TROPICAL RAINFORESTS a plan for action

Forest and Bird, Volume 19, Issue 3, 1 August 1988, Page 28

TROPICAL RAINFORESTS a plan for action

The world’s tropical rainforests are being destroyed at the rate of 40 hectares every minute. Their destruction has been described as ‘‘the greatest natural calamity since the Ice Age’, "the greatest biological disaster ever perpetrated by humans" and "a threat to civilisation second only to thermonuclear war." In response to this terrible threat, concerned people around the world are marshalling forces to save the forests. The editors of the English magazine The Ecologist have written the following abridged article on a possible solution to the problem.

The World Resources Institute Report

he World Resources Institute (WRI), in conjunction with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, has produced a lengthy report calling for action to end tropical deforestation. The report outlines a five-year action programme to cost $8,000 million — aimed at providing fuelwood, promoting agroforestry, reafforesting upland watersheds, conserving tropical forest ecosystems, and strengthening institutions for research, training and extension. The taskforce consisted of government ministers, directors of state forestry agencies, representatives of logging companies and paper manufacturers, together with a representative of the World Bank. No conservationist or ecologist or member of an independent (that is, non-government funded) environmental organisation was included, nor were any tribal peoples from those areas most directly affected by tropical deforestation. Significantly, the plan was rejected outright by Non-Governmental Organisations from 10 countries at a meeting in 1987. Firstly, the WRI report is based on the premise that poverty, over-population and ignorance are the prime causes of forest destruction. Blaming the poor for deforestation, however, is a gross and evil charge. To blame colonising peasants for burning the rainforests is tantamount to blaming soldiers for causing wars. Peasant colonists

carry out much of the work of deforestation in Central America, but they are mere pawns in a general’s game. Making scapegoats of the poor and dispossessed not only obscures the reasons for their poverty but detracts from the real causes of deforestation namely, the massive commercial development schemes being promoted in the Third World. Plantations and ranching projects, for example, have laid waste to millions of hectares of forest. In Ethiopia, the Awash Valley has been stripped of its trees to make way for plantations, 60 per cent of the land now being under cotton with another 22 per cent devoted to sugar. In Central America, cattle ranching is responsible for the clearance of almost two-thirds of the forests. In Brazil official government statistics reveal that 60 per cent of forest destruction between 1966 and 1975 was caused by largescale ranching schemes (3,865,271 hectares) and road building (3,075,000 hectares). Dams too are a cause of massive and irreversible deforestation. In Brazil, the Tucurui project, has flooded some 216,000 hectares of virgin forest. Near Manaus, in northwestern Amazonia, the Balbina dam will flood 2,346 square kilometres. All told, the dams planned for Amazonia are expected to flood an area the size of Montana, much of it forest. Blaming the poor for deforestation also overlooks the fact that millions of peasant colonists have been actively encouraged to invade the forests under government-spon-sored colonisation schemes. In Indonesia,

more than 3,600,000 peasants from Java have already been moved into the densely forested outer island of the archipelago under the country’s Transmigration Programme. At a conservative estimate, more than 3,300,000 hectares of rainforest are threatened by the project. In Brazil, colonisation schemes are held directly responsible for 17 per cent of forest destruction between 1966 and 1975. Moreover, the problem of peasant settlers cannot be separated from the problem of landlessness in the Third World. At present, land holdings are concentrated in the hands of very few people 93 per cent of arable lands in Latin America being held by a mere 7 per cent of land owners: Much of that land is used for plantation agriculture or ranching — thus denying its use to poor farmers, many of whom have been ruthlessly dispossessed of their own lands, often at the point of a gun. In the absence of land reforms, those farmers then have little choice but to invade the forests. Blaming poverty for deforestation also ignores the fact that the best protected forests of the world are inhabited by those very tribal peoples who, by the standards of industrialised humans, are among the world’s poorest. Indeed, most lack all but the simplest material possessions and have no access to the creature comforts, such as piped water, that we equate with a minimum standard of living. Yet it is these very people who are fighting hardest to protect the forest. Thus in Sarawak, the local tribes have been waging a desperate campaign to stop the logging of their forests. The response of the Malaysian Government has been brutal,

