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The Big Story Forests the 18th and 19th centuries. By the end of the 20th century, farms and new settlements had replaced much of America’s deciduous forests.5 Degraded land For landless poor in Rondônia, the chance to carve out a few hectares from the forest to grow bananas and maize, and raise a few chickens and pigs, trumps conservation. The frontier acts as a relief valve allowing the state to mask extreme inequality. (Brazil has the world’s eighth-biggest economy but there is a yawning gap between rich and poor). Successive governments have encouraged settlement of the Amazon. But small farmers are neither the main cause of deforestation nor, in the long run, the main beneficiaries. Within a few years, rain and erosion leaches nutrients from the thin tropical soil. Yields fall. The degraded land is soon sold to large landowners and powerful agribusiness companies. Not surprisingly, a similar combination of cash crops and resource projects threatens forests the world over. ● In Australia, coalmining menaces more than a million hectares of forest, while in Canada 20 per cent of the boreal forest (more than 150 million hectares) has been ceded to logging companies, oil and gas exploration, hydro dams and mines.6 ●● Illegal logging flourishes, driven by renegade loggers in cahoots with corrupt politicians and greedy entrepreneurs. In Burma, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, ‘Chinese businesses pay in gold bars for the rights to log entire mountains and smuggle timber out of [Burma]’s conflict-torn state of Kachin.’ ●● Often the graft is transparent. Under Papua New Guinea’s ‘Special Agriculture and Business Leases’ scheme, 30 per cent of the country has been auctioned off to foreign timber companies. More than 80 per cent of its forests may be gone by 2021, according to the PNG Forest Authority.1 ●● The conversion of woodlands to cash crops is widespread. In Uganda, tea planters have set their sights on 250 hectares of the Kafuga Pocket Forest Reserve on the southern fringes of the Bwindi National Park. The forest is one of the last homes of the endangered mountain gorilla and the national park has been listed by the UN as a World Heritage Site. ●● Perversely, even the demand for so-called green fuels has fuelled deforestation. Across Europe, power plants looking to replace ‘dirty’ coal are now burning wood pellets for generating electricity. As a result, old-growth trees in Slovakia and Romania are ground into wood chips.7 This trend also endangers forests in the US south. From Georgia to the Carolinas, biologically rich wetland forests are replaced by monoculture pine plantations.8 Zero net deforestation In many countries, managed tree plantations are now the norm. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says 50 million hectares of forests were planted between 2000 and 2010. Unfortunately, these were mostly industrial monocultures – pine, acacia, eucalyptus, rubber and palm – which the FAO bizarrely equates with natural forests. This might seem odd until you understand the UN’s corporate-friendly goal of ‘zero net deforestation’. Simply put, it means that natural forests can continue to be toppled as long as they are replaced – somewhere, anywhere – by other trees. That’s one reason global corporations such as Unilever, Bunge and Mondelez International have jumped on the bandwagon. As the World Rainforest Movement notes: ‘Zero net deforestation means companies can 450,000 Aggregated forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon, 1988-2014 (sq km) 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0 198 8 198 9 199 0 199 1 199 2 199 3 199 4 199 5 199 6 199 7 199 8 199 9 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 : M o n g a b a y. c o m 2014Source 14 ● New I nter nat io nal iS T ● April 2016
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l a m y t h e A g e n c y/A A grizzly bear mother and cubs in Canada’s northern boreal forest. The boreal makes up 30 per cent of global forest cover and is severely threatened by climate change and resource extraction. R o o M Stumped: a young boy surveys the remains of giant conifers on a mistshrouded inlet in the US Pacific northwest. l a m y M a r r i o t t /A J o h n E continue destroying forests as long as they can show a certificate that someone elsewhere has planted trees or protected some forest of at least the same size as one they converted into pasture or monoculture plantation.’9 But planting trees does not necessarily make a forest. Just ask the Mbyá Guaraní people in the Argentine province of Misiones who saw their native lapachos and timbós replaced by an endless expanse of foreign pine trees. Now, they lament, ‘our land, which once filled our lives with joy, is a desert of pine trees... where silence reigns because there are no animals, birds or fish.’10 The other ‘game changer’ that the UN and the business community endorse goes by the unwieldy acronym REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). The idea is to use market forces to arrest deforestation in what is really an elaborate carbon-offset scheme. It seems simple enough – rich countries pay poor countries not to cut down their forests. Save the trees, save the CO2. Countries (or companies) providing the funds can claim credit for the emissions saved and eventually those credits can be traded in a global carbon market. But there are a few barriers en route. One is that market-led schemes tend to spiral into greed-driven free-for-alls. We’ve seen what convoluted investment vehicles the deepthinkers on Wall Street can invent. The 2008 global recession was triggered by such chicanery and the wreckage is still with us. But more to the point: the scheme is an elaborate solution that ignores the core problem. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. Forests without people With REDD, rich countries can continue to pump out carbon as long as they can pay poor countries not to cut their trees. More critically, it’s communities who depend on the forest for their livelihoods that tend to get the sharp end of the stick. As journalist Sam Knight argued in his meticulous exposé of REDD in Papua New Guinea: ‘When money and trees mix, it is normally local people who get screwed.’11 An NGO study of 24 projects across a range of countries – including Mozambique, Peru, Nigeria and Kenya – found that communities in REDD project areas are ‘subjected to restrictions on forest use which interfere with their ways of life and livelihoods and reinforces the idea that a well-conserved forest is a forest without people.’12 And that would be a mistake. Because our idealized notion of forests as pristine wilderness separate from human culture is pure invention. Human life has always been deeply intertwined with forests. Millions of people today depend on forests for their most basic needs. And it’s those communities that are best placed to protect and defend them. Recent research supports this claim. Deforestation rates in community-managed forests are consistently lower – up to six times lower in forests where local people have legal rights.13 In the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, where indigenous communities manage about a quarter of the two-million hectare reserve, deforestation is a scant 0.02 per cent. In Peru it’s the opposite. There, the government has allowed resource companies to trample on indigenous rights. Concessions cover 75 per cent of the jungle and deforestation is rampant. Kenya is another country where community forestry is making a difference. Critical upland watersheds were denuded as trees were burned to make charcoal, leading to a dramatic reduction in rainfall and widespread drought. That set alarm bells ringing and eventually led to the creation of community forestry associations to reclaim and manage the barren hillsides. Today, forest cover is increasing and so are the rains. According to Simon Gitau, warden of Mount Kenya National Park: ‘People who used to be poachers and illegal loggers are now defending the forests.’14 So should we all. People need forests. But so do the creatures we share the earth with and so does the planet. That’s why it’s urgent we both protect and nurture them. n 1 On the Edge, the State and Fate of the World’s Tropical Rainforests, Claude Martin, (Greystone Books, Vancouver/ Berkeley, 2015)  2 The Guardian, nin.tl/brazil-drought  3 National Academy of Sciences, nin.tl/amazon-projections  4 NPR, nin.tl/residents-leaving   5 Saving the World’s Deciduous Forests, Robert A Askins, (Yale University Press, New Haven/ London, 2014)  6 Global Forest Watch, nin.tl/canada-tree-cover  7 Fern, nin.tl/biomass-devastation  8 Dogwood Alliance, nin.tl/bioenergy-report  9 World Rainforest Movement, nin.tl/wrn-redd  10 World Rainforest Movement, nin.tl/fsclandgrabbing  11 The Guardian, nin.tl/money-on-trees  12 World Rainforest Movement, nin.tl/number-games  13 World Resources Institute, wri.org/securingrights  14 Yale Environment 360, nin.tl/kenya-conservation New I nter nat io nalist ● April 2016 ● 15

