THE GREEN
SPIRIT
When the FoEI Forest Programme was
established at the Annual General Meeting
in Ecuador in 1999, no less than 39 FoE
groups enlisted themselves as active
members of the accompanying working group.
The great majority of FoE groups were
already involved in one way or another in
forest-related projects or campaigns.
Existing activities ranged from the
provision of legal support to Indigenous
Peoples defending their forest lands
against the intrusion of oil companies to
community-based forest management, and from
consumer's campaigns to raise awareness
about the need to reduce paper consumption
to international lobbying at the United
Nations. Yet despite this diversity, all
involved groups hoped to halt the
destruction of the earth's most
biologically diverse ecosystem and to
defend the rights of Indigenous and other
forest peoples.
The southern FoE groups showed a
particularly strong interest in the forest
programme: six African, six Asian and
nearly all of the FoE groups from Latin
America and the Caribbean region are active
in the work. Coordination is also dominated
by activists from the southern hemisphere,
with FoE Paraguay leading the international
advocacy campaign related to
intergovernmental fora like the Climate and
Biodiversity Conventions and FoE Australia
taking responsibility for campaigning on
the private sector.
The large number of groups involved is
simultaneously the strength of and a
challenge for the forest programme. It was
obvious from the beginning that the
programme would only make sense if it were
to build upon the richness of existing
work. For that reason, the most important
events in the first year included three
regional and one global workshop to
identify the priorities of the FoE groups.
These workshops were held in the Ecuadorian
Amazon, in Ghana and in Bangladesh, and
they provided an excellent opportunity to
get to know the main activities and
interests of the southern members of the
working group. The global workshop was held
in Bonn, Germany, and was used to evaluate
the first months and plan some concrete
campaigns for the initial year of the
programme based upon the outcomes of the
regional workshops.
For practical reasons, these campaigns
had a strong focus on intergovernmental
fora. The year 2000 was a busy year for
forests at the international level. The
Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (see
page 20) held its last session in January
2000. Regretfully, this "worst diplomatic
exercise ever" decided to reestablish
itself in the form of a UN Forum on Forests
(UNFF). FoEI has persistently campaigned
for the genuine participation of Indigenous
Peoples, NGOs and other major groups in the
UNFF process, and for the implementation of
existing commitments. The UNFF has formally
embraced these two recommendations, but it
is unclear whether these intentions will be
put into practice.
Meanwhile, another intergovernmental
forum has been devoting a lot of
negotiation time to forests: the Framework
Convention on Climate Change. To escape
from their obligations to reduce industrial
greenhouse gas emissions, the Kyoto
Protocol allows industrialized countries to
include deforestation, reforestation and
afforestation in their greenhouse gas
calculations. A number of countries also
want to implement these activities in
developing countries (see article page 5).
Thus, the Parties to the Convention needed
to come up with a number of limitations,
principles, methodologies, and definitions,
including a definition of "forest"!
Considering the risk that the definition
of "forest" under the Kyoto Protocol could
include monoculture tree plantations, FoE
forest campaigners opted to focus on the
negative social and environmental impacts
of tree plantations, including their impact
on both climate change and biodiversity. We
thus produced a compilation of testimonies
on the negative impacts of tree
plantations. The document,
Tree
Trouble
, includes an analysis of the
problems of tree plantations and carbon
sequestration in general by FoE Costa Rica,
and additional stories about the problems
associated with tree plantations and other
carbon sinks and reservoirs by FoE groups
from Ecuador, Australia, Paraguay,
Cameroon, the Czech Republic, Finland (on
Finnish tree plantation companies in
Indonesia), Colombia, Bangladesh and Chile
and case studies from Uganda and Tanzania
written by Norwatch/The Future in Our
Hands. The World Rainforest Movement and
FERN-UK assisted in editing the document,
the final edition of which was published at
the November Climate Conference in The
Hague.
Tree Trouble
provides an amazing
overview of appalling tree plantation
stories from all over the world. It also
provides a good example of the tremendous
knowledge and expertise that can be found
in the FoEI network and the richness of
local and national FoE work. It is obvious
that the main challenge for the Forest
Programme in the years to come will be to
further mobilize this existing expertise,
both as a basis for international advocacy
campaigns and as a basis for the private
sector campaign to be developed in the
coming months.
Simone Lovera, Sobrevivencia/FoE
Paraguay
Tree Trouble can be downloaded from the
FoEI website.
