PRIVATISING THE RAINFOREST

by Liam Young

IN December the World Bank added to it’s so called Clean Development Mechanism a plan to slow down deforestation.
The World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) has been set up to entice poor nations to include their tropical forests in the international carbon market after 2012.
This will provide polluters with an opportunity to avoid reducing emissions in their own countries by buying cheap credits from poorer nations.
As for the poorer countries with tropical rainforests they will see the privatisation of forests, the destruction of local communities and the trashing of indigenous peoples rights.
The World Bank revealed it’s true interests in the tropical forests earlier this year when it spent large sums of money on cattle ranching and Soya production.
These industries are acknowledged as being two of the worst threats to the rainforests of the Amazon.
In one project they donated $9billion dollars to Brazil’s leading beef producer.
This despite an environmental study that had shown expansion of a single slaughterhouse in Maraba would lead to 300,000 acres of rainforest being destroyed.
The Amazon basin is home to one in ten mammals, 15 per cent of all the Earth’s plant-life, and holds half the world’s fresh water.
All this is threatened by vast tracks of land being cleared for cattle ranching, Soya production to grow animal feed and sugar cane production for bio-fuels.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates that the Amazon could be completely eradicated by fire and drought by 2030.
The world is losing forests the size of Nicaragua every year.
This process of deforestation accounts for a fifth of all carbon emissions.
The measure the World Bank is proposing is supposed to encourage poor countries to conserve their forests by setting up a carbon trading market with the industrialized countries.
The plan will work in two ways. Firstly it will provide tools needed to measure the carbon content of forests in order to establish their value on the carbon market.
Secondly the FCPF will offer money to countries to encourage a series of pilot schemes that will see countries being compensated for their ‘carbon reservoirs’.
This will generate pollution rights that the governments of the poorer nations can sell to northern industries allowing them to carry on polluting.
The World Bank plan will be organized at a national government level and will have no participation from local communities.
Indigenous peoples whose livelihoods and cultures depend on the forests will be sidelined.
Already there has been lobbying of donor countries to persuade them to legalize and institutionalise the global carbon trading markets.
Advocates of the scheme include a number of carbon finance companies eager to make big money out of the carbon trade.
Any expansion of the schemes will see governments rushing for the cash, as there will be hundreds of millions of dollars up for grabs.
Carbon trading stocks on the international market will never solve the problem of climate change.
The World Bank is committed to capitalism an economic system that turns living nature into dead commodities in order to make a profit.
The FCPF deforestation plan will only lead to the enclosure of forests as private firms evict forest dwellers and indigenous communities in order to make a killing.
This is an example of the World Bank representing the financial interests of the rich by using land already supporting the lives of local communities to create carbon sinks that allow the major industrial companies to simply buy a license to pollute.
Until the needs of people and communities are placed before that of companies making profits then the environment of the planet will continue to be threatened.