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The Big Story Forests the 18th and 19th centuries. By the end of the 20th century, farms and new settlements had replaced much of America’s deciduous forests.5

Degraded land For landless poor in Rondônia, the chance to carve out a few hectares from the forest to grow bananas and maize, and raise a few chickens and pigs, trumps conservation. The frontier acts as a relief valve allowing the state to mask extreme inequality. (Brazil has the world’s eighth-biggest economy but there is a yawning gap between rich and poor).

Successive governments have encouraged settlement of the Amazon. But small farmers are neither the main cause of deforestation nor, in the long run, the main beneficiaries. Within a few years, rain and erosion leaches nutrients from the thin tropical soil. Yields fall. The degraded land is soon sold to large landowners and powerful agribusiness companies.

Not surprisingly, a similar combination of cash crops and resource projects threatens forests the world over. ● In Australia, coalmining menaces more than a million hectares of forest, while in Canada 20 per cent of the boreal forest (more than 150 million hectares) has been ceded to logging companies, oil and gas exploration, hydro dams and mines.6 ●● Illegal logging flourishes, driven by renegade loggers in cahoots with corrupt politicians and greedy entrepreneurs. In Burma, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, ‘Chinese businesses pay in gold bars for the rights to log entire mountains and smuggle timber out of [Burma]’s conflict-torn state of Kachin.’ ●● Often the graft is transparent. Under Papua

New Guinea’s ‘Special Agriculture and Business Leases’ scheme, 30 per cent of the country has been auctioned off to foreign timber companies. More than 80 per cent of its forests may be gone by 2021, according to the PNG Forest Authority.1 ●● The conversion of woodlands to cash crops is widespread. In Uganda, tea planters have set their sights on 250 hectares of the Kafuga Pocket Forest Reserve on the southern fringes of the Bwindi National Park. The forest is one of the last homes of the endangered mountain gorilla and the national park has been listed by the UN as a World Heritage Site. ●● Perversely, even the demand for so-called green fuels has fuelled deforestation. Across Europe, power plants looking to replace ‘dirty’ coal are now burning wood pellets for generating electricity. As a result, old-growth trees in Slovakia and Romania are ground into wood chips.7 This trend also endangers forests in the US south. From Georgia to the Carolinas, biologically rich wetland forests are replaced by monoculture pine plantations.8

Zero net deforestation In many countries, managed tree plantations are now the norm. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says 50 million hectares of forests were planted between 2000 and 2010. Unfortunately, these were mostly industrial monocultures – pine, acacia, eucalyptus, rubber and palm – which the FAO bizarrely equates with natural forests.

This might seem odd until you understand the UN’s corporate-friendly goal of ‘zero net deforestation’. Simply put, it means that natural forests can continue to be toppled as long as they are replaced – somewhere, anywhere – by other trees. That’s one reason global corporations such as Unilever, Bunge and Mondelez International have jumped on the bandwagon.

As the World Rainforest Movement notes: ‘Zero net deforestation means companies can

450,000 Aggregated forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon, 1988-2014 (sq km)

400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000

0

198 8

198 9

199 0

199 1

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199 3

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199 5

199 6

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2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

: M o n g a b a y. c o m

2014Source

14 ● New I nter nat io nal iS T ● April 2016

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