Red Pepper » Environment

Can’t see the wood for the desert

admin — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:00:25 +0000

Providers of ‘ecosystem services’, ‘carbon sinks’, sources of renewable energy, job creators, tax providers, solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises – these are just some of the positive images of industrial tree plantations (ITPs) being painted by the private and state interests pushing for their expansion. Growing and processing trees for profit is a major and expanding global industry, an industry with a highly destructive face.
ITPs have been the focus of widespread resistance across the global South for several decades. The reality is that they have a deeply destructive impact on communities, local economies and biodiversity. They are not a solution to climate change, nor to biodiversity loss. They cause numerous problems in many countries, including my own, Costa Rica.
A plantation, not a forest
A forest is a complex, biodiversity-rich, self-regenerating system, consisting of soil, water, a microclimate and a wide variety of plants and animals in mutual coexistence. Forests host more than 70 per cent of our planet’s terrestrial biodiversity. In contrast, an ITP is a uniform agricultural system geared to the production of a single raw material. ITPs are typically large-scale, intensively managed, even-age, monoculture plantations, mostly of fast-growing trees, including eucalyptus, pine, acacia, gmelina, oil palm and rubber.
The trees and their products are generally harvested mechanically for industrial processing to produce products such as pulpwood, paper, timber, wood energy, palm oil and biodiesel/ethanol. The plantations tend to cover very large areas, from thousands to hundreds of thousands of hectares, and are typically owned and promoted by corporate actors, often with significant state involvement and support. Calling a plantation a ‘planted forest’, a label that the plantation industry is keen to promote, is highly misleading and betrays the reality of the destruction caused by this intensive agro-industrial model.
Rise of the monoculture plantation
While ITPs are present in the global North, their recent expansion has been concentrated in the global South. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the area of ‘planted forest’ in the South increased by more than 50 per cent between 1990 and 2010, from 95 million to 153 million hectares. The FAO estimates that a further 40 to 90 million hectares will be planted by 2030, not including the predicted rapid expansion of oil palm plantations.
The expansion in the South is driven primarily by the consumption and economic actors of the North. According to Simone Lovera of the Global Forest Coalition, ‘Plantations form part of an industrial model for the production of abundant and cheap raw materials that serves as an input for the economic growth of industrialised countries.’ While China’s footprint is rapidly growing, the EU and US still consume most of the final products of ITPs. EU and US corporations, banks and investment funds are the key players and the main drivers and beneficiaries, attracted by the cheaper land and labour in the South, weaker environmental regulations and the higher wood productivity per hectare.
Although the expansion of monoculture tree plantations dates back to colonial times, the significant rise of ITPs is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Their development was accelerated by the structural adjustment programmes imposed on countries in the South by neoliberal international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In return for credit, governments were forced to liberalise their trade regimes and offer incentives and subsidies for export-oriented activities such as ITPs.
Bad for people, bad for the planet
The expansion of ITPs is wreaking havoc on the environment, biodiversity and existing communities. Globally around 1.6 billion people rely on forests for their livelihoods and wellbeing, including 60 million indigenous people who are entirely dependent upon them for their food, medicines and building materials. While local communities and indigenous peoples consume tiny quantities of the end products, they suffer considerably as a direct result of the plantations and their expansion.
Monoculture plantation expansion is a major driver of land grab, displacing entire communities and denying them their land and livelihoods. Compared with small-scale agro-forestry and community forest management, ITPs offer few employment opportunities. The use of cheap migrant labour and mechanised harvesting and processing results in a significant reduction in the overall number of livelihoods that can be sustained by a given area, while those lucky enough to find employment are vulnerable to precarity and labour rights violations.
The expansion of ITPs is therefore a key driver of a wider process of large-scale impoverishment, displacement and disenfranchisement, denying people their means of subsistence and independence, alienating them from their labour and those aspects of their cultures deeply related to and dependent on the forest, dismembering their communities, and forcing them into cities in search of highly precarious and poorly paid employment. The process of establishing and expanding plantations is also very commonly associated with violence, with community members suffering repression, torture and even death at the hands of state and private security forces serving the interests of the plantation owners.
Contrary to the claims of the corporations associated with plantation agriculture, ITPs are also highly environmentally destructive. Large-scale plantations often replace existing forests and are thus a direct cause of deforestation; there are comparatively few cases where they have been established on degraded land. The negative effects of these ‘green deserts’ on biodiversity are well documented. One study reported in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2008 found that the conversion of primary rainforest to oil palm plantation resulted in the loss of more than 80 per cent of species.
Once established, thirsty fast-growth ITPs deplete water resources, change local and regional hydrological cycles, pollute rivers, streams and other water resources and degrade soil with their intensive use of pesticides and other agrochemicals. A recent report in Nature, moreover, showed that while old-growth forests store carbon for centuries, plantations and young forests are actually net emitters of carbon due to the disturbance of the soil and the degradation of the previous ecosystem.
Who benefits?
Government policies continue to promote the establishment of ITPs, and in bigger economies such as Brazil and China the state is often a part or total owner of companies involved in ITPs. However, the main drivers of ITP expansion are the private sector and neoliberal multilateral institutions such as the World Bank. Many of the corporate actors are from the global North, especially from countries with strong wood-based industries, including Finland, Sweden, Germany and the US. The Finnish company Jaakko Poyry, for example, is active in the plantation and pulp sector in 30 countries, with sales of £550 million in 2010.
Other key private sector players and beneficiaries include:

The world’s ‘big six’ pesticide manufacturing corporations – BASF, Bayer, Dow, Dupont, Monsanto and Syngenta – whose pesticides are heavily applied to large-scale monoculture tree plantations

