Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2014 22:56:30 +0200
World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs -
NGOs
Plight of Kenya's indigenous Sengwer shows carbon offsets are empowering
corporate recolonisation of the South
Posted by
<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/nafeez-ahmed> Nafeez Ahmed
Saturday 5 July 2014 07.00 BST
Between 2000 and 2010, a total of
<http://www.landcoalition.org/sites/default/files/publication/1282/ILC.Annua
l.Report.2011.pdf> 500 million acres of land in Asia, Africa, Latin America
and the Caribbean was acquired or negotiated under deals brokered on behalf
of foreign governments or transnational corporations.
Many such deals are geared toward growing crops or biofuels for export to
richer, developed countries – with the consequence that small-holder farmers
are displaced from their land and lose their livelihood while
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/27/land-grabbing-food-biofu
els-crops> local communities go hungry.
The concentration of ownership of the world's farmland in the hands of
powerful investors and corporations is
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/28/farmland-food-security-s
mall-farmers> rapidly accelerating, driven by
<http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/papers/view/187947> resource
scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/land-rights> land rights
organisation Grain: "The powerful demands of food and energy industries are
shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the
production of commodities for industrial processing."
Less known factors, however, include '
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/conservation> conservation' and '
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/carbon-offset-projects> carbon
offsetting.'
In west <http://www.theguardian.com/world/kenya> Kenya, as the UK NGO
Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported,
<http://www.forestpeoples.org/topics/legal-human-rights/news/2014/01/kenyan-
government-torches-hundreds-sengwer-homes-forest-glade> over a thousand
homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to
forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their
ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.
Since 2007, successive Kenyan governments have threatened Sengwer
communities in the Embobut forest with
<http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jan/07/kenya-embobut-for
est-forced-evictions-police> eviction. A deadline for residents to leave the
forest expired in early January, prompting the most recent spate of
violence. The pretext for the eviction is that the indigenous Sengwer –
labelled wrongly as '
<http://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2014/01/23/sengwer-forest-eviction
s/> squatters' – are responsible for the accelerating degradation of the
forest.
Elsewhere in Kenya's Mount Elgon forest, however, the KFS' track record
reveals a more complicated story. In 2010, the indigenous Ogiek were issued
a deadline to <http://www.galdu.org/web/index.php?&odas=5006&giella1=eng>
relocate in the name of forest conservation and reforestation. In February
this year, Survival International
<http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/9969> reported that, like the
Sengwer, the Ogiek continued to be violently evicted from their homes in
violation of court orders, with reports of government officials and their
supporters seizing their land.
While deforestation is undoubtedly linked to the activities of poor
communities, the Kenyan government's approach illustrates favouritism toward
parochial vested interests. In addition to the indigenous communities, the
forests are also inhabited by many thousands of tea-planters, loggers, and
squatters.
According to an
<http://projects.csg.uwaterloo.ca/lvbc/report.php?ListType=Document&ID=117&M
enuItemID=2> internal report by the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) in 2000, reviewing the Kenyan government's
internationally-funded conservation programme, "the forests of Mt Elgon are
not being sustainably managed." The report highlighted "unsustainable
harvesting of both indigenous and plantation forest on Mt Elgon," routine
flouting of "regulations and procedures for sound management", "the rate of
forest plantation harvesting" far exceeding "the rate of replanting", lack
of supervision of controls on "forest harvesting operations authorised by
the Forest Department," and consequently "extensive loss of forest
resources."
The IUCN review also alluded to the role of the Kenyan government's
relationship with RaiPly Ltd, a Kenyan company involved in manufacture of
wood products: "It is not known why or how RaiPly presumably received a
license to harvest indigenous species, thus circumventing the ban on
harvesting in indigenous forests."
Official Kenyan parliamentary records from May 1999 show that Kenyan
political representatives have been concerned about these issues for some
time. One question put to Kenya's then assistant minister for natural
resources, Peter Lengees, by a Kenyan MP pointed out that "trees are being
cut in Mt. Elgon forest," threatening the region's rivers "from both sides."
Local government officials, the MP accused, "have shared up the area between
these two rivers" which are now "drying up."
Lengees denied any knowledge of this, prompting a further question from late
politician George Kapten, who said that "lorries from Raiply" had been
ferrying high-value teak timber from Mount Elgon forest. "And I wish to add
that the highest authority in this country has shares in RaiPly", he added.
Lengees repeated his denial but admitted that RaiPly was "licensed to cut
trees from some forests in Kenya."
Currently, RaiPly is among several major companies that are
<https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/voices/12/kenyas-ogiek-face-d
isplacement-mau-forest> exempt from a partial government ban on logging.
Effectively, the government is permitting powerful logging companies to
accelerate deforestation to buoy the Kenyan economy while systematically
persecuting indigenous communities whose environmental impact is
comparatively negligible.
The devastating plight of Kenya's
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/indigenous-peoples> indigenous peoples is
symptomatic of the flawed approach to conservation on the part of
international agencies.
The <http://www.theguardian.com/business/worldbank> World Bank's
<http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2007
/03/12/000020953_20070312104941/Rendered/PDF/37982.pdf> Natural Resource
Management Programme (NRMP) with the Kenyan government, launched in 2007,
has involved funding for projects in the Cherangany Hills under the UN's
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)
programme, including
<http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2013
/05/31/000442464_20130531104013/Rendered/PDF/779590IPR0P09500lPN0REQUEST0RQ0
1302.pdf> "financing REDD+ readiness activities" some of which began in May
2013.
Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase carbon
credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. Those credits
turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon reductions. In practice,
however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to
<http://issuu.com/reddmonitor/docs/rainforest_foundation_redd?e=0>
accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing
world at bargain prices.
A
<http://www.forestpeoples.org/sites/fpp/files/news/2013/12/How%20the%20World
%20Bank%20is%20implicated%20in%20today%E2%80%99s%20Embobut%20Evictions.pdf>
FPP background brief on the role of the World Bank claims that the
implementation of NRMP – overseen by the very same KFS forces conducting a
scorched earth campaign in Cherangany – violates the Bank's own operational
safeguard policies. A formal Sengwer complaint to the Bank lodged in January
last year alleged that human rights abuses by Kenyan forces were "a direct
result" of the World Bank-funded programme:
"One example of the harm caused by the project was that it changed the
border of the Cherangany forest reserves," according to the FPP brief, "such
that Sengwer families, without any consultation or notice, found themselves
on the inside of the forest reserve and therefore automatically subject to
eviction by the KFS, evictions effectively funded by the World Bank. These
evictions were customarily executed by burning homes and food stores in
2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013."
In a
<http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/02/06/world-bank-statem
ent-on-embobut-forest-and-cherangany-hills-evictions-in-kenya> statement in
February, the World Bank disavowed any link between its programme and the
forced evictions, but also offered to the Kenyan government:
"... to share best practices in resettlement in line with its safeguard
policies. These seek to improve or restore the living standards of people
affected by involuntary resettlement."
A
<http://wrm.org.uy/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sengwernranletter12march2014.p
df> letter to the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) – a
group of African civil society organisations - signed by over 60
international NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of "both admitting
its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as
offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural
genocide."
As "carbon credit financier and broker", the World Bank is "aiding and
abetting the forced relocation of an entire Indigenous People through its
Natural Resource Management Plan (NRMP) which includes REDD (Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), in the Cherangany
Hills", said the letter.
The Sengwer's complaint is currently under investigation by the World Bank
Inspection Panel. Although the report is now complete, a Bank spokesperson,
Phil Hay, said that it would not be reviewed by the Board until August or
September.
"The World Bank is not associated with the evictions and has not supported
or financed resettlement in forest areas under the now closed Natural
Resource Management Project (NMRP)", said Hay. "Nonetheless we are not
bystanders either. We have been concerned about how the evictions have been
handled and have been in frequent touch with the Kenyan government."
Notably, the Bank's professed concern here is with "how the evictions have
been handled", not with evictions being carried out in the first place.
A damning <http://www.rightsandresources.org/documents/files/doc_6594.pdf>
new report from the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) based in
Washington DC thus warns that the UN and World Bank approach to REDD is
paving the way for large-scale "carbon grabs" by foreign governments and
investors, putting at risk the land rights, livelihoods and lives of
indigenous communities.
The report surveyed 23 low and middle income countries in Latin America,
Asia, and Africa, covering 66 percent of the developing world's forests,
concluding that REDD had not established laws or mechanisms by which
indigenous peoples and local communities could profit from the carbon in the
forests they inhabited.
"Their rights to their forests may be few and far between, but their rights
to the carbon in the forests are non-existent", said Arvind Khare, RRI
executive director.
At the <http://www.theguardian.com/world/unitednations> United Nations
climate negotiations in Warsaw in November 2013, delegates reached an
agreement that would allow REDD to move forward which, however, excluded
questions around who should control and benefit from the new carbon value
found in standing forests.
Instead, the World Bank Carbon Fund's approach to defining carbon rights has
been widely criticised by civil society groups for creating conflict between
new property rights to carbon, and existing statutory and customarily held
rights of local communities. The lack of clear safeguards and measures opens
up an unprecedented opportunity for corporate and government land grabbing.
Tony La Viņa, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of the
intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in Copenhagen
and Durban, said: "The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support
the forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide
national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens from
the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for generations."
According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because
indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles
that their implementation could lead to
<http://www.redd-monitor.org/2013/04/03/launch-of-no-redd-in-africa-network-
redd-could-cause-genocide/> outright genocide.
Chris Lang, a British forestry expert who runs the
<http://www.redd-monitor.org/> REDD Monitor blog, agrees that under REDD
schemes involving forested or agricultural land, "the rights to the use of
that land could be taken away from indigenous peoples who depend on their
forests for their livelihoods. Destroying livelihoods on this scale could
conform to the parts (a), (b), and (c) of the [UN Convention] definition of
genocide."
This article was inspired by a
<http://deaddeanfilms.tumblr.com/post/89247316043/conservation-vs-communitie
s-the-plight-of-the-sengwer> blogpost by British film-maker Dean Puckett who
will be traveling to Kenya in August to investigate the plight of the
Sengwer.
<http://www.nafeezahmed.com> Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security
journalist and academic. He is the author of
<http://crisisofcivilization.com> A User's Guide to the Crisis of
Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction
thriller, <http://zro.pt> ZERO POINT. ZERO POINT is set in a near future
following a Fourth Iraq War. Follow Ahmed on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/DrNafeezAhmed> and Twitter
<http://www.twitter.com/nafeezahmed> .
A Kenyan farmer tends newly planted trees
UN's REDD scheme promises carbon offsetting will empower local communities
in the developing world while conserving forests - but critics say the
scheme is fuelling genocidal evictions of indigenous people from their
lands. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP
(image/jpeg attachment: image001.jpg)