Bulletin Issue 60 – July 2002

The village of Zaïpobly is located in Southeast Côte d’Ivoire, in the western outskirts of Taï National Park. This park covers an area of 454,000 hectares and is the largest remnant of the original humid tropical forest in West Africa. It was designated Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978 and was inscribed on the Natural World Heritage List in 1982, because of its extraordinary specific wealth and because of the numerous endemic species inhabiting it. At the beginning of the last century it was a uniform forest zone, but agricultural systems of cultivation introduced later and over-exploitation of the forest have reduced it to the present small forest islets.

Gambia used to be covered by very dense forests. However, the country has undergone a severe deforestation and degradation process. In 1981, about 430,000 hectares were classified as forests --45% of the total land area. Seven years later, the forest area was reduced to about 340,000 hectares. Gambian forests have also undergone a degradation process that implied the conversion of many closed forests into a poor quality tree and shrub savannah category, according to the national forest inventory of 1998. The institutional framework implemented in the 1950’s, with the aim of protecting the remaining forests gave the state overall power over the national forest resources, depriving the rural population of responsibility for forest management.

A country with an annual deforestation rate of 1,71%, which in 17 years (1955-1972) lost one third of its forests and further 5,6 million hectares from 1977 to 1997, Ghana also holds ancient keys for a meaning model of forest conservation.

The major environmental problem reportedly faced by Zambia is deforestation. A case study carried out by the European Forest Institute in 2000 gives figures: the annual rate of deforestation ranges from 250,000 to 900,000 hectares representing 0.5 to 2.0 % of the country's forest area. Apart from other social and environmental impacts, the consequences of this process are felt on water supplies, since forests regulate much of the catchment area of the Zambezi river and are essential during the annual seven month long dry season.

The NGO Down to Earth has recently concluded a special report titled "Forests, people and rights", which provides very detailed analytical information on the forest situation in Indonesia. The following paragraphs have been extracted from the chapter "Community forest management: the way forward" and we recommend our readers to access the full document (see details below). According to the study, forest peoples have been regarded by Indonesia’s powerful wood industry and successive governments in Jakarta as an obstacle to the profitable exploitation of the forests and their skills and knowledge were unrecognised, until very recently.

The upland forests of north Thailand have become an arena for intensely contested perspectives on forest protection as state forestry officials and some nature conservation groups attempt, in the name of forest conservation, to remove local communities, particularly hilltribe people living in and using these forest areas, with the argument that upland forests act as watersheds for lowland rivers and must therefore be kept free of human interaction.

Built at a cost of $1 billion on the Se San River in Vietnam, the Yali Falls dam has caused devastating impacts on downstream communities in Cambodia (see WRM Bulletin 42). At least 32 people have drowned in flash floods caused by sudden releases of water from the dam and villagers have lost livestock, crops and fishing equipment. Poor water quality in the river has led to skin rashes and stomach problems for downstream communities. Fisheries in the Se San River have been dramatically reduced. The dam has affected 50,000 people living in the Cambodian provinces of Ratanakiri and Stung Treng.

The new President of Costa Rica, Abel Pacheco would seem to have good intentions regarding the environment, but at the same time, shows some gaps in knowledge of the native tree species of his country. In fact, such contradictions became evident on 2nd June, on occasion of a ceremony at the Presidential Residence, celebrating the donation by the government of Japan (through the World Bank), of US$300,000 aimed at promoting commercial tree plantations. During the ceremony President Abel Pacheco stressed the need to fight for native species and halt plant “Nazism.”

The United States is also affected by the predatory scheme that is elsewhere replacing forests by monoculture tree plantations. In the state of Tennessee, the sorrow is also felt by those who know the peril behind the short-term profit driven projects. A question is posed in central Tennessee, where giant timber-cutting machines shear native trees off Spencer Mountain: “If many trees are cut down in a forest, but others are planted to take their place, is it still a forest? Or is a forest something more elusive: a repository of varied life forms, a cradle for clear-running streams, a historical continuum where children and their fathers and grandfathers can sit atop old stumps, watch for squirrels and talk?”