Private banks specialising in agribusiness funding, including the European banks especially important for the pulp and paper and oil palm sectors

Investment funds from the global North, which are moving into a more dominant position in the land and forest market

Private financial institutions and players benefiting from the expansion of carbon and biodiversity trading and offsetting being promoted under the auspices of international processes such as the UN climate negotiations

Environmental consultancy firms profiting from the certification of carbon and ecosystem services necessitated by the expansion of trading and offsetting schemes

Fossil fuel companies trying to get a foothold in the expanding global market for so-called ‘biofuels’ and ‘bioenergy’

Big GMO industry players who are testing genetic alterations aimed at increasing the profitability of ITPs with very little monitoring and oversight from governments
Multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, its private arm the International Finance Corporation, and regional development banks are helping to promote ITP expansion through direct loans and investment and helping to leverage further private sector finance. Meanwhile ITP corporates are using their significant financial power to lobby governments and international processes to guarantee increased profitability and new expansion opportunities. They have succeeded in getting the FAO and World Bank to define plantations as forests, as carbon sinks and as providers of ecosystem services, thereby both undermining and benefiting from global efforts to reduce carbon emissions to tackle climate change and to mitigate forest and biodiversity loss.
Together, these interests have ensured that ITPs and their products form a central part of the destructive, corporate‑led ‘green economy’ agenda increasingly being promoted by governments and UN agencies. This agenda is just a greenwashed version of the same old unsustainable neoliberal economic model.
No such thing as a better plantation
The destruction wrought by monoculture ITPs will not be solved by monitoring and certification schemes. Such schemes serve only to legitimise the plantations and facilitate their further expansion.
To stop the destruction we need multiple changes, including efforts to promote community management of forests; to halt the perverse support that our governments give to the ITP sector; to secure recognition and protection of the land rights and territories of indigenous and traditional peoples; to promote food sovereignty – the right to sufficient, nutritious, healthy, ecologically-produced and culturally adequate food; and to tackle the excessive and unsustainable consumption of forest products such as pulp and paper by the North.
Affected communities across the global South are putting their lives at risk to claim their rights and protect and reclaim their forests from plantation expansion. They need solidarity from activists and social movements around the world, as well as our efforts to change the dysfunctional economic system and power relations at the heart of this and many other environmental problems.
Isaac Rojas is coordinator of Friends of the Earth International’s forest and biodiversity programme, based in Costa Rica

Occupy Kinder Scout: remembering the mass trespass

admin — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 10:00:58 +0000

The 1932 mass trespass onto Kinder Scout is an event that has immense significance in the history of working class struggle, and continues to resonate through campaigns such as those by the Occupy movement today.
The very idea of trespass, and the implied concept of ownership, goes to the heart of all class struggle, and there is still much we can learn from the 1932 action – not least because it was spectacularly effective. On the 75th anniversary Roy (Lord) Hattersley described it as ‘the most successful act of direct action in British history’. It is widely seen as having given a crucial impetus to the creation of the national parks and still acts as a rallying point for the whole right to roam movement, a point made repeatedly during the week of celebrations held around Edale and Hayfield, which were poignantly attended by the only two surviving members of the trespass.
The mass trespass was part of a long campaign to gain access to open moorland appropriated by the landed gentry during the enclosures. The main target for generations of campaigners was Kinder Scout, the dark, brooding plateau of rugged moorland lying between the industrial conurbations of Manchester and Sheffield. It was this proximity to large populations of young and politically aware factory workers that made Kinder the symbolic battleground for the struggle between the feudal landed gentry and a militant working class, a struggle that began in earnest in the late 19th century and continues to this day.
Individuals had long trespassed on the moors, often walking long distances from Stockport and the outskirts of Manchester just to get to the hills, where they faced constant harassment and often violence from the gamekeepers. Lengthy negotiations had been taking place between the Ramblers Association and the landowners, but many were becoming impatient with this process. Members of the Communist Party British Workers’ Sports Federation in Manchester became increasingly frustrated and decided to force the issue. Benny Rothman organised the event and a young Ewan McColl, who was later to immortalise the struggle in his song ‘The Manchester Rambler’, acted as the self-proclaimed press officer, ensuring full coverage in the Manchester Evening News and Manchester Guardian.
Police and protesters
On the day, Rothman cycled to the rallying point in Hayfield, partly because he couldn’t afford the train fare and also because he was concerned that police might try to prevent supporters from joining the protest. Despite the efforts of the Derbyshire constabulary, more than 400 Manchester ramblers did make it to Hayfield, with a smaller Sheffield contingent arriving in Edale on the far side of the plateau.
The leader of Hayfield parish council attempted to read the Riot Act, while police focused on what would today be called ‘kettling’ the trespassers to prevent them gaining access to the Kinder approach routes. Then, according to an unpublished interview with Benny Rothman (conducted by Graeme Atkinson in 1978, used here courtesy of Kinder Trespass Archive Project, Hayfield), the walkers broke through and streamed across Hayfield cricket pitch and onto Kinder Road, ‘singing the Red Flag and the Internationale’. In the same interview, Rothman says that the police were much less fit than the trespassers and unable to keep up with their pace, allowing them to regroup in a quarry at the foot of Kinder, where Rothman and others addressed them and outlined their strategy for gaining access to the top of the plateau. They then marched past the reservoir, onto the slopes of Kinder and into the history books.
There were some minor scuffles with hired ‘gamekeepers’, but most of the hikers reached the top and briefly met with their Sheffield comrades, before heading back into Hayfield and the waiting police, who made five arrests (a sixth was arrested in a separate incident). Benny Rothman said that all five were ‘Jewish or Jewish looking people’, and he certainly believed that this was deliberately racist behaviour by police.
The trial of the six took place some weeks later, with full national coverage, and there was widespread outrage in liberal and left circles when all of the accused received prison sentences. And so the trespass entered popular folklore, becoming synonymous with the struggle for greater access to the countryside.
Behind the scenes, of course, there was a great deal of low profile, day-to-day hard work in lobbying and negotiating, led by the tirelessly committed Tom Stephenson of the Ramblers Association. He and many others initially resented what they saw as attention‑seeking behaviour that might threaten the painstaking and precarious progress being made. Tom later recanted, however, and accepted that without the mass trespass, progress towards access would have stalled and the setting up of the national parks would not have happened. Even at the time, he was canny enough to use the event to put pressure on the landowners and politicians by raising the spectre of further mass trespasses should more tangible progress fail to be made.
Why the trespass succeeded
So why was it so successful? First, it was well planned, with a careful eye on positive publicity – the protesters even had a Guardian special reporter ‘embedded’ with them on the trespass – and they were able to gain public sympathy by panicking the authorities and provoking them into a wholly disproportionate response. The prison sentences created instant martyrs to the cause and the heavy-handed, patently unjust reaction exposed the nature of the rich and powerful feudal landowners to a wide urban audience.
Another key factor was that the actions were very focused and had a clear objective. Yet it was not seen as a single issue campaign, either by the participants or the authorities. For those taking part, it was consciously and explicitly part of a wider, revolutionary struggle to overthrow the capitalist system. Several of those on the trespass fought – and died – in the International Brigade in Spain four years later and many of the others continued a life of political activism in their trade unions in Manchester and Sheffield.
It is no coincidence, then, that the first national park was established in the Peak District, centred on Kinder. It is now one of the busiest such parks in Europe, with an estimated 10 million visitors a year. The park is incredibly well managed by the National Trust, which has large landholdings, and the Peak Park and the Ranger Service, who together are somehow able to balance the often conflicting needs and demands of famers, locals, hikers, mountain bikers, campers and car park tourists who flock there every weekend.
The Countryside Rights of Way Act (2000) has consolidated gains in access and helped extend it, but overall progress towards a ‘right to roam’ in the English and Welsh countryside has been patchy (there are different, far more extensive rights in Scotland). There still remain significant areas of the country where access is restricted, threatened or resisted, with landowners such as the Duke of Westminster fighting every inch of the way.
Even in Hayfield itself, the gateway to Kinder, the trespass can still ignite strong feelings. In 2011 the parish council astonishingly turned down grant funding of more than £90,000 awarded to set up a permanent exhibition of the mass trespass.
The trespass was a crucial event that must not be forgotten, but neither should it be remembered as simply an isolated historical event. Rather we should celebrate it as an inspirational moment in a continuing struggle that we cannot afford to lose, and learn its lessons well.
The Kinder Trespass Archive Project, Hayfield, is committed to establishing a permanent archive and exhibition to commemorate the mass trespass and link it to the continuing struggle for access to our countryside. Its website is www.kindertrespass.com

Interview: can changing the law save the planet?

Michael — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:28:22 +0000

With her measured tone and eloquence it is little surprise that Polly Higgins has a background as a barrister. But for an environmentalist, more surprising is her former line of work – corporate law. “I was representing companies and employees and wondered ‘why is it that good people think it completely normal to make money out of destroying the earth?’” she recounts. “This really was strange for me. It was when I realized that the law was to put profit first.”

For the past ten years Polly has campaigned to have ecocide recognised by the UN as the fifth ‘crime against peace’. This would place it on a par with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. Defined as ‘the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of an ecosystem that results in inhabitants losing their peaceful enjoyment of the territory’, our planet abounds with examples of human-caused ecocide – from the BP Mexican Gulf oil spill to shale gas ‘fracking’ exploration taking place in Lancashire.

Best way forward

Where political and economic initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol and COP15 accords have failed spectacularly, in her 2010 book Eradicating Ecocide Polly argued that employing international legal instruments is now our best way forward.

The idea is simple: create an international law, applying to all governments, companies and individuals, that prohibits ecologically destructive industrial practices. This would apply equally to damaging local ecosystems as to emissions contributing to climate change. Rather than imposing fines – which can be easily calculated by large businesses as ‘externality’ costs and offset against profits – crucially, the law would attatch criminal sanctions to individuals.

She explains how it would function: “If you make policies that allow the destruction to go on then you will have to answer in an international court of law and the offence is sanctionable by being put in prison. The minimum [custodial] sentence under international law is two year and it would apply to ministers, CEOs and investors. This is about individuals taking responsibility.”

“A corporation at the end of the day is just a piece of paper – human beings commit crimes, not fictional entities, so you can’t hide behind the corporate veil.”

As with other international crimes, the law would fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. However there are obvious limitations. Environmental claims often take years to reach trial and in cases of genocide the ICC only applies its justice retrospectively, offering scant consolation to victims. And so far, the justice it dispenses has been uneven: while Milosevic and Taylor have appeared in the dock, we are yet to see Blair and Bush.

Restorative justice

Telling me that “ultimately locking up people is unsatisfactory”, Polly outlines her vision of a ‘restorative justice’ model for ecocide. Moving away from adversarial courtroom encounters and the deprivation of liberty, this progressive philosophy encourages conciliation and dialogue between parties in order to right wrongs – insofar as possible.

