80 NGOs Call For Elimination Of World Bank Climate Program

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WASHINGTON, DC, April 19, 2004 (ENS) - Eighty environmental and social justice organizations today delivered a letter of protest to the World Bank, calling for the closure of its four year old greenhouse gas reduction mechanism, the Prototype Carbon Fund. The groups are sure to raise the issue at protests ahead of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund 60th anniversary spring meeting April 24 - 25 in Washington, DC. The groups, who identify themselves as "teachers, scholars, activists, scientists, students, Indigenous peoples, landless people, peasants, NGOs, and others from the North and South," say they "do not recognize the legitimacy of the World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund."

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In their letter, the groups state that the Prototype Carbon Fund is "destructive greenwash" and instead of solving problems has "exacerbated existing human rights violations and furthered environmental destruction." They point to the Plantar project that is planting 23,100 hectares of eucalyptus trees in a rural area of Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, as an example of how the Prototype Carbon Fund is going wrong.

The Plantar project is expected to create emission reductions by avoiding a fuel switch from charcoal to coal in pig iron production. Plantar S.A. Reflorestamentos, founded in 1967, is a private company whose shareholders are members of the Moura family. It is growing eucalyptus timber for charcoal production on its own lands to supply its own iron works.

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But the groups say the project involves the expansion of monoculture eucalyptus plantations "originally established by forcibly evicting geraiszeiros peoples from the land." Geraiszeiros are inhabitants of the dry forest ecosystem of the central Brazil plateau known as the cerrado. Since the evictions, the groups allege, the plantation's owners have created "slave-like conditions."

To back that allegation, the groups cite a 1994 Brazilian Parliamentary Investigation Commission which verified the practice of slave labor on the property of Plantar and other forest companies. This finding is reviewed in an evaluation report on Forest Stewardship Council certification of the Plantar eucalyptus plantations written by a research team for the World Rainforest Movement based in Uruguay, one of the 80 groups that signed the letter to the World Bank. In addition to the labor conditions, the groups say Plantar plantations have "heavily polluted surrounding water sources, thus devastating the livelihoods of local farmers and fisherfolk." On top of the impacts upon the local environment and peoples, the verifier of the carbon credit scheme, the Norwegian company Det Norske Veritas, has stated that there is no guarantee that the project actually will have a permanent positive effect on the climate."

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http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=30926

Long, interesting article.