What really happens when forests are commodified -- by Global Forest Coalition

Turning forests into fuel for the new bio-economy – Voices from around the world, a video repository (for UNFCCC Doha COP-18, reprinted from Global Forest Coalition website)

 

Forests, their biodiversity, and their inhabitants are under attack as never before. In addition to existing problems with respect to the commodification forests, such as illegal logging and the clearing of forests to grow food crops for export, a variety of new policies threaten to escalate this situation dramatically.

Increasing demand for biofuels is already leading to escalating pressure for land to grow crops, including quick-growing tree plantations. In addition, the development of a new industrial strategy in numerous countries — known as the ‘bio-economy’ — will exacerbate this situation dramatically. This approach focuses on replacing fossil fuels with biomass, both as an energy source and to provide the raw materials for a new phase of industrialisation. It could also facilitate the release of genetically engineered trees with dire consequences for forests.

In addition, governments’ ‘green economy’ approach to resolving deforestation and other environmental problems is also exacerbating the commodification of forests, because it is based on the use of uncertain and complex market mechanisms, with a view to drawing private investment in, seemingly without regard for the consequences.

A key policy that impacts on forests is REDD – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation — which is explicitly premised on increasing the value of standing trees. But as the value goes up, so does competition for those forests, leading to more and more land being grabbed from people living in or dependent upon them. Furthermore, since REDD policies mistakenly equate diverse and ancient forests with quick-growing and other wide barren monoculture plantations, REDD still permits the destruction of forests and their replacement with plantations.

The current corporate-friendly neo-liberal approach aims to find alternatives to fossil fuels and climate change mitigation, without addressing the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, including overconsumption. Companies in the Global North are being guaranteed a suitable policy environment in which they can continue to generate profit, even though this will be at the expense of peoples in the Global South, the very same people who have been custodians and have safeguarded these precious ecosystems for centuries.

The Global Forest Coalition (GFC) has compiled this video repository because collectively, these videos — made by numerous different organisations and communities — tell a powerful story about the way in which the same problems are being encountered and challenged across the continents. The commodification of forests is driving land grabbing, forest loss, the expansion of tree plantations, fraud, corruption, the violation of human rights and more…

From Brazil to Australia, testimonies from different stakeholders show the very real cases of communities impacted by this dynamic. In addition, the videos show how the current approach to climate change is increasing the pressure on forests and forest peoples, and why the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change are not real solutions.

The current repository is divided into 3 sections:

1- Exporting commodities: timber and agrofuels
2- Carbon: schemes, scams and cowboys
3- Rights and Resistance

Indigenous peoples protest so-called "green economy"

On UN Human Rights Day, 10 Dec 2010, Survival International released two videos highlighting the plight of the Guarani Indians in Brazil. In One must have courage they ask return of their lands, stolen for ranches, soya and sugarcane plantations.
The Gunmen expresses their anger at landgrabbers and fear of hired pistoleros.
Further north in Pará, Amazonian peoples protest huge hydro dams that destroy forest and river ecosystems, polluting their water and dispossessing them. In June and August, in the city of Altamira, hundreds demonstrated against the huge Belo Monte dam."The forest is our grocery, the river is our market. We want strangers to leave the rivers of the Xingu alone," say chiefs quoted by the church organization CIMI. 300 more dams are planned, say the protesters.

The NGO Amazonia has reported illegal pipeline construction, land grabs by ranchers, Indian children sold as slaves, vigilante murders, fullscale military attacks, corrupt state governments and judges -- all in the name of "development". Even REDD is "short-sighted and deadly" to indigenous peoples, the NGO adds.

There is blood on the organic soya (or hamburgers) you eat, the "green" biofuels you use. More than 1,400 rural poor in Pará have been killed by illegal logger-ranchers over the last 35 years, according to the Catholic Pastoral da Terra. Witnesses die mysteriously. This year, a long-standing court case marked by corrupt decisions ended; a rancher who ordered the assassination of a white Catholic human rights activist, Sister Dorothy Stang, was finally imprisoned after strong US diplomatic pressure. See the 2008 film They Killed Sister Dorothy and the 2009 opera Angel of the Amazon. Land grabs, deforestation, and near-slavery to big landowners continue. A fifth of Amazon forests have been clear-cut in 40 years, exceeding losses in the previous five centuries. Brazil has become one of the leading emitters of greenhouse gases.

The price of development? A Time article "Brazil's Land-Reform Murders" points out that Brazil has become the world's biggest producer of sugar, soy beans, coffee, orange juice, beef and chicken. Father Edilberto Senna, an activist priest, says clear-cuts, jobs, and cash are motivating factors behind the bloodshed. Despite free elections, "nothing changes," he says. "Brazil will soon be the fifth biggest economy in the world... But who pays for these ambitious goals? Amazonia, the home of the biggest reserves of minerals and timber." A geographer, Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, has produced a map of the violence. Worst murder rates are in the frontier provinces, and cities where police death squads operate. See also National Geographic's eyewitness reports from the Amazon.

Thanks to Margaret Kidd's blogs on QEWnet for these references.