“This means accepting your guilt,” Polly says. “It could be anything from the company working with the community to restore and ameliorate the area. It’s certainly more than just giving a community money; it’s about how can we make good the damage and destruction we have done.”

But questions arise when we arrive at the intractable tension that always surfaces when environmental protection comes up against economics.

No business as usual

Polly says that it is not time for “business as usual”. Yet surely, I ask her, outlawing harmful processes on which industrial production relies would precipitate a collapse in manufacturing, mass job losses and a nosedive in living standards?

“There are certain times in history when we say the moral has to trump the economic. We did it with the abolition of slavery, even though all our economies ran on it. We did it again with the civil rights movement and the ending of apartheid, because a lot of people made a lot of money out of that.”

Despite climate change slipping down the political agenda since economic slowdown began, she thinks her proposals will prove popular, telling me it will be the “biggest job creation scheme in the history of civilization and a vote-winner for governments”.

Green conversion

In order for a smooth transition, Polly’s blueprint involves a five-year amnesty period alongside subsidies to help companies make the conversion to renewable and non-polluting technologies. While currently few businesses are willing to take the plunge into environmental sustainability for fear of it harming profitability, she believes that the disincentive of criminality will act as a lever, forcing corporations to change their method of planning from one based on “risk analysis” (focused on losing opportunities and advantages to competitors) to “consequence analysis” (looking at the impact on the environment outside of the business itself). Investment in the ‘green economy’ will inevitably flow as a result of the criminalisation of financing destructive practice, leading to “innovative and resilient growth in a very different direction”.

Getting corporations on board is one of the central themes of Polly’s new book, The Earth Is Our Business. She explains why, unlike many environmentalists, she doesn’t take an anti-business approach: “These companies have great infrastructure, they just need to turn around very fast. The beauty is that corporations work very well with legislation and their wheels turn quickly. So give them the assistance they need.”

Contradictions

This position distinguishes her from the more radical end of the green movement, where the expansionary and accumulative nature of capitalism itself is posited as the cause of environmental degradation.

But like other liberal reforms to tackle climate change, the logic relies on businesses voluntarily turning towards benign industries in the hope that they will adequately provide for human needs. At the same time, it skirts uneasily around the edges of the contradiction between an economic system based on infinite growth and a planet of limited resources.

At things stand, it is hard to see why any company or nation would willingly give up lucrative extraction industries. Corporate lobbying notoriously helped to derail COP15, while rogue nations like the USA refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol – leading to the suspicion that both states and corporations would do their utmost to prevent ecocide reaching the UN’s statute books.

But Polly is adamant and her faith unshakeable: “Just as our right to life needs to be protected, so does the earth’s right to life. It works when you say that I prohibit [environmental destruction]. You don’t get a permit allocation for genocide.”

Audio: May elections – Jenny Jones interview

Michael — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:53:21 +0000

Last week we travelled to Green Party HQ in Shoreditch, London to interview Green Party mayoral candidate Jenny Jones. We wanted to get her views on some of the big issues facing Londoners – and her broader worldview.

While she did little to refute the case of those who call the Green Party’s understanding of capitalism ’wishy washy’, she did have some interesting things to say about housing and pay ratios.

Below you can listen to the interview in five bite-size sections and read our commentary and responses under each one:

The City, anti-capitalism and the Occupy movement

listen on Audioboo

It’s fair to say that Jenny was a little evasive over how she might begin to change the relationship between the City and the rest of London. She did say that she wanted do away with the City of London’s ‘Corporation’ status (which make it a borough with its own separate rules), but she gave little detail of how this might be achieved. She also mentioned supporting loans to small businesses.

On the Greens as an anti-capitalist party she said ‘we are anti-capitalist because we believe in fair trade not free trade’. According to Jenny, when the Greens’ leader Caroline Lucas said the party is anti-capitalist, what she meant was that she ’just wants a fairer society’. This doesn’t necessarily suggest, in and of itself, that the Greens are in any sense anti-capitalist at all. Jenny admits that this sounds ‘wishy washy’. (Perhaps we should ask Caroline?)

She wants this fair society because in an unfair society, ‘even the rich aren’t happy because you have riots’.

When she talked about the Occupy movement, we asked how she reconciled the contradiction between being part of this non-hierarchical movement that has spoken out against political parties and being part of the Green Party.

Jenny argued that party politics is a different route to the real democracy which the Occupy movement believes is the problem, and added that ‘you can’t get more non-hierarchical than the Green Party’.

Police and protest

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On the police force, her big concept was politeness (Excuse me, sir, do you mind if I arrest you, knee you in the chest, strangle you and racially abuse you?) She also said the police should have showed kindness to Mark Duggan’s family.

In her final analysis, the problems could be solved by more lefties joining the force. Hardly heavyweight.

Transport

listen on Audioboo

This is the area where Jenny seemed strongest. A Green mayor would reduce bus and tube prices and keep any future increases below the level of inflation, she said. This, she added, would be funded by putting up the congestion charge, particularly for the most polluting vehicles, then after three years introducing a pay-as-you-drive system.

Boris cut the road safety budget and this has lead to more injuries. Ken Livingstone, meanwhile, has offered Jenny the job of promoting walking and cycling.

She added that air pollution is currently shocking in London and that it’s way over the EU limits. She would ask that fines be imposed by the EU to help combat the problem.

Housing

listen on Audioboo

This was another strong suit. Jenny described the current housing system as dysfunctional and called the government’s council housing sell off ‘stupid’.

She believes social cleansing is ‘already happening’ and that the government is ‘making it worse’. To tackle the problems, she wants to build 15,000 affordable new homes every year – but these would only be affordable for those on around £23,000 a year.

