Bulletin Issue 115 - February 2007

Biofuels are flavour of the month for car-makers and politicians keen to be seen as green without directly addressing the problem of ever-rising transport emissions. The buzz has also caught on strongly in the EU. On 10 January, the European Commission presented its new energy and biofuels blueprint. It can be summed up in just seven words: bad news for people and the climate.

The present eagerness of the European Union to favour the use and import of biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels has risen serious concerns among those who are aware that global warming should be tackled globally and demand drastic changes in the current Western consumer, commercial and production patterns.

The land near the southern boundary of the Mount Elgon national park is green and the volcanic soils are fertile. But since it was declared a national park in 1993, a sometimes violent conflict between villagers and the national park management has flared up at Mount Elgon.

Last year, about 170 farmers met in the farming community of South Riana to air their concerns and see how to stop valuable farmland being converted to timber plantations. They were concerned for the future of the area -- built on successful dairy and cropping enterprises -- and called for the Tasmanian Government to abolish tree plantation development on prime agricultural land.

The Veracel pulp mill is located in the south of the Brazilian state of Bahia, some 45 kilometres from the coast, on the border between the municipalities of Eunapolis and Belmonte. Veracel is a corporation in which the Swedish-Finnish group Stora Enso and the Brazilian Aracruz group have equal shares, today managing one of the world’s largest eucalyptus plantation and industrialization projects. As from the end of the eighties, gigantic monoculture tree plantations and pulp mills started to be set up in the Southern Cone of South America, occupying vast stretches of land in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. This is the implementation of a strategic decision taken by the main timber and paper market groups from Sweden, Finland, Spain, the United States, Brazil and Chile.

According to the FAO definition, rubber plantations are “forests.” Recently we visited one of these “forests” in Kribi, Cameroon and talked with the workers and local population. Unlike the FAO “experts,” nobody, absolutely nobody there perceives these plantations as forests. In fact, if there is anything in the world that looks less like a forest it is precisely a rubber plantation. To the normal monotony of plantations comprised of parallel lines of thousands of identical trees – eucalyptus, pine, acacia – is added the array of small pots hanging on the tree trunks into which the latex is gathered. Along the paths there are other, larger pots where the latex is poured to take it to the processing plant. Added to this is the penetrating and disagreeable smell of rubber.

Indian NGO Samata and the UK's Forest Peoples Programme have found that the resettlement action plan (RAP) of the World Bank-funded Andhra Pradesh Community Forest Management Project (APCFMP) undermines customary rights and livelihoods and is in multiple breach of Bank safeguard policies on Indigenous Peoples and Involuntary Resettlement. The participatory evaluation, which was undertaken in seven villages in NE Andhra Pradesh in November 2006, has discovered that many problems identified in an earlier Samata-FPP study (see end notes) of this Bank forestry project, which started in 2002 and is due to close at the end of 2007, have not been resolved and in some cases have even worsened.

Kenyan winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, and also Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources and Member of Parliament, Wangari Maathai, launched in 1977 the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa.

For decades, the presence of communist insurgents kept Malaysia’s northern frontier free from exploitation. Too dangerous to open up for tourism or development, the Belum-Temenggor forest stood in pristine splendour as the nation built superhighways and superstructures, and extracted timber from other forests. Sprawling over 3,000 sqkm, the mostly intact primary rainforest is now a treasure trove of biodiversity. The main intrusion into this wilderness was the construction of the East-West Highway in 1975, a 124 km strip of tarmac stretching from Gerik to Jeli to reach Kelantan and the east coast.

Vietnam's paper industry is booming. In 1995, paper production stood at 220,000 tonnes. In 2007, the Vietnam Paper Association aims to produce more than one million tonnes of paper. Demand far exceeds supply and in 2006, Vietnam imported 709,000 tonnes of paper products. A large proportion of paper produced is for packaging - a result of Vietnam's expanding export economy. At present, Vietnam's pulp industry supplies only 37 per cent of domestic demand and Vietnam also has to import pulp to keep its paper mills running. In 2007, the industry anticipates importing 232,000 tonnes of pulp.

The Enawene Nawe -- a small Amazonian tribe (over 420) who live by fishing and gathering in Mato Grosso state, Brazil -- are a relatively isolated people who were first contacted in 1974. They grow manioc and corn in gardens and gather forest products, like honey but fishing is their main livelihood and fish are a vital part of their diet, as they are one of the few tribes who eat no red meat. During the fishing season, the men build large dams across rivers and spend several months camped in the forest, catching and smoking the fish which is then transported by canoe to their village.

The remote and environmentally rich Hugawng valley in Burma’s northern Kachin State has been internationally recognized as one of the world’s hotspots of biodiversity. It even remained largely untouched by Burma’s military regime until the mid-1990s. After a ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and the junta in 1994, local residents had high hopes that peace would foster the economy and improve living conditions. However, as Valley of Darkness, a new report by undercover local researchers published in 2007 by the Kachin Development Networking Groups, says: “Under the junta’s increased control, the rich resources of the valley turned out to be a curse”.

On 15 December 2006, the Colombian government made public its decision to reinitiate oil exploration activities in the Siriri and Catleya Blocks located in the Departments of Arauca, Santander, North of Santander and Boyacá, in the northwest of the country, in U’wa territory.

Costa Rica has been built as an export-oriented economy, with no political or economic independence. Export pressure on resources by the world system resulted in great inequality. Since the Kyoto Protocol, neoliberals have redefined forests as ‘oxygen generators’, a concept that Costa Rica has embraced. In this framework, local communities, especially those living in the tropical rainforests and depending for survival on the bounty provided by the forests, have seen undermined their basic support system.

When couple of days ago President Rafael Correa affirmed that the environmentalists want to return to the Stone Age on requesting an oil moratorium he was only repeating what has been said for years by those who have shaped and maintained the dependent country we have… The problem is that this time he made this statement while the international press was sounding the alarm over global warming…if we burn more oil we will end up in the Stone Age! Beyond this typically developmental comment, it invites us to remember Plato’s myth of the cavemen.

The passage of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill, 2006 is a watershed event in the hard-fought and prolonged struggle of adivasis and other forest dwellers of the country. For the first time in the history of Indian forests the state formally admits that rights have been denied to forest dwelling people for long, and the new forest law attempts not only to right that 'historic injustice' but also give forest communities' role primacy in forest management.

Mali is host in February to over 500 women and men from some hundred countries from all over the world that are meeting at the “Nyeleni 2007: Forum for Food Sovereignty.” The objective of the meeting is to launch an “international movement to achieve true recognition of the right to food sovereignty,” to reaffirm this right and “set out its economic, social, environmental and political implications.”

The World Social Forum met in Nairobi, Kenya from 20 to 25 January. Beyond the opinion that each one of us may have about its achievements, what we would like to highlight is not so much what was said or what was done there but its message that “another world is possible.” . This message implicitly means that the present world is no longer possible. In this world, increasingly dominated by large corporations, social and environmental problems are aggravated year after year. In spite of the incessant intervention of so-called solutions by those seeking desperately to keep it alive, the truth is that in most cases, the remedy is worse than the illness itself. Let us look at some examples of these so-called “solutions” in WRM’s scope of action: