberalization that comes in its way-- agreed on the need to create a global movement to ensure forest conservation and peoples' rights over forests. The principles on which the movement would be based were agreed upon and circulated by the groups as the Mumbai Forest Initiative - Statement of Principles.

A year later the group and some other participants of the World Social Forum 2005 met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, reviewed and revised the Mumbai Forest Initiative. The result is the Mumbai - Porto Alegre Forest Initiative. What follows are its 12 principles with a brief explanation under each.

1. Indigenous peoples and other forest dependent communities living in and using forests for their survival needs are the true protectors and governors of these forests and enjoy inalienable rights over their forests.

The starting point is that forest and forest-dependent communities have inalienable rights over their forests. These rights were overturned during colonization and the new independent states maintained in place the same legislation that had been imposed on communities by the colonial powers. At the same time, this principle acknowledges the role that communities play --and wish to play-- in the protection of forests that provide to their survival needs and that they hold the knowledge to govern them adequately.

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

Most cases of forest destruction are not caused by communities but through decisions taken outside forest areas (e.g. logging concessions granted by governments). If forests are to be protected and conserved, the first step is to ensure that communities’ rights over their territories are legally acknowledged. The complementary step is to ensure that those rights are fully respected.

3. The institutional mechanisms for the social control by forest peoples -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.

This principle stresses the cultural and biological diversity existing within forests and emphasises that diverse mechanisms will be implemented by different forest communities in different types of forests and that these mechanisms will evolve through time to adapt to changes. At the same time, it cautions against the imposition of homogenous recipes from governmental or non governmental actors.

4. The historical role and positive contribution of women in the governance and nurturing of forests must be recognised and their full participation in decision making must be ensured.

If women are made “invisible” in many areas, no-where are they more invisible than in forests, both regarding their role in forest protection and on the differentiated impacts they are forced to endure resulting from deforestation and forest degradation. Acknowledgement of their role must be necessarily accompanied by their right to fully participate in decisions over those forests.

5. Governments must ensure an enabling environment for the community governance of forests.

Governments have a crucial new role to play in creating the conditions for adequate forest protection. Not only must they ensure that rights over forests are put safely --and legally-- in the hands of local communities, but they must also put in place mechanisms to support community forest governance. This “enabling environment” ranges from responding to specific support requested by communities, to putting in place policies that enhance the communities’ ability to achieve forest protection.

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

In many cases, legislation and policies apparently far removed from forests result in forest destruction. For instance, mining and oil legislation linked to energy policies may be contradictory to forest policies based on the above principles and may result in the dispossession of local forest communities and in forest degradation. As a result, all government policies and laws should be previously analysed regarding their possible impacts on forests and forest peoples and modified or withdrawn if necessary in order to avoid those impacts to occur.

7. Society at large benefiting from the broad range of products and services provided by forests must support communities in their efforts to govern and conserve forests.

Public opinion is increasingly clear about the role that forests play in their lives, particularly regarding the environmental importance that forests have in the conservation of water, biological diversity and climate at the local, regional and global level. Support from society is essential, particularly at this stage, when forest communities are not even granted their rights over forests and when forests are disappearing at an alarming rate in numerous countries. Supporting communities’ struggles to govern and protect their forests should therefore constitute an important step in the creation of conditions that bring power over forests back to those best entitled to ensure forest conservation: the forest communities themselves.

8. 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 govern the forest and to be accountable to them.

Civil society organizations can play a positive or a negative role in forests and there are examples of both. The first question they need to pose themselves is whether they are only committed to forest conservation or if they are committed to forest peoples’ rights –and to forest conservation. If the answer is the latter, they need to understand that what communities need is support --and not outside leadership-- and that ensuring long-term forest protection implies true empowerment of forest communities. The role of those organizations must therefore be perceived as a short-term involvement supporting the creation of conditions for self-governance by forest communities.

9. We oppose NGOs and other civil society organizations involved in activities affecting or undermining forest peoples rights and interests.

