Bulletin Issue 102 - January 2006

Until recently, relatively little was know about the Nordic countries in the South. At the best, Finland, Norway and Sweden were known because of their progressive social legislation, their solidarity against the Southern dictatorships, their composers, such as Sibelius, the Nobel Prize or more popular facts such as famous tennis players and racing car drivers, the Helsinki Olympics or the World Football Cup in Sweden.

In the forests of northern Republic of Congo, the Mbendjele are a hidden people. Living entirely on forest resources, this pygmy tribe has co-existed with their environment for thousands of years. Their impact on the forest is so minimal that from satellite images it is impossible to detect any evidence of these people's hunter-gatherer activities. But their 'hidden existence' is under threat as logging concessions are allocated and logging companies move in to claim the timber. However, work conducted in the Amazon forests in Brazil has shown that recognition of community rights can help to prevent further deforestation and it is hoped that recognition of land rights and indigenous activities will present a way forward for the forests of Central Africa.

Cameroon has undergone a major re-organisation of its forestry sector over the last two decades. A process of policy reform was implemented, sponsored by the World Bank, and this resulted in the new Forest Law of 1994, which included changes to forest taxes and regulations relating to the allocation of concessions, including the requirement for management plans, and new provisions for community forestry. Implementation of the forest law was based on a national zonation plan, referred to as the plan de zonage, which was supposed to be a preliminary plan, but in practice, it was often taken to be the definitive plan, and one that was not open for discussion.

The government of Ghana and Sino Hydro, a Chinese construction company, have signed a memorandum of understanding and a 500 million-dollar agreement to undertake the construction of the Bui Dam. Two million dollars are earmarked for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) bound to prepare the ground for the take-off of the project, which has been on the drawing board for decades. Despite the environmental disaster wrought by the World Bank's Akosombo Dam in Ghana (used for below cost power to process bauxite mined in Jamaica) and its failure to live up to power generating expectations, the new dam project has been restarted with the intention of eluding the increasing cost of running thermal plants with crude oil.

On November 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) filed an Alien Tort Claims Act case in US District Court in California against the rubber company Bridgestone alleging "forced labor, the modern equivalent of slavery" on the Firestone Plantation in Harbel, Liberia, of which Bridgestone is a partner. "The Plantation workers allege, among other things, that they remain trapped by poverty and coercion on a frozen-in-time Plantation operated by Firestone in a manner identical to how the Plantation was operated when it was first opened by Firestone in 1926," states the lawsuit. Still worse, conditions have actually deteriorated since that date.

Mangroves, the coastal equivalent of tropical forests on land, and also called "salt water forests", have provided livelihood for a lot of local people (see WRM Bulletin Nº 51). The Sundarbans, the world's largest coastal mangrove forest, stretches for almost 6,000 square miles across India and Bangladesh, a natural barrier against tsunamis and frequent cyclones that blow in from the Bay of Bengal. With roots that tolerate salt water, the forest's mangrove trees grow 70 feet or more above islands of layered sand and gray clay, deposited by rivers that flow more than a thousand miles from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal.

As soon as the year started, a tragedy sparked off in Orissa's Jajpur district in Kalinga Nagar. For many months, local tribals and other villagers have engaged in a bitter struggle to avoid displacement by the steel project of Tata Industries, a company with a long history of displacing people and exploiting their natural resources. An earlier attempt to start construction in Kalinga Nagar was prevented by local people in May last year.

United Fiber System's plans to build a pulp empire in Kalimantan received a blow in January 2006, when Deutsche Bank confirmed that it has pulled out of its role as financial advisor to UFS. Five months ago, UFS announced that it had appointed Deutsche Bank's Singapore Branch as Financial Advisor on a proposed acquisition of the Kiani Kertas pulp mill in East Kalimantan. Michael Hoelz, Deutsche Bank's managing director, confirmed in a statement to German NGOs that "Deutsche Bank no longer holds a mandate with UFS".

Phrue has been walking for 49 days. Together with ninety eight companions, he set out on the 7th of November on an epic march from Chiang Mai to Bangkok to save the people's component of Thailand's Community Forest Bill (CFB). The bill, originally advanced by farmer organizations and NGOs to enable communities to protect their forests, is now in danger of being twisted into its opposite. In September 2005, the committee overseeing the drafting of the bill decided to prohibit community forests in special conservation zones (see WRM Bulletin 99). For Phrue, a Chgor Karen from Chiang Mai province, this would compound decades of injustice at the hands of the Royal Forest Department (RFD) and would threaten his community with eviction, as well as his whole way of life.

Monoculture is the main tool used by the large trans-national capitals to appropriate and control land resources and cheap labour in the countries of the South, causing enormous impacts on biological and cultural diversity. Homogenization and the dramatic simplification of the agro-ecosystem enable them to maximize soil exploitation and labour through mechanized tasks that are easy to control and supervise. Sustainability is defined on the basis of codes of profitability and depending on the crop, cycles of ten, fifteen or twenty years are completed and then the land is abandoned.

The struggle of the Tupinikim and Gaurani indigenous peoples is now facing an extremely difficult situation. In February 2005, following their decision to take back their lands occupied by the eucalyptus plantations of the Aracruz Celulosa pulp company, over 100 indigenous families returned to settle in the rural areas from where they had been evicted, thus opening up the door to hopes of a sustainable and decent future (see WRM bulletins 94, 96 and 101). However, today those hopes are being dashed. A communiqué sent by the Alert against the Green Desert Network (Red Alerta Contra el Desierto Verde) appears here below:

Perhaps no other Bill in Colombia on environmental matters has given rise to such diverse opinions and to such commotion as the discussion in the Colombian Congress of the General Forestry Law adopted by this institution last December. The strength of the arguments and the response of Colombian environmentalism, social movements and even part of the mass media have been such that for the first time President Alvaro Uribe Velez returned a Bill to the Congress of the Republic.

At the end of December 2005, Ibama – Instituto Brasilero del Medio Ambiente y de los Recursos Naturales Renovables (the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) - brought a lawsuit against the Veracel Celulose company. Using satellite imagery and geo-processing, it verified the pulp mill’s irregularities and fined it R$ 320.000 for preventing or hindering the natural regeneration of the Mata Atlântica forest over an area of 1,200 hectares and worsening the situation of this biome. This event has again exposed Veracel’s fraud and its discourse as protector of the Mata Atlântica.

The traditional January summer siesta in Uruguay has been interrupted, not only by constant rainfall but also because there has been no respite in the advance of the pulp mills. They continue with their advertising campaign, based on falsehoods, which are then repeated as truths. Promises and mirages made to a population with a high rate of unemployment, desperately in need of solutions.

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic. In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota". In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals.