Bulletin Issue 66 - January 2003

Predominating ideology has tended to divorce social issues from environmental issues and even to make them antagonistic. Such is the case with the question of forests, where while governments recognise their environmental values, they frequently present them as an obstacle to "development", and "poverty" is used as an excuse to carry out deforestation of increasingly wider areas of forests, with the alleged objective of improving people's living conditions.

The Chad/Cameroon Oil & Pipeline project (see WRM Bulletins 45, 41, 35, 14 and 2) is reaching critical milestones. Most construction activities are scheduled to be completed by July 2003 and initial oil sales could take place as early as November 2003. As a result, completion of construction is more than a year ahead of schedule which had initially been planned to be finalised by the end of 2004. The speed of construction work stands in marked contrast to the substantial delays of measures intended to ensure the welfare of local people and protection of the environment, some of which may never see the light of day.

The Ministerial meeting in the Africa Forest Law Enforcement and Governance process is scheduled to take place in Brazzaville, Congo April 1-4th, 2003. Government delegates as well as representatives from the timber industry, multilateral and bilateral organisations, and civil society are expected to take part in the meeting where a Ministerial declaration will be drafted. The following briefly introduces the FLEG process, then moves on to discuss civil society participation in the up-coming Ministerial.

Kenya's new elected president, Mwai Kibaki, has named Dr Newton Kulundu as Environment Minister and well known environmentalist Prof Wangari Mathai as assistant minister. The newly appointed minister has already made a number of public statements related to forests which seem to imply that things might be changing --at last-- in the right direction. However, his statements leave some crucial issues in the shade.

Madagascar's historic problem of deforestation can be linked to the detrimental policies of the colonial state in terms of land use and agriculture. The deforestation problem in Madagascar began when it was annexed as a French colony in 1896. An uncertain political climate and famine followed this annexation, and many of the Malagasy fled to the woods for survival. These farmers started practicing the method of shifting cultivation as a means of survival.

The SBCP Watch Group is an environmental group of four local NGOs --Actionaid Bangladesh, Rupantar, JJS and Lokaj-- established in 2000 with the purpose of monitoring the activities carried out by the so-called Sunderban Biodiversity Conservation Project (SBCP). This 77.5 million dollar project is funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Nordic Development Fund (see WRM Bulletin 44), allegedly to restore the original ecosystem of the largest single block of mangroves that exists in the world today (see WRM Bulletin 44).

During a recent visit to Rajasthan state in India, Patrick McCully from International Rivers Network, had the opportunity to see first hand just how profoundly the work of a local organization called "Tarun Bharat Sangh" (TBS) has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. He was astounded to learn that this social and environmental transformation has been achieved at a tiny fraction of the economic --not to mention human and ecological-- cost of providing water services with big dams. Below some fragments of his experience:

Indonesia ranks among one of the countries with the highest tropical forest loss rate in the world. Average annual deforestation recorded up to one million hectares in the 1980s, 1.7 million hectares in the first part of the 1990s, and between 2.0 and 2.4 million hectares at present according to statistics of the State Ministry of Environment.

"Indonesian police and company security forces are responsible for persistent human rights abuses against indigenous communities involved in the massive pulp and paper industry in Sumatra", Human Rights Watch said in a new report released on January 7, 2003. Abuses include land seizures without compensation and brutal attacks on local demonstrators. "Without Remedy: Human Rights Abuse and Indonesia's Pulp and Paper Industry", a 90-page report, extensively documents the underlying links between disregard for human rights and unsound forestry practices.

On 24 October 2002, provincial authorities announced the suspension of construction of the new 130,000 tons a year pulp and paper mill at Dac To in Kontum province, in Vietnam's Central Highlands. The state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported that construction was stopped because of "a failure to draw up a credible master plan". Six months earlier, during a two-day trip to Kontum, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Cong Tan had demanded that the Vietnam Paper Company, Vinapimex, must publish a plan indicating where the raw materials were to come from to feed the mill.

Many years before there was scientific evidence of the destruction of the environment, the major artists and poets had noted the phenomenon in their essays, songs and poetry. In Puerto Rico, authors such as Enrique Laguerre, Abelardo Diaz Alfaro and Luis Llorens Torres denounced the destruction of our beautiful landscape and valuable natural resources, done in the name of "progress". The well-known poet, Juan Antonio Corretjer observed with great pain the overwhelming encroachment of concrete and the use of poisonous chemicals in Puerto Rican farming.

On 23 November, 2002, at the Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Ramsar Convention for the conservation of wetlands, held in Valencia, Spain, the Honduran environmental organisation, Committee for the Defence and Development of Flora and Fauna in the Gulf of Fonseca (Comité para la Defensa y Desarrollo de la Flora y Fauna del Golfo de Fonseca - CODDEFFAGOLF), denounced serious irregularities that involve its country's official representation, discredit the Ramsar Convention and undermine attempts to conserve mangrove forests, lagoons and other coastal wetlands.

The phyto-geographical region of the Yungas, or cloud forest, is a humid forest occurring in mountainous sectors linked to the cordillera of the Andes. It extends in a discontinuous way from Venezuela, through Ecuador, crossing Peru and Bolivia and reaching the north east of Argentina where its extreme remnants are to be observed in the provinces of Salta, Jujuy, Tucuman and Catamarca. In general, conservation of this zone comes under the National Park system: Baritú and el Rey in the province of Salta, Calilegua in the province of Jujuy and Campo Los Alisos in the Province of Tucuman.

In 2002, hope overcame fear. In 2003, hope may result in a political agreement between the middle class voters who, devastated by unemployment and impoverished by the economic policy, lost their fear of change, and the worker voters who, hounded by poverty and violence, no longer fear being happy.

According to information available in FSC's web page, seven companies in Chile have certified "forests" covering a total area of 262,168 hectares. However, only one of these companies (Las Cruces S.A.) is actually managing a forest, covering an area of only 3,588 hectares. The rest (258,580 hectares) are monoculture tree plantations, which unfortunately continue to be considered as "forests" by FSC.

In Ecuador, the Esmeraldas forests are part of the relict tropical forests on the Pacific coast of America. These forests are part of the Choco bio-geographical region, one of the planet's ten "hot spots", stretching from the South of Panama to the North of Esmeraldas. There are some 10,000 species of plants in this zone, of which some 2,500 are endemic. This is the home of the Awa, Chachi and Tsachila peoples and of Afro-Ecuadorian communities, which keep up traditional life styles. However, these forests are being destroyed at an astonishing speed, due to deforestation caused by oil palm monocultures and the the timber industry, that have so far enjoyed the complicity of the National Government.

The richness of PNG's forests is well known, and so is their level of destruction due to industrial logging. This unsustainable activity --in most cases related to high levels of corruption-- has provided large revenues to corporations while at the same time has left local communities without their sources of livelihoods. Local Non Governmental Organizations --organized under the Papua New Guinea Eco Forestry Forum-- together with local land owners are pushing forward another model of forest management (see WRM Bulletin 44).