Though by no means a generalized situation, a handful of large international conservation organizations --acting in partnership with a few local partners-- have chosen to disregard forest communities’ rights and capacities and are actively seeking --in collaboration with some governments and corporations-- to obtain ownership and/or management rights over forests that belong to local communities. Such organizations will receive the total opposition they deserve.

10. Industrial logging and plantations, and 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.

Experience has more than sufficiently shown that many so-called “development” projects have only served to develop the wealth of the wealthy, while pushing forest peoples to impoverishment and loss of livelihood means. Industrial logging is perhaps the most obvious example, but there are many others, such as dams, monoculture tree plantations, roads, mining, oil exploitation, shrimp farming, colonization and so on. If forests are to be protected, no such types of projects must be allowed. True development does not imply forest destruction; on the contrary, for forest communities, development means enhanced and permanent access to forest goods and services and therefore implies forest conservation.

11. We oppose any involvement of the World Bank, IMF, WTO and other International Financial Institutions in policies and projects than can affect forests and forest peoples.

The World Bank has a long history of forest destruction. Many of the most destructive projects in forests have been funded by this institution and it continues doing so. The positive aspects of its past forest policy were never implemented and its solution has been to downgrade its own policy in order to continue carrying out “business-as-usual”. The International Monetary Fund has never even had a forest policy or acknowledged the huge impacts of its structural adjustment policies on forests. The World Trade Organization is doing its utmost to ensure that no barriers to international trade are put in place and even defines some forest protection measures as illegal “non tariff measures”. The conclusion is that in order to protect forests and forest peoples, these institutions must be kept well away from forests and that their policies and projects must be carefully screened for possible impacts on forests.

12. The commodification of nature and forests by corporations, governments, international institutions and some NGOs is not acceptable.

While forest communities are trying to assert their rights over forests as a means of ensuring forest conservation and livelihoods, neoliberalism is trying to create market mechanisms to get yet more profits from nature. Nature is out for sale and everything marketable is being put a price tag. Even the carbon stored in wood is being sold; so is the forests’ water cycling capacity or the medicinal properties of countless plants. This must be seen as what it really is: a further step in the privatization of life, which --if allowed-- will result in corporate appropriation of almost everything. For this reason, this initiative concludes that such process is totally unacceptable.

This statement of principles is intended to contribute 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 join this process.

Porto Alegre, 30 January 2005

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), Tebtebba Foundation (Philippines), Coecoceiba/Friends of the Earth (Costa Rica), CENSAT/Friends of the Earth (Colombia), Rede Alerta Contra o Deserto Verde (Brasil), FASE (Brasil), Sobrevivencia/Friends of the Earth (Paraguay), International Forum on Globalisation (USA), Accion Ecologica/Oilwatch (Ecuador)

If you wish 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/Mumbai/form_MumbaiPortoAlegre.html

Comments of the 12 principles by Ricardo Carrere, e-mail: rcarrere@wrm.org.uy

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- Forests and plantations: An essentially social issue

In an increasingly fragmented and specialized world, very often social and resistance responses are inevitably fragmented and specialized. Many social organizations are devoted to an issue, very often removing themselves from the whole.

In this whole, like converging circles, the various issues have coinciding zones that are translated into issues on social movement agendas. In its defence of forests the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) has, for instance, incorporated into its action strategy the gender issue and is endeavouring that women’s organizations incorporate the subject of forests and plantations in those aspects related with their area of work.

In an effort to depict this geometry of resistance in an integration of struggles for another possible world, WRM and Friends of the Earth International, in the framework of the World Social Forum, organized a workshop on “Forests and plantations: an essentially social issue.”

Following a brief presentation by panel members from various walks of life, a wide spectrum of representatives from numerous countries had the opportunity to contribute with their experience through a participative group working methodology. Members of NGOs working on very diverse issues (ranging from trade to transgenic crops) from peasant and indigenous peoples’ organizations, trade union organizations, the academic community and human rights organizations, were able to exchange ideas on common subjects. The results of the group discussions were later presented in plenary and relationships with forests and plantations were identified.

We consider it to be symbolic that the issue of forests and plantations is included in the World Social Forum. What is involved is breaking up schemes, de-fragmenting ourselves and placing the defence of forests in its true social dimension.

The disappearance of forests directly affects the indigenous and peasant populations that use them and are generally displaced from the territories their ancestors had occupied and which are their right by tradition. Their forms of life and subsistence are totally dismantled, slowly eroding their culture. Deforestation also alters the water cycle which in turn undoubtedly affects even more seriously the most underprivileged social sectors, thus contributing to increase their poverty.

The essentially social nature of forests makes the struggle for their defence into an essentially social struggle, merging with other social struggles for human rights, land and land tenure, food sovereignty, local economies and local control, health, job defence, just to mention a few.

The way forests are perceived is also a cultural construction insofar as biological diversity is not accidental but has to do with the type of relationship human beings establish with their surroundings, with a certain form of knowledge and its use. The communities that have known how to care for forests have not established a purely commercial and individual relationship with the soil, the water and forest products, but have conceived the right to the use of a territory as a collective right.

Thus, this rethinking of ways takes those who struggle for agrarian reform to ask themselves now: An agrarian reform to plant what? What for? And by whom?

The new visions interweave new ideological frameworks in which concepts spring up such as agro-ecology vs contamination of life with agrochemicals, diversity vs monoculture plantations, small scale vs large scale, local trade vs economic globalization (“another trade is possible”).

In a framework of the advancement of major trade interests in all walks of life which, according to Friends of the Earth International places “nature on sale,” monoculture tree plantations are swooping down on forests and savannahs. They bring contamination from agrochemicals, slave-like working conditions, destruction of ecosystems, soil erosion, rural eviction and an increase in poverty. That is to say, essentially social issues.

Forest activists, peasants, trade-unionists, members of indigenous peoples, of landless movements, human rights activists, community health workers, ecologists, and women’s organizations will surely build linking platforms expressing those issues on which they agree and from where they can muster forces.

The workshop was a drop that joins the many others that we trust will form a shower, which sooner or later will end up by clearing tomorrow’s horizon.

By Raquel Núñez, World Rainforest Movement (WRM), e-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy

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- Taking climate back to people’s hands

The Durban Group is a coalition of NGOs, social and environment activists, communities, academics, scientists and economists from around the world concerned about climate change, who call for a global grassroots movement against climate change. The group denounces the current flawed approach of international negotiations and claims that it must be met by the active participation of a global movement of Northern and Southern peoples to take the climate back into their hands.

Several members of the Durban Group participating in the 5th World Social Forum held at Porto Alegre, Brazil, gathered there to exchange information and elaborate strategies for action regarding climate change. One of the outcomes was an open letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to convey him “two convictions: first, that another world is possible; second, that it will not be possible if people do not have a climate they can live in.”

The letter was drafted in Porto Alegre and launched on February 15, coinciding with the Kyoto Protocol's entering into force. The Kyoto Protocol had been agreed in 1997 in the UN Convention on Climate Change, allegedly to establish concrete commitments to reduce fossil fuel emissions from Northern countries. However, the Durban Group claims that the climate treaty not only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert climate catastrophe, but also steals from the poor to give to the rich.

In the letter sent to Kofi Annan, the group expresses disappointment that international climate negotiations resulting from the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 did not “effectively address the threats to life, livelihoods and peace posed both by climate change and the continuing extraction of fossil fuels that causes it. We had expected the negotiations to tackle the climate crisis at its root: the transfer of oil, coal and gas from underground to the surface.”

This excessive burning of fossil fuels is now jeopardising Earth’s ability to maintain a liveable climate. However, the group notes that “Instead of mandating steep reductions in the extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas, and reducing the capital diverted to oil exploration, the United Nations, under the influence of the United States, has spent a disproportionate amount of time and resources on developing a complicated global climate market.”

