Tropical forests: a plan for action

Blaming the poor for deforestation also overlooks the fact that millions of peasant colonists have been actively encouraged to invade the forests under government-sponsored colonisation schemes. In Indonesia, more than 3,600,000 peasants from Java have already been moved into the densely forested outer islands 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 percent 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 percent of arable lands in Latin America being held by a mere 7 percent 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 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. Significantly, almost all those peasants who have invaded Rondonia in Amazonia have done so because their lands, in the fertile state of Rio Grande do Sul, have been taken over for large-scale export-orientated plantations and ranches.

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 man, are among the worlds 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 peoples 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.

A Plan for Action

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.

Any plan aimed at preserving the world’s tropical forests must thereby rest on the fundamental premise that the forests are an international patrimony. To achieve our goal will require an elaborate plan made up of a number of carefully co-ordinated steps. Its implementation will span many decades and will require the close co-operation of international institutions, national governments, non-governmental organisations, action groups and millions of committed individuals. The stages of the plan are as follows:

1. Debts for forests

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, many more look like following suit. At the July 1987 Annual Meeting of the Organisation for African Unity, 50 member states requested an amnesty on $200 billion worth of debts, admitting quite openly that “the problem is not one of liquidity but rather of a complete ability 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. In particular, the amount of land under cash crops has been increased at the expense of the forests and at the expense of growing food for local consumption.

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. Indeed, as Barbara Bramble points out, there are numerous means by which foreign debts can be written off in exchange for policy changes, which would benefit the environment.

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 on a 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 co-ordinated 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. In the UK, the Ecological Foundation (Lower Bosnieves, Withiel, Bodmin, Cornwall) has undertaken to help raise the funds required to publicise this scheme and persuade the appropriate institutions to finance it on the scale required.

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. For this reason, the development programmes that should have the highest priority must be those which aim to rehabilitate the natural environment, on which we must ultimately depend for our welfare and, indeed, for our very survival.

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 and of those we are proposing, is to restore degraded land to ecological health so that it can fulfil ecological, social and climatic functions, 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.

To carry out reafforestation on the scale required will necessitate the mobilisation of young people. Shankar Ranganathan suggests that we take as our model President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which was set up in the US during the New Deal, partly as a means of healing the wounds caused by a century of thoughtless industrialisation, partly as a means of employing the millions of idle and depressed young people who had lost their jobs during the great depression.

President Roosevelt’s plan was

“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 benefited from erosion control, drainage and other conservation measures. The value of the work completed was, at the time, estimated at more than $200 million. As Ranganathan argues,

“an organisation on the lines of the CCC needs to be set up soon in India. If it succeeds, it could become the biggest project of its kind the world has ever seen. It could provide jobs for millions and increase the nation’s wealth through improving its land. Through disciplined training, it could create a large and effective workforce, based in the villages where they are needed and geared to the development of rural India.”

It is not India alone that requires such an operation but the tropics as a whole – that vast densely populated area that is at present being systematically desertified with consequences that are too horrible to imagine.

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 100 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 fulfil 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 return 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 present 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, domestic appliances, automobiles 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 impoverished 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 mankind 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.

Edward Goldsmith, Peter Bunyard & Nicholas Hildyard.

References

1.	Rainforest Action Network, briefing document 1987. Available from RAN, Suite 28, 300 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, USA.
2.	Statement by Canadian non-governmental organisation, 1987. Available from: Probe International, 100 College Street, Toronto Canada M5G 1L5.
3.	Statement by the Club of Earth quoted in the Washington Post, 29 September 1986.