many of the tribesmen having been recently arrested in an attempt to break their blockade of the logging roads. Yet, the government still insists, contrary to all evidence, that the tribesmen are to blame for the deforestation. Blaming the poor for deforestation also serves to rationalise, and hence legitimise, the view that current development policies can (and should) continue unabated, and that deforestation can be halted without any need for politico-economic sacrifices of any kind. Indeed, the WRI plan goes further than this. It interprets the problem in such a way as to justify further schemes which, though politically and economically expedient, are socially and ecologically destructive: in this case, the setting up of vast plantations of fast-growing exotics, such as eucalyptus which not only fail to fulfil most of the ecological functions of natural forests, but which actually have a serious adverse impact on the environment. What is more, as the Environmental Defense Fund points out, little of the wood grown under India’s World Bank funded ‘‘social forestry’ programme, which is held up as a model by the WRI, is available to the poor: instead it almost all goes for pulp and rayon manufacture. Finally, the plan does not even mention the rights of those indigenous peoples who inhabit the world’s tropical forests and who depend on them for their livelihood. Clearly, a radically new approach is required if deforestation is to be halted and a global catastrophe averted. The forests cannot

possibly be saved if we continue to see them as but another resource to be cashed in. They are indeed a resource, but not because they can be transformed into commodities to be sold on the open market. They are a resource in the sense in which the planet itself, the sun and the atmosphere are resources; they make life possible and must therefore be preserved in that state which enables them to do so. To achieve our goal will require an elaborate plan made up of a number of carefully coordinated steps. Its implementation will span many decades and will require the close cooperation of international institutions, national governments, non-govern-mental organisations, action groups and millions of committed individuals. The stages of the plan are as follows: The first step in the plan involves taking advantage of the present impasse created by the Third World's massive debt to the western banking system. This debt now stands at approximately a trillion dollars. Interest payments are so high that Third World countries are now paying more money to the West than they are receiving in aid — in 1986, by a margin of about $29 billion. There is of course no way in which such payments can be sustained for very long. Already several countries, notably Peru and Brazil, have come close to defaulting on their interest payments, and many more look like following suit. At the July 1987 Annual Meeting of the Organisation for African Unity, 50 members states requested an amnesty of $200 billion worth of debts, ad-

mitting quite openly that ‘‘the problem is not one of liquidity but rather of complete inability to pay’’. In order to service the interest on their debts, Third World countries have drastically increased the rate at which they are plundering their natural resources, including their forests, thus adding to the environmental and social costs of the debt crisis. Several western banks, led by Citicorp, have now made provisions against countries defaulting on their debts. The acceptance that many loans will never be repaid has opened up the possibility of turning the debt crisis to ecological good. Already two ‘‘Debt-for-Nature"’ swaps have been carried out by environmental groups. Thus in the US, Conservation International negotiated to buy $650,000 worth of Bolivia’s debt at a discounted rate of $100,000. The debt was then written off in exchange for the Bolivian Government undertaking to set aside 3.7 million acres of rainforest in an area adjacent to the existing Beni Biosphere Reserve in Amazonia. A similar agreement has been reached between the World Wildlife Fund and the Costa Rican Government leading to the setting aside of a substantial area of forest as a national park. It is not suggested that these Debt-for-Nature swaps are the ultimate solution to the problem of forest preservation. They are not. It is possible to criticise them ona number of counts. One obvious problem is the possibility that, having set aside small areas of forest under debt-swap agreements, there will be a temptation to exploit what forests remain. However, debt swaps

undoubtedly have a role to play as part of a holding action, one that will enable us to gain invaluable time which can be used for creating the conditions in which sounder and more lasting policies can be implemented. To have any real impact, however, Debt-for-Nature swaps must be generalised and coordinated so that the bulk of tropical forests within debtor countries can be safeguarded and debts correspondingly reduced. For this to be possible, governments, international agencies and industrial corporations must together raise the requisite funds, however massive these might be, since clearly the small private foundations that have so far been involved cannot be expected to finance this operation except in a small and piecemeal manner. 2. Redeveloping the Biosphere The main causes of poverty and famine in the Third World are deforestation, erosion and desertification in other words, environmental or biospheric degradation. Of this there can be no doubt. The need for a massive programme of ecological rehabilitation was only too clear to the highly respected Indian civil servant, B.B. Vohra, at present Energy Consultant to the Indian Government, when he wrote his now famous A Charter for the Land in September 1972. A similar plan was also put forward by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at its Desertification Conference in Nairobi in 1977, but member Governments were largely indifferent to the issue and the funds UNEP asked for were never provided. The first priority in any programme of ecological recovery must be a worldwide programme of reafforestation. With sensitivity and skill, even the most degraded lands in the dry tropics can be restored to forest, successful reafforestation schemes having been implemented in Costa Rica and at Auroville in India. Unlike officially-funded reafforestation programmes, however, the goal of these schemes, is to restore degraded land to ecological health rather than merely to make a commercial profit. The trees must therefore be selected for their ecological rather than economic value, the emphasis being on trees which restore the soil, which retain water and which provide fodder and foodcrops. As a model, we might take President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan ‘‘to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work, not interfering with normal employment, and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood

control and similar projects.’’ More important than the material gains would be ‘‘the moral and spiritual value of such work."’ It was not a panacea for all the unemployment, but ‘‘an essential step’"’ in the emergency. It was also a remarkable success. Forty million acres of farmland benefitted from erosion control, drainage and other conservation measures. The value of the work completed was, at the time, estimated at more than $200 million. 3. The Phasing Out of Destructive Development Schemes More important than even reafforestation is the phasing out of development policies which threaten the forests. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, whilst reafforestation is possible in the dry tropics, it is virtually impossible in the moist tropics. Tropical rainforests are the product of over a hundred million years of evolutionary research and development: once destroyed, they can never be completely reconstituted. A reafforestation scheme, however massive, can at best give rise to a crude approximation of the climax forest, one that cannot fulfill essential ecological services with the same degree of sophistication. Secondly, the Civilian Conservation Corps would be fighting a losing battle if deforestation were still proceeding at the present rate and on the present scale. Thirdly, the task of assuring the protection of the forests set aside under Debt-for-Nature arrangements would be very difficult indeed if the custodians of the forests were subjected to continual pressure from powerful interests to release forested areas to accommodate development projects. For those reasons, an essential component of the plan must be to phase out all development projects that involve the destruction of forested areas. This means that timber will eventually have to be derived from limited areas planted for the purpose of providing it. We will simply have to learn to live without many tropical hardwoods. Livestock rearing schemes which involve clearing the forests must also cease: Americans will simply have to pay more for their hamburgers or eat less meat and more vegetables as do people in many parts of the world. Moreover, peasants must no longer be displaced from their lands and settled in forested areas. Land reform is thus of critical importance: the land which has been taken over from peasants for large plantations and livestock rearing schemes geared to the export trade must be returned to the peasants. There is no other option if the pressure of colonists on the forest is to be relieved. These are some of the economic sacrifices that will have to be made if the forests are to be protected. To suppose that their protection is possible without making such sacrifices is an illusion we can no longer afford to entertain. 4. Reforming Development Strategies The destructive development schemes that are directly and indirectly responsible for deforestation are an essential part of pres-

ent development strategies as reflected in IMF policies. These consist in encouraging Third World countries to buy our manufactured goods and technological devices, and to finance those purchases by exporting their raw materials, including forest products and the produce of their land. It is unquestionably the case that Third World countries have become increasingly ‘hooked’ on imported manufactured goods and technological devices, so much so that the pressure to cash in their resources, including their forests, is irresistible-a pressure that can only increase as their debts escalate, which under present development strategies they must inevitably do. Our Official development strategy has thereby caused Third World countries systematically to export the indispensable, without which their survival is impossible, in exchange for totally superfluous items such as armaments, and tinned and packaged foods. This process cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered to be in the interests of the bulk of the increasingly improverished and underfed peoples of the Third World. If deforestation, and indeed environmental degradation in general and its associated impoverishment and malnutrition, is to be brought to a halt, then current development policies must be radically revised. Third World countries must only import those manufactured goods which they can pay for without selling off their forests, without eroding and desertifying their agricultural land, and without exporting food crops which should be used to feed their increasingly malnourished populations. The bilateral aid agencies and the multilateral development banks, and indeed commercial banks in general, must be prevented, by law if needs be, from lending money to finance any non-essential imports and expenditure on infrastructure over and above that which Third World countries can really afford financially, socially and ecologically. This will undoubtedly involve major politico-economic sacrifices on the part of western institutions, and industrial and financial corporations. But, once again, it would be totally illusory to suppose that, without such sacrifices, the forests can conceivably be preserved. An Emergency Meeting of the United Nations The measures required to save the world’s tropical rainforests and bring a halt to the biological holocaust which is occurring before our very eyes, and which can only lead to global catastrophe in the very near future, requires that immediate and very difficult decisions be taken at an international level. For this reason we call for an Emergency Meeting of the United Nations, to study the problem and consider our plan for action. To that end, we therefore call on those national governments that are conscious of their responsibility to humankind, and indeed to life in general, to sponsor this request, so that it may be formally presented to the United Nations as soon as possible. We also call on all those individuals who share our deep concerns to join with us in requesting this emergency meeting. f

The publishers of The Ecologist are also circulating a petition urging for an Extraordinary United Nations Meeting and say that 1 million signatures are required at least. If you would like a copy of the petition, please write to Forest & Bird, PO Box 631, Wellington, with a stamped, addressed envelope. Subscribers to Conservation News will be receiving a petition with a copy of the newsletter.