Bulletin Issue 132 - July 2008

This month, provisional measure No.422 was adopted as law by the Brazilian parliament, providing for an increase in the area of the Amazon that may be granted for rural use with no need to call for bids. The limit, previously set at 500 hectares, has been increased to 1,500 hectares, allowing deforestation of up to 20 percent of the area granted. The voting had the strong opposition of the former minister of the Environment, Senator Marina Silva, who accused the Government of legalizing the illegal appropriation of Amazon lands. “This measure will mean a land privatization process,” she declared, forecasting serious detriment to the Plan for Combating Amazon Deforestation.

In Guatemala, like in several other countries of the South, indigenous communities and the environment are paying a high cost due to the expansion of agrofuels. Deforestation, forced displacement, threats, illegal arrest and even murder are the signs of this encroachment. The organization Salva la Selva (Save the Rainforest) has denounced a situation that has been occurring over the past three years in an area known as “Finca Los Recuerdos”, where Ingenio Guadalupe, one of the companies producing ethanol in the country, has been deforesting indigenous land to plant sugar-cane for ethanol production.

In  last month’s WRM bulletin we recalled the long standing battle that local communities had waged for Sarawak’s forests, notably through road blockades for stopping the entry of logging trucks into their territories.

This past 8-10 July, the Peasant Confederation of Peru and the National Agrarian Confederation, with the wide backing of a large number of indigenous and peasant organizations, carried out a country-wide protest which coincided on July 9 with a national general strike called by the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP).

Mangroves are the rainforests by the sea. Large stretches of the sub-tropical and tropical coastlines of Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas and the Caribbean are fringed by mangroves, once estimated to cover an area of over 32 million hectares. Now, less than 15 million hectares remain —less than half the original area. The importance of the protective mangrove buffer zone cannot be overstated. In regions where these coastal fringe forests have been cleared, tremendous problems of erosion and siltation have arisen, and terrible losses to human life and property have occurred due to destructive hurricanes, storm surges and tsunamis.

Over 170 activists who gathered in Bangkok from 12-14 July harshly criticised governments and corporations for their failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They called for "climate justice" and a "fundamental departure from the current global order" to solve the climate crisis. Conference participants included fishers and farmers, forest and indigenous peoples, women, youth, workers and non-government activists from 31 countries. "By climate justice,” participants asserted in a conference document, “we mean that the burden of adjustment to the climate crisis must be borne by those who have created it, and not by those who have been least responsible.”

On 17 June 2008, a federal court in the city of Eunápolis, in the state of Bahia, passed sentence in a public civil suit filed in 1993 by the Brazilian Federal Public Prosecutor's Office against Veracel Celulose – known at the time as Veracruz Florestal – and the government environmental agencies CRA (Centre for Environmental Resources, responsible for environmental licensing in the state of Bahia) and IBAMA (Brazilian Environmental Institute, the national environmental authority).

The occupation of the Mapuche peoples’ ancestral territories by large-scale eucalyptus and pine plantations belonging to major forestry companies such as CMPC and Forestal Bosques ARAUCO relies for its expansion on the support of State machinery. Repression, torture, death and criminalization of Mapuche resistance are the background for the “forestry model.” The Mapuche conflict is a sort of leprosy in Chilean society: concealed, stigmatized and denied. Elena Varela, a documentary-maker and music teacher had become interested in Mapuche music and decided to carry out research work in the 9th Region to learn more about their music and instruments. However, the situation she found there changed the focus of her work.

Since the beginning of the decade, all the areas of expansion of oil palm plantations have coincided geographically with areas of paramilitary presence and expansion, to the extent that some of the new plantations being developed have been financed as farming projects for the same demobilised paramilitary from the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – United Self-Defence Force of Colombia) who had previously made incursions into these very areas. This strategy of territorial control through the expansion of oil palm is reinforced by government policies supporting and providing incentives for the planting of oil palms, also clearly in a quest for economic, political and military control of large areas of Colombia currently outside state control.

In Europe and the US, palm oil is being promoted as an agrofuel that will allegedly prevent the increase of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. Of course, it is the large scale and not the small-scale diversified model which is being implemented and in fact it’s just a way of delaying the imperative need of changing energy-intensive production, consumer and trade patterns. Oil palm plantations for agrofuel just add to the already damaging effects of palm tree plantations for industrial use.

An article in June’s WRM Bulletin highlighted Unilever’s role in the threat to Tanoe Swamps Forest, one of the last remaining forest blocks in Cote d’Ivoire.  Following international protests, Unilever now ‘promises’ an Environmental Impact Assessment but has given no guarantee that the forest will be protected.  Instead, they have publicised their long-standing plans to sell shares in PALM-CI, which holds the concession for Tanoe, although they will remain a major PALM-CI customer.  Behind the announcement, and possibly behind the plans to destroy Tanoe Forest, lie far-reaching changes in the region’s palm oil industry.

According to the Chinese Technology Minister Wan Gang, the Beijing Olympic Games will result in the release of some 1.18 million tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere, “in part because so many athletes and spectators were traveling long distances”. However, we need not worry about this, because the Chinese authorities assure us that the Olympics will be “basically” carbon neutral.