Women for Sustainable Development, 32/2 Kempapura Road, Hebbal,
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blog Current Climate Issues
A forestry, biomass and sustainability conference planned in London in May 2010 advertises itself as offering insights into investment opportunities and carbon reductions. Apparently the rich need updating on “analysis of the latest developments in policy, economics and financing of biomass and forestry projects”, and apparently they need to “identify new investment opportunities and risks in these rapidly growing markets”. But where are these rapidly growing markets and what are these investment opportunities? There appears to be a keynote speaker from the UK, but he is there in his capacity of Chairman, Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration – it does not sound like he will restrain the citizens of his country to acquire rights and land for forestry biomass and sustainability at home in the British Isles – “global” would seem to mean instead that he is encouraging them to play casino capitalism and look for forests, and biomass growing opportunities on land in India, for example. “Optimise your business opportunities – gain a deep understanding of the current market situation facing forestry and biomass, including carbon finance, so you have all the information you need to maximise investment opportunities as they arise!” The organisers cry. But long and temporary Certified Emission Reductions from forests hardly earn 1% of the investment costs for reforestation of degraded lands. So “including carbon finance” may be a little optimistic.
This conference specifically and this type of conference generally is nothing other than a land grabbing exercise. All these speakers know that carbon credits from afforestation are a joke. There is not even a legally binding climate agreement anymore to speak of. They know that REDD is a joke – it will take a life time to get one project registered. But they want at all cost to buy land, so they will leave their homes in London and wherever else they live and come and do business overseas, if not in India then in Cambodia or another country. And seeing as mining is out of their league they will do forestry instead, financed by the same oligopolies who own everything from mining to forests to carbon allowances with our friends as minor go-betweens at best, as bit part land grabbers at worst. The land will be theirs, they think, and that is why they come.
It is important for people’s movements to use land laws to defend the rights of the people against these neo-colonial forces. There is not a patch of land on which people have not for centuries lived, worked, built up soil carbon or indeed destroyed it, conserved trees or indeed felled them, but it was our land and we did what we needed to do, and we have our forest laws to keep us in check. What London based casino capitalists at conferences like this do is plan and strategise about how to lure and seduce and entice officials of the Government of India and of the States into denotifying forest lands and allotting government lands, as well as acquiring lands in the name of economic development so that forestry biomass and sustainability money laundering operations can be set up. The coal, oil, gas and casino money of the rich is to be converted into land - land from which the Government of India and the State governments will have driven us to give to them. Whilst the people in forests in India struggle to get their rights under the Forest Rights Act, and the citizens of India struggle to defend the environmental laws of the country and cling on to their ancestral agricultural lands, the rich including our friends from London will assume that land laws do not apply to them. In India the law is very very difficult to enforce against the rich, or on behalf of the poor, or against the government in collusion with the rich [we still do not know what the outcome of the Lafarge case is going to be]. “Which law?”, is not a question our friends at the “forestry biomass and sustainability” conference are likely to ask us. There is unlikely to be a single speaker in the conference answering the question of what they will be allowed to do if they come to India. The reason is that if they looked into the law they would find they are not allowed to do very much at all in Indian forests or any land with trees or on agricultural land. They need the government and NRI lawyers with a willingness to buy the services of judges and members of legislative assemblies and members of parliament and cabinet ministers and tahsildars to do their land acquisition. A similar conference for Cambodia is also announced. Cambodia is likely to have similar laws as India, which our friends are similarly unlikely to study. Capitalists will have a tough time there too if they stick to the environmental, wildlife, agricultural land laws and forestry laws of the country. But instead of sticking to the law, capitalists bribe our government officials to get their work done. They are not interested in the State's responsibility in India under Article 48-A of our Constitution, is to “endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country". Do our friends think that they will do this better than us and therefore they deserve to have our land? Today tiger buffer areas, elephant corridors and “farms” are becoming the status symbol of corporate responsibility of Indian capital. The same company will a have mine on one side of the country and a CDM reforestation project on the other side and a tiger lodge in between, a mine in one part of the world and a forest in the other. Where ArcelorMittal and Lafarge go our sustainable friends follow, helping them to do what ever needs to be done for “sustainability” - having first destroyed the forest. Our expert “forest, biomass and sustainability” friends have rich pickings in forests ruined by industry. They can come and reforest after their big bothers have ruined the land. They can come to India and meet with the officials and in no time at all they will have land allotted to them by the Government of India and the state governments. But whatever they do, “forestry biomass and sustainability” when uttered by our friends whether they are mining companies or biomass companies is a Trojan horse for land grabbing. There is absolutely nothing in it for the poor, or for the simple people of our country, and I doubt whether things are any different in Cambodia and elsewhere.