Those at the lower end of the income spectrum, she says, would be helped by encouraging councils to build more social housing. She would also encourage the use of community land trusts, which Boris promised but did not deliver.

Greens in power

listen on Audioboo

In this final part we talked about the Greens’ record in office here in the UK.

She admits that the Greens have the luxury of opposition almost everywhere – but where it’s possible to act like all other political parties, they’ve done just that. She admits this in as much as she argues that the only other option than following the mainstream agenda is to resign.

She says the difference is that only the Green Party has a philosophy, and that this ensures that they stick to manifesto promises when in power. But at the moment we’re seeing the results of the Tories’ neoliberal philosophy – and the Lib Dems’ Orange Book philosophy too.

Finally she addresses the Greens’ performance in Brighton. She said it was important as it demonstrated the Greens’ ability to take tough decisions. And she defended the council on their decision not to challenge the government over its cuts agenda, adding that challenging it through an illegal budget would have been ‘good for no-one’.

This left the question of how the Greens are different once in office largely unanswered. She was, however, categorical when she said that council tax levels in London would be kept at current levels on her watch.

Fueling an oily future

emma — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:26:27 +0000

BP launched their 2012 Olympics sponsorship advertising campaign in July 2011, just over one year after the 87-day oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The re-seduction of public opinion began in televisions, high streets and roadsides across the country. Since the Deepwater Horizon tragedy the BP clean-up has taken place in two dimensions: the seabed, fragile coastal ecology, habitats and livelihoods of the Gulf; and that of its shamed image, justly sullied by a catastrophe caused by its own negligent, cost-cutting behaviour. The opportunity to be seen as a good corporate citizen through its sponsorship of the Olympics is magnificent timing from BP’s perspective.

This sponsorship support is not provided as a form of philanthropy, but as an integral part of engineering the social and political circumstances that will best ensure the long-term security of their investments in oil and gas projects. Approached as an engineering challenge, the corporation tends to see all opposition to its activities as solvable with the appropriate time, capital and techniques.
The construction of an offshore platform is one of the most expensive projects on earth in the 21st century. It can only offer a high return on capital if oil production if maintained over two or three decades. The maintainence of this production is usually threatened by social and political shifts in the countries of extraction. Any such threat to production – or the perception that that threat might exist – can immediately undermine the profitability of a corporation. BP’s share value was almost halved by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, not because of the potential costs of the oil spill clean up, but because investors were concerned that the company’s future prospects in the US were being undermined by the collapse of support in Washington DC and in the US media.
To guard against any such threat to the company’s value, BP works constantly to engineer its ‘social license to operate’. This is a term widely used in business and government circles and usually applies to the process of engendering support for a company’s activities in the communities who live close to their factories, oil wells and pipelines. However it can shed light on how corporations construct public support far from the places of extraction or manufacture – for example how BP builds support in London and the UK.
In the summer of 2010, a large swathe of the British political establishment called on the White House to ‘stop bashing BP’ – support that assisted the company in persuading President Obama to say on TV: “BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all our interests that it stays that way”. To construct and maintain this support, BP focuses on building a positive image in the eyes of politicians, diplomats, civil servants, journalists, academics, NGO’s and cultural commentators. These groups are known as the ‘special publics’ or ‘clients’ in the public relations industry. Building a supportive attitude within the ‘special publics’ can be done through direct engagement and dialogue, through advertising, and through financial support – funding academic posts at universities, creating programmes in schools, sponsoring culture such as Tate or the British Museum, and financing sports such as the 2012 Olympics.
The BP Olympics advertising includes images of a runner on a pristine beach, calling to mind the Louisiana coastline which remains oil-soaked to this day. The choice of imagery here seems a bit of an oversight by the PR agencies Ogilvy and Landor. The campaign seeks to dress BP in green, making references to BP’s use of biofuels for the Games. Yet only 40 out of 5000 vehicles will use this source that campaign groups argue is unsustainable because it necessitates large scale planting of monoculture crops that wipe out biodiversity, deplete soil and exacerbate world hunger.
The success of the campaign rests not on these details however. Via global media attention the BP brand is associated with the hype, passion and fervent feel-good factors of the biggest international athletics event. This lends the company a guise of social acceptability that enables harmful oil and gas projects the world over. As such, BP extracts what it needs to continue profiting on its investments – a social licence to operate.

For more on BP sponsorship, follow @PlatformLondon on Twitter for their upcoming arts publication ‘Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil’ and the ‘Tate a Tate’ audio tour.

Natural solidarity

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:08:16 +0000

A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11′. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.

Contrary to the headlines, this is no standoff between ‘capital’ on the one side and ‘the state’ on the other. And although residual anti-British prejudices that may have surprised some on this side of the Atlantic have certainly been exploited, neither is it a case of US nationalism. Both government and corporate interests are more closely linked than they appear.

Obama faced a public baying for corporate blood in a part of the country where his vote is weak. This explains the rumour, rife in the industry for a short time, that Obama was intending to ‘nationalise’ BP. The incredible $20 billion compensation deal negotiated in the White House was probably necessary for the survival of both the company and the president.

How they did it is significant. The White House deal effectively smashed the $75 million liability limit normally guaranteed to polluting oil firms by the US Oil Pollution Act. Now the act – a key 1990s ‘corporate welfare’ reform – has been torn to shreds as if it never existed. This shows us that the combination of liability protections for companies, what lawyers call the ‘corporate veil’, is not impermeable.