The Durban Group’s letter tells UN Secretary-General that through the new carbon market, “industrialized countries and their corporations are acquiring valuable formal rights over the earth’s capacity to recycle fossil fuel emissions while also being encouraged to use land and other resources in the South to ‘mitigate’ continued Northern greenhouse gas emissions.” Helping in the latter project has been the World Bank, which, through its various carbon funds, is backing “carbon-saving” projects throughout the South.

The Durban Group criticizes the UN for failing “to move toward, or even encourage debate about, sensible and equitable alternative policies of regulation, taxation, termination of subsidies for fossil fuel extraction and use, and support for sustainable local energy. At the same time, a smokescreen of specialized ‘carbon market’ jargon has prevented the public from understanding or exercising control over climate policy.”

“The purpose and legitimacy of this carbon market,” the letter continues, “is being questioned by many who see it as biased in favour of the short-term interests of industrialized countries and their corporations”.

The letter was accompanied by a press release noting that “while many are celebrating the Kyoto Protocol's entering into force this week, others are finding cause for grave concern” and posing the question “Kyoto: What's to Celebrate?”

The press release exposes the arguments of members of the Durban Group regarding the present situation: “We're creating a sort of 'climate apartheid,' wherein the poorest and darkest-skinned pay the highest price -- with their health, their land, and, in some cases, with their lives -- for continued carbon profligacy by the rich,” said Soumitra Ghosh of the National Forum of Forest Peoples and Forest Workers in India.

"Even in purely economic terms, a market in credits from 'carbon-saving' projects will fail," said Jutta Kill of Sinkswatch, a British-based watchdog organization. "You simply can't verify whether a power plant's emissions can be 'compensated for' by a tree plantation or other project. Ultimately investors are bound to lose confidence in the credits they buy from such projects."

Ricardo Carrere of the World Rainforest Movement added that "so-called carbon sink plantations will result in the further spread of monoculture tree plantations, which are already having enormous impacts on people and the environment".

The Kyoto Protocol also allows genetically engineered trees to be used in carbon-absorbing plantations. "This will open up a Pandora's box of impacts we can't even guess at," said Anne Petermann of Global Justice Ecology Project in the US.

Regarding the role of the World Bank as a promoter of the carbon market, including "carbon-saving" projects in poor nations, Nadia Martinez of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Network in Washington declared that "It's ridiculous that the Bank, which has a mission of entrenching the fossil fuel industry, is now advertising itself as solving the climate crisis."

"If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic reductions in fossil fuel investment and use are inescapable, as is the protection of remaining native forests," confirmed Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade Watch.

Global trends of privatization of water and biodiversity have now encroached on climate too. To tackle the climate crisis, the Durban Group is calling on Northern and Southern grassroots activists and organizations to help reinforce a peoples’ movement that rise up against those processes and “take the climate back into our hands.”

The open letter can be accessed at http://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban/letter.html and the full press release at http://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban/kofi.html.

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- Another forestry profession is possible

Forestry science first appeared in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century and provides the clearest example of the way forests were removed from local rural economies and redesigned to serve the needs of an industrialising state economy.

European woodlands formed a part of agriculture, providing not only another area for pasture but also fertilizers, foliage as fodder and to thatch roofs, food for domestic animals and people, bark and roots for medicine and tanning, sap for resins, and wood for fuel and building, among others.

Formerly communal property, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, feudal lords gradually restricted peasants’ access to forests, charging dues and tithes for forest pasture, fuel wood collection, and hunting of forest animals.

When the State became stronger, it took on the objective of appropriating communal goods for commercial purposes. In the midst of persistent conflicts between the State (its forestry department) and the rural population, systematic legal restrictions on the customary rights of local communities, repression and even violence, State control was established over forests and their management with the aim of timber production.