The people of the world depend on a stable climate which can only be protected through ecological justice. The ever expanding spiral of capitalism and economic growth spreads corruption amongst our officials and is the opposite of what we need. In India we are now at the stage where not even the promise of jobs can lure us any longer, as the jobs in Lafarge, ArcelorMittal, as well as our own public sector undertakings and private mining companies are destroying the life support system of our precious world, as do “forestry, biomass and sustainability” companies that drive us off our land. Environmental protection is a fundamental duty of every citizen of this country under Article 51-A(g) of our Constitution which says that "It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for living creatures." Do we need casino money to help us do this? Our Wildlife Act “provides for the protection of wild animals, birds and plants and for matters connected therewith or ancillary or incidental thereto with a view to ensuring the ecological and environmental security of the country.” “No person shall, destroy, exploit, or remove any wildlife from a National Park or destroy or damage the habitat or any wild animal or deprive any wild animal or its habitat within such National Park except under and in accordance with a permit granted by the Chief Wildlife Warden and no such permit shall be granted unless the State Government, being satisfied that such destruction, exploitation, or removal of wildlife from the National Park is necessary for the improvement and better management of wildlife therein, authorises the issue of such permit.” There is no scope for biomass companies in this. It is against the law for the government to permit anyone who is not a farmer to buy agricultural land in India – all conversion of agricultural land into non-agricultural land is done through bribery and corruption in this country. How do our friends think they will come and do forestry and biomass and sustainability projects legally? India is a democracy. We have all the freedom in the world to mix with the rich. “Network with the key players in forestry and biomass – meet and do business with project developers, forestry owners and financiers/investor and other key players in forestry and biomass.” exhorts the brochure. Would these key players be the people who live and work and drink the water in the forests and in the foothills and on the plains of India today? Or are these key players footloose capitalists who have spread trade and exploitation where ever they have gone since the days of the East India company? “Highly interactive format – put your pressing questions to the panellists and debate the issues that are most important to you and your business” the brochure concludes. The anthropologist Alan Macfarlane wrote a book some years ago about how capitalism arose in the British Isles because Anglo-Saxon women were forced out of their homes at an early age to go and earn their own dowry. No family comforts for them, but instead a kinship bond broken at puberty, exogamous marriages paid for through sheer hard work, as landlessness was the fate of Anglo Saxon maids whose families could not afford support from home. Individualism was born and bred into the people of the British Isles, and capitalism was instilled into the next generation at their mothers' breasts. The names of the men and one woman who must have so eagerly drunk this milk and are now spreading capitalism and individualism in its new avatar of “forestry biomass and sustainability” are in the conference brochure. Read out the names and you will be naming and shaming them. They are spreading the next wave of capitalism through false slogans. Their plans depend on illegally acquiring land in India and destroying it first in collusion with or as a part of oligopolisitic capital be it RWE or Posco or Arcelor Mittal or Lafarge or any of the others, and then acquiring some other land somewhere else to “reforest”, two steps are all that are needed, and often done within a short span of five to ten years, robbing the people of our precious inheritance of water, air, forests and soils. The so-called National Green Tribunal Bill has been criticised in many quarters and will hopefully be buried. Instead of new avenues for our friends to approach our government servants, what we need is the speedy implementation of existing environmental and land laws.
About:
WSD promoted the Bagepalli CDM Biogas Project, the Bagepalli CDM Reforestation Programme, the Bagepalli Coolie Sangha Biogas Project. We developed the REDS CDM Photovoltaic Lighting project and initiated activity by various NGOs to get into CDM.
Anandi Sharan Meili was a co-founder of the idea of contraction and convergence in 1990.
For more information contact Anandi Sharan Meili 9945208044