And even in the knowledge that Obama had little option, the macho hype surrounding his promise to ‘kick some butt’ is significant. The challenge to BP has shown us that no corporation is invincible.

On the face of things, this is an historic moment. Indeed, it is a moment that, in shaking the foundations of one of the world’s largest organisations, dwarfs anything that counter-hegemonic anti-capitalist movements have achieved.

The question, then, is: how should we, the multitude who are wholly disconnected from the ‘big politics’ of BP and the White House, respond?

An industrial disaster

The first thing we need to do is to recover the description of the incident as an industrial disaster, with 11 workers dead and 19 injured. If you missed the news coverage on 20 April, the day of the disaster, it is entirely possible that you wouldn’t know that anybody had actually been harmed.

After a week or so it had become an environmental disaster, something different, and, judging by the news coverage, infinitely more serious. In the coverage of the compensation deal, questions about the compensation to the deceased and injured workers were not even on the agenda.

This is reflected closely in the movement of BP’s share price following the explosion. A week into the disaster, with 11 dead, the share price remained higher than it had been the week before. The collapse started on 26 April, as traders feared that BP’s environmental crimes could trigger huge liabilities and expose it to major loss of earnings suits from other businesses. It was commercial life that mattered to Wall Street, not human life.

The left too often upholds Wall Street’s conceptual segregation of workers’ safety and environmental protection. The author and journalist Naomi Klein’s otherwise forensic response was hampered by this artificial segregation.

In presenting the root of the problem as a folly of industrial hubris (arguing that humans will never tame nature), she is ultimately right, but this grand analysis obscures the crucial detail. Maybe Mother Nature is shedding her blood, but why is that a separate issue from the undeniably real human blood already shed?

In the oil industry, the seeds of environmental destruction and of workers’ deaths are both found in an oligarchic structure that controls the industry from drilling to sale on the forecourt. The power of the oligarchy is found not just in the size of those companies, but in their ability to control the supply of oil and its primary products at every stage.

The industry has a virulently anti-trade union culture. The summary dismissal of trade unionists and safety activists is a feature that permeates its activities across the globe.

It was a key causal factor in the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988. On BP’s Atlantis platform, whistleblower Kenneth Abbot was sacked in 2009 for raising problems similar to those that have been established as causal in Deepwater Horizon.

In the Niger Delta, as John Vidal has noted, the super-majors combine to produce a Gulf of Mexico every year, destroying livelihoods and water supplies on an incomparable scale. In the Amazon, spills and pollution by companies including ChevronTexaco have removed whole tribes from the forest, resulting in cultural genocide.

In each case precisely the same features are at play: managerial despotism, lax regulation, reckless production and transportation, and a vacuum of accountability and liability for spills and routine pollution. Yet the industrial structure allows responsibility to be passed down the chain, very often to the individual that ’caused’ an explosion.

The quickest way to guard against environmental catastrophe is to ensure that those who work in hazardous conditions have some measure of control over this work. More than ever before, we need to mobilise around the natural solidarity between worker protection and environmental protection.

This is not to deny that big environmental threats such as global warming will require more than workplace organisation. But when we begin to look for the most radical transformative solutions, we find this solidarity irresistible.

Thirty years ago the Lucas Aerospace workers drew up their ‘alternative corporate plan’, to convert military production to clean and socially useful activity. This is a model that is often invoked (see Red Pepper, Oct/Nov 2009).

In the current climate, transformative initiatives that propose ‘green jobs’ are not particularly politically challenging – not least given the overtures to the value of the ‘green economy’ on both sides of the Atlantic. The work of the Blue-Green Alliance, an alliance between US trade unions and environmental NGOs, is gaining some momentum. (It remains baffling why there have been no such major trade union-led initiatives on green industrial transformation in the UK in 30 years.)

Moratorium

Beyond the demand for industrial transformation, Deepwater Horizon will surely give impetus to the politics of moratorium. The Yasuní-ITT initiative proposes to leave oil in the ground under the Amazonian rainforest in an area that

claims the highest biodiversity in the world.

The Ecuadorian government has requested around $3.5 billion over the next 10 or so years from the international community to safeguard the forest. Last September the German government pledged EUR50 million over 13 years, and Spain was considering a similar plan to pledge EUR18 million.

In April, as the Deepwater disaster was unfolding, 30,000 people representing indigenous peoples’ movements from all over the world met in Bolivia, at the invitation of President Evo Morales. The World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth set out a radical vision of environmental justice and issued a ‘Peoples’ Agreement’. Its demands included ‘a review, or if the case warrants, a moratorium, [of] every polluting activity that affects Mother Earth, and the withdrawal of multinational corporations and megaprojects from indigenous territories’.

From the perspective of the peoples of South America, care for the Earth and the dignity of human beings cannot be artificially separated. It is in the necessary reconnection of ‘life’, ‘work’ and ‘environment’ that once again we find a new solidarity.

New ways of collaborating and thinking are always connected to the withering of old ones. It seems undeniable now that the dismantling of the corporation is necessary to allow us to recover our dignity and our humanity. All of the key structural features of corporations ensure that they act destructively, and always against the grain of human values of mutual support and the sustainability of life.

Rather than offering alternatives to a world dominated by the ‘pathological’ killer corporations, it is sometimes suggested that recalcitrant corporations should be dealt with on an individual basis, by revoking their charters. In adopting this approach, corporations are pathologised – treated as deviants in an economic system that is otherwise basically okay.

This has been Obama’s approach to BP.

But the actions of one reckless company, no matter how reckless and destructive, are only part of the issue. We are at a decisive point in the history of the planet, one that is too important to be left to remote and increasingly out-of-control corporate hierarchies.