Forestry science developed as a sub-discipline of “cameral science” –named after the chamber in which a prince’s advisors planned the economic affairs of the land. Demand for timber for various uses led to more restrictions on local use of forests for subsistence in favour of industrial production.

The main interest in forests was represented by a single number –the revenue yield that might be extracted annually by cutting down trees. Mathematicians helped to calculate the usable volume of timber from a standardized tree of a known species, age, and diameter. Foresters could more accurately predict the value of a forest if the trees growing in it conformed to a standardised average. A forest containing fewer species of more commercial value was easier to measure and of more value to the state economy.

The next step in the evolution of forestry science was therefore to replace the “untidy, unpredictable, chaotic” forests which produced a wide range of products for a wide range of different people, with logical predictable plantations which produced consistent, predictable and large quantities of timber for industrial use.

Today, very little remains of Europe’s forests. Although statistics of forest cover indicate that over 30 per cent of Europe is currently forested, they are misleading as they do not reveal that much of this “forest” is in fact plantations grown to produce timber or to supply pulp and paper mills. Foresters have been specialized in studying those subjects that contribute to consolidate this model.

Facing this scenario of the forestry profession, other voices are now being raised –from the profession itself– questioning the traditional forestry paradigm based centrally on the extraction of timber for industry, considering that it is not adapted to the true social and environmental needs of our society: eradication of poverty, conservation of natural resources (water, soil, biodiversity) and conservation of the planet’s climate.

In the framework of the World Social Forum, the World Rainforest Movement organized an event with the title of “Another forestry profession is possible,” aimed at promoting a wide-ranging discussion among professional foresters, technicians and other people interested in reflecting on a change in the paradigm of the forestry profession.

Many of the participants were students and some pointed out that in their curricula no chair exists involving social and political affairs that would provide them with a vision of the rationale and the needs this profession is addressing. They are only trained to produce and exploit timber resources and this situation of the forestry profession is repeated in several countries.

The participants considered that the profession should respond to a social and environmental responsibility and have professional ethics, which today are missing. The students’ training is based on a grid, responding to very technical parameters, but no reflection is made on the questions of: what are they producing for, for whom, what should be exploited and how far? At whose service is Forestry Science? What interests are involved? Where do the policies guiding the forestry profession and timber business come from? All these are questions that professionals and technicians should ask themselves.

With an orientation of social responsibility, various participants at the workshop considered that foresters should have an attitude of respect and humility towards peasants and forest communities. A forester cannot go to a forest community and tell the people how it has to be managed. Who better than those who have lived there and used it for years to know what to do? The professional should not be a stranger who dictates what has to be done but a person who is walking together with the people, valuing and respecting their knowledge, learning from them and trying to work in a coordinated manner.

It was also denounced that the forestry profession has endorsed and promoted large-scale monoculture tree plantations, imposed in various countries using the same model. Socially it is a process that increasingly evicts rural workers. Environmentally, it affects various ecosystems and causes major problems with water. Economically it is an activity that responds to the insertion of the countries of the South as exporters of raw material with scant added value, reproducing the large landowner-monoculture-export cycle, with profits ending in the hands of national elites.

The vast eucalyptus plantations are part of agro-business and are unrelated to solving hunger or poverty –not due to a lack of food but to a lack of access to resources. Moreover, areas of land that could be used in an agrarian reform programme benefiting vast social sectors are being occupied by eucalyptus plantations for export, generating scant labour under poor conditions and compromising soil use for the future generations. This model is strengthened with the majority position of the forestry profession which states that eucalyptus, pine, teak and acacia plantations are forests.

It is time for the forestry profession to undertake a major internal and open debate, putting a distance between it and the powerful economic agro-business interests and placing it in a context of social responsibility. For this purpose it should work on the construction of an educational project promoting debate and the construction of sustainable production models where the aim is neither the extraction of timber nor the strict conservation of forests, but their sustainable use.