Genetic engineering is the state of the art output of the Green Revolution. It has deepened a pattern where monoculture, land concentration, and dependence --on the technology, on the seed-- are the rule. GE has been heralded by the same promises of the Green Revolution: that it will feed the starving. Promoters of GE have even tried to make its critics feel guilty: “The day you look into the eyes of a starving person, your opinion over transgenic crops changes …Today, 24,000 people a day die because of malnutrition. So when the North, Europe, decides not to use this technology, this is morally unacceptable”, said Dr Clive James, biotech specialist at International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA).

It is amazing the way in which Aracruz Celulose S.A. is facing the situation in which it is placed, affected by the numerous negative impacts arising from its activities in Espirito Santo and Bahia. At present, the company is finishing the construction of a private airport, sufficiently large for the presidential plane carrying Fernando Henrique Cardoso to land on 2nd August when their third factory will be officially opened, increasing annual eucalyptus cellulose production from 1.3 to 2 million tons.

Hidden in the midst of remote mountains on the South Pacific coast of Chile, is the last remnant of intact coastal forest, one of the most diverse ecosystems of Latin America. It is estimated that one third of the temperate forests existing in the world are to be found in the Southern zone of Chile and Argentina. The Chilean temperate forest, protected from the glaciers by the Coastal Cordillera, is the remnant of what was once the widespread Valdivia forest. The Coastal Cordillera has ecosystems that have existed with minimum human intervention for thousands of years and that are a unique natural and cultural heritage. It is an area that is recognised as one of the 25 ecosystems in the world, concentrating unique elements.

Paraguay covers an area of 406,752 km2 . The Paraguay river divides the country into two well differentiated bio-regions: the Eastern region and the Western region or Chaco. Both regions have a wide diversity of culture and ecosystems. Due to its greater population density and the constant expansion of the agricultural frontier, the Eastern region is suffering heavy pressure on its ecosystems. In this region, only 0.6% of the area is under some category of protection. The Eastern region has lost most of its forest cover over the past 40 years. In 1945 it had almost 9 million hectares of forest, corresponding to 55% of the total area of the region. However, in 1991 this forest cover had been reduced to 15%.

Today I went for a walk in the Tarkine. I was fortunate to sit under a wedge tailed eagle as it circled around me. Its nest must have been nearby as it seemed to linger, most curious about my intrusion. As I wandered in to that spot, so similar to many other places in Tassie's north-west, I had the pleasure of seeing a couple of wallabies and some rather rare trees, amongst which was a magnificent specimen of native olive.

There should be more literature on the broken promises of the logging industry. When those companies arrive in a country, they try to entice the local people with arguments like that their operations will bring jobs and training for them. In the case of Papua New Guinea, an investigation carried out in May 2001, by Joe Meava, information manager of the publication “Echoes from the Forest”, into reports of illegal logging in Pondo, in the Open Bay area of East New Britain, reveals that most of the jobs created --much less than expected, anyway-- were performed by foreign workers, who are not legally allowed to occupy positions which could be filled many times over by Papua New Guinean workers.

A Brazilian industrial plantation project hoping to get a subsidy from the UN for sucking up carbon from the atmosphere has failed to make its case, according to the project's official validator. Det Norske Veritas (DNV), a norwegian company assigned by the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) to check the project's claims, says that it can't determine whether carbon could be held in the project's eucalyptus trees long enough to make any difference to the climate system.

With this issue the WRM bulletin will be five years old and we want to congratulate you and ourselves on this occasion. This double congratulation is not a mere formalism. In fact, for us the Bulletin is basically the result of continuous and fruitful interaction among individuals and organisations who, throughout the world, with reasoning and feeling, work for the defence of tropical forests and those who live in them. Therefore it reflects shared visions and objectives and is fed by the experience of thousands of people who, on different levels struggle to achieve them.