Dismantling corporate power structures is the most pressing task of our time. The revolutionary significance of working towards this should not be underestimated.

The modern corporation is the principle institutional form of capital. To break this institutional structure is to break the legal and institutional basis of private property ownership.

So we are left in a familiar quandary: in order to move towards a more just society, we need to break that which is held most sacred. But this is not an all-or-nothing quandary.

Working for small changes in the structure of the oil industry can give impetus to a new solidarity between ‘work’ and ‘environment’ and to demand real change.

Obama has shown how limited liability protections for one company can be discarded unilaterally by government intervention.

The quickest way to dismantle corporate power structures would be to abolish the privilege of limited liability – for all companies. This is the possibility that Deepwater Horizon has opened up for us.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

admin — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t bin it

Contact your local council for details of its waste disposal policies and the nearest recycling facility.

The best option for household organic waste, including food, is home composting. It eliminates the carbon footprint of waste transport and returns valuable nutrients to the soil. Visit: www.recyclenow.com/home_composting/composting/index.html for more information.

Give your clothes a new lease of life by reinventing them. It’s amazing what you can do with some haberdashery and trimmings. It could be as simple as swapping the buttons on your outfits, or using iron-on letters to bring that old tee shirt back into fashion. Use undyed yarn to knit your own jumpers to avoid toxic materials and sweatshops.

Do book swaps with friends instead of buying new. Donate unwanted toys to nurseries or children’s hospital wards.

Don’t buy products with excess packaging; choose those with re-useable containers. Invest in a reusable natural fibre bag to carry your shopping home.

Return unwanted junk mail and ask for your name to be removed from the mailing list by emailing the Mail Preference Service.

Don’t standby, switch off

A computer left on all day results in the emission of 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide in a year. Even a mobile phone charger left plugged in wastes power and money. Switch off all lights and electrical appliances when not in use. See www.tiptheplanet.com for information on computer power management and other energy saving tips, such as not overfilling the kettle.

Use energy efficient appliances and light bulbs and turn down your thermostat by just 1°C to save one tenth of your home heating bill. Make your home more energy efficient by insulating your loft, lagging your boiler and pipes, and using draught excluders. And switch to a green energy provider like Ecotricity.

Nullify your carbon footprint

For zero carbon emissions cycle and walk as much as you can. Use public transport. If you must drive make sure you do so in the appropriate gear to reduce exhaust emissions and switch off your engine if not moving. Invest in a fuel efficent car. The Environmental Transport Association features the environmental rating of all new cars and other tips on becoming a greener motorist.

Sacrificing overseas air travel will significantly diminish your carbon footprint and personal contribution to global warming. Research train and boat options at www.nofly.co.uk and www.seat61.com and pledge to limit or stop your flights at www.flightpledge.org.uk.

Be sustainable material-istic

For every tonne of paper we use each year, we consume an area of forest about the size of five football pitches. Buy recycled or recyclable products such as toilet tissue and stationery. Look for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo when buying wood products – from paper to raw timber. This ensures the wood comes from a well-managed forest. Re-use envelopes and recycle paper after use. And use e-mail where possible, rather than faxing or writing.

Consume zero waste

There’s a multitude of reasons why you should buy local, organic food. As well as saving on carbon miles and packaging it supports the endangered farmer species and is healthier. Check out your nearest farmers’ market for fresh food, often organic, direct from the farm. Visit www.farmersmarkets.net for more information.

The Organic Directory provides information on organic box schemes and local food resources. Buy seasonal fruit and vegetables to reduce the environmental transport costs. Or grow your own allotment. Call your local council or contact the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners for information on getting started.

What a waste of water

Fix dripping taps and turn the tap off when brushing your teeth. Install a Hippo water saver – or a brick – in your toilet cistern to save between 2.5 and 3.5 litres of water when you flush.

Ban your hosepipe; use a watering can for the garden and a bucket of water for car washing. Install a water-butt, available at local garden centres. Using rainwater for the garden, toilet and washing machines can save up to 50 per cent of household water use. There are a number of different rainwater harvesting systems available, which can be installed in both new and existing buildings. See www.environmentagency.gov.uk.

Drinking the world dry

admin — Mon, 01 May 2006 00:05:00 +0000

Coca-Cola is one of the most recognisable brands in the world. The company claims to adhere to the “highest ethical standards” and to be “an outstanding corporate citizen in every community we serve”. Yet Coca-Cola’s activities around the world tell a different story. Coca-Cola has been accused of dehydrating communities in its pursuit of water resources to feed its own plants, drying up farmers’ wells and destroying local agriculture. The company has also violated workers’ rights in countries such as Colombia, Turkey, Guatemala and Russia. Only through its multi-million dollar marketing campaigns can Coca-Cola sustain the clean image it craves.

The company admits that without water it would have no business at all. Coca-Cola’s operations rely on access to vast supplies of water; it takes almost three litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola. In order to satisfy this need, Coca-Cola is increasingly taking over control of aquifers in communities around the world. These vast subterranean chambers hold water resources collected over many hundreds of years. As such they represent the heritage of entire communities.

Coca-Cola’s operations have particularly been blamed for exacerbating water shortages in regions that suffer from a lack of water resources and rainfall. Nowhere has this been better documented than in India, where there are now community campaigns against the company in several states. New research carried out by War on Want in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, confirms theories that Coca-Cola’s activities are having a serious negative impact on farmers and local communities.