In this respect, some steps towards the construction of a new paradigm implying the understanding of forest functioning have been taken, thus getting to know how to benefit from what they offer. The concept of Community Forest Management covers pioneer projects that constitute a real forest policy and that can truly establish a difference.

Furthermore, another possible world already exists. It is the world of the communities that live in a sustainable way within the possibilities allowed to them by the larger world. The mission of forestry professionals and technicians committed with people and with the environment is to achieve that these other possible worlds are maintained and expanded.

Article based on opinions expressed by participants at the event. The first part of the article is based on information from: “Blinded by Science: The invention of scientific forestry and its influence in the Mekong Region”, Chris Lang and Oliver Pye, Watershed Vol. 6 No. 2, http://www.terraper.org/watershed/pdf/vol6no2.pdf

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- Monoculture tree plantations targeted by a Latin American network

The Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations (Red Latinoamericana contra los Monocultivos de Árboles - RECOMA) is a decentralized network of organizations from all the countries in the region, and its basic objective is to coordinate activities to resist the expansion of large-scale monoculture tree plantations in the region, either for the production of timber and pulp, for the production of palm oil or to act as “carbon sinks.”

At the Fifth World Social Forum, various members of RECOMA who were in Porto Alegre were able to meet and to up-date themselves on the situation in each country while drawing up future strategies and planning their activities for the year.

One of the important aspects of this coordination work has been the possibility of obtaining the results of various research works carried out by members of RECOMA –some finalized and others currently on-going– that will certainly provide important elements for the network’s tasks.

In Brazil a study was carried out on the generation of employment and labour conditions in large-scale tree plantations associated with pulp-mills. The research was done by the Brazilian organization, FASE and is yet another demonstration of the social disasters of the forestry model being applied and that is being promoted throughout the region.

In Ecuador, the organization “Acción Ecológica” carried out research on the activities of the Dutch foundation FACE, which has installed pine and eucalyptus plantations to capture the greenhouse gas emissions produced by Dutch electricity companies. At the same time, Acción Ecológica has launched a new investigation, focussed on the socio-economic impacts of monoculture tree plantations.

In Chile, the Latin American Environmental Controversy Observatory (Observatorio Latinoamericano de Conflictos Ambientales)is undertaking research work on the social effects of tree plantations and also of their so-called economic benefits for the country. The results of this research will be very important as Chile is presented as “the model” by those promoting the development of tree plantations in other countries.

In Venezuela the organization AMIGRANSA carried out a small study on the situation of two communities affected by the Irish company, SMURFIT, which occupied large areas of fertile land to implant large-scale tree plantations to supply its pulp-mill. As a result of this research, action was taken and an open letter was addressed to President Hugo Chavez in support of the communities’ struggles.

In Uruguay, the Guayubira Group has supported a research on the environmental impact of tree plantations and another one on their social impacts. The latter showed that not only is tree plantation much worse than extensive cattle-raising with regard to job-generation per hectare, but also that the conditions prevailing in the plantations are also much worse.

The objective of the abovementioned research activities is to provide more information and analysis with the aim of strengthening the struggle against these monoculture plantations. It is thus not a academic exercise but one of developing tools that will serve not only for action but also to enable the organizations to better insert themselves into social struggles.

Another of the issues that arose as a central theme on the RECOMA agenda is that of certification, both that of the FSC and of other national certification schemes. The unanimous reflection of the members of the network is that certification weakens local struggles against the expansion of monoculture tree plantations and the participants at the meeting agreed to develop joint activities in this area.

The fact that RECOMA met at the World Social Forum is in itself a clear message that the Network perceives the issue of monoculture tree plantations as an essentially social issue. The “other” possible world must be diverse, both regarding the environment and social matters, and will have no place for monoculture of any kind. In the case of trees, RECOMA is progressing along this path and its negation – NO to monoculture tree plantations – is fundamentally an affirmation. YES to life and YES to diversity.

If you wish to contact the RECOMA secretariat, please send a message to Ana Filippini at: anafili@wrm.org.uy