Coca-Cola established a bottling plant in the village of Kaladera in Rajasthan at the end of 1999. Rajasthan is well known as a desert state, and Kaladera is a small, impoverished village characterised by semi-arid conditions. Farmers rely on access to groundwater for the cultivation of their crops, but since Coca-Cola’s arrival they have been confronted with a serious decline in water levels. Locals are increasingly unable to irrigate their lands and sustain their crops, putting whole families at risk of losing their livelihoods.

Local villagers testify that Coca-Cola’s arrival exacerbated an already precarious situation. Official documents from the Government’s water ministry show that water levels remained stable from 1995 until 2000, when the Coca-Cola plant became operational. Water levels then dropped by almost 10 metres over the following five years. Locals now fear that Kaladera could become a “dark zone”, the term used to describe areas that are abandoned due to depleted water resources.

Other communities in India that live and work around Coca-Cola’s bottling plants are experiencing severe water shortages as well as environmental damage. Local villagers near the holy city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh complain that the company’s over-exploitation of water resources has taken a heavy toll on their harvests and led to the drying up of wells. As in Rajasthan and Kerala, villagers have been holding protests against the local Coca-Cola plant for its appropriation of valuable water resources.

In the now infamous case of Plachimada in the southern state of Kerala, Coca-Cola’s plant was forced to close down in March 2004 after the village council refused to renew the company’s licence on the grounds that it had over-used and contaminated local water resources. Four months earlier, the Kerala High Court had ruled that Coca-Cola’s heavy extraction from the common groundwater resource was illegal, and ordered it to seek alternative sources for its production.

In 2003 the independent Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) tested Coca-Cola beverages and found levels of pesticides around 30 times higher than European Union standards. Levels of DDT, which is banned in agriculture in India, were nine times higher than the EU limit. In February 2004 Indian MPs who investigated CSE’s studies upheld these findings and the Parliament went on to ban Coca-Cola from its cafeterias.

War on Want’s “alternative report” also details how Coca-Cola is having a devastating impact on water resources elsewhere. In El Salvador, the company has been accused of exhausting water resources over a 25-year period. In Chiapas, Coca-Cola is positioning itself to take control of the water resources. The Mexican government under Vicente Fox – himself a former President of Coca-Cola Mexico – has given the company concessions to exploit community water resources.

Coca-Cola’s own workers have also suffered and the company is being increasingly associated with anti-union activities. The most notable case is in Colombia where paramilitaries have killed eight Coca-Cola workers since 1990. The main Coca-Cola trade union, Sinaltrainal, is seeking to hold Coca-Cola liable for using paramilitaries to engage in anti-union violence.

Coca-Cola is being sued on behalf of transport workers and their families for its part in the alleged intimidation and torture of trade unionists and their families by special branch police in Turkey. In Nicaragua, workers of the main Coca-Cola union, SUTEC, have been denied the right to organise and the General Secretary, Daniel Reyes, believes that the objective of this ongoing and escalating campaign is to crush the union.

Guatemalan workers have been struggling against Coca-Cola since the 1970s. In the years between 1976 and 1985, three general secretaries of the main union were assassinated and members of their families, friends and legal advisers were threatened, arrested, kidnapped, shot, tortured and forced into exile. The violations of workers’ rights continue, and Coca-Cola workers and their family members with ties to unions have reportedly been subjected to death threats. Elsewhere in countries such as Peru, Russia and Chile, Coca-Cola workers have been protesting against the company’s anti-union policies.

Coca-Cola claims to exist “to benefit and refresh everyone it touches” and to try to sustain this positive image the company spends $2 billion a year on advertising alone. Yet there are signs that the image is beginning to crumble. At the recent Winter Olympics the relay carrying the Olympic flame was repeatedly disrupted by protests at Coca-Cola’s role as the principal sponsor, with the Turin council actually declaring the city a no-go zone for the company (a decision subsequently overruled by the mayor). War on Want demonstrated outside the UK leg of the Coca-Cola sponsored World Cup Tour. The company is promoting a sporty image of itself through sponsorship of events such as the World Cup, but is not playing fair with its workers and with local communities around the world.

Coca-Cola’s operations have had a devastating impact on the environment and workers’ rights around the world. By exposing these abuses and campaigning in solidarity with these affected communities, we can send a strong signal to our elected leaders that corporate abuses are unacceptable. War on Want is calling on the UK government to put in place a series of laws that hold companies like Coca-Cola to account for their operations overseas.For more information and to join War on Want go to: www.waronwant.org or to order a printed copy of the report, e-mail jzacune[at]waronwant.org

The Last Drop

admin — Mon, 01 May 2006 00:05:00 +0000

The south east of England is currently experiencing a peculiarly British drought. It is raining – less than average, admittedly – but enough to ensure that 915,000 litres of water per day can still be lost from the city’s creaking pipes.

But London’s livid lawn-waterers are not the only of Thames Water’s 70 million customers worldwide whose taps have run dry. Over 9,000 kilometres away, the citizens of Jakarta, Indonesia, have regularly complained of poor service and frequent water disruptions, including several days without water, since the city’s water company was taken over by Thames Water and French multinational Suez in 1997. Water rates there have been hiked by up to 30 per cent per year.

Double-digit price rises are also promised in Britain, and the company’s record of investment in the two countries is similarly unimpressive. But while Thames continues to make a £250 million annual profit domestically, its international operations are in trouble. The company is withdrawing from investments outside Europe and the German company RWE, which owns Thames, has recently put it up for sale.

A similar pattern is being repeated across the water sector. Veolia (formerly Vivendi), the world’s largest water company, is saddled with major debts. Suez, the second largest water company globally, is also being sold and is busily withdrawing from markets it deems politically risky. And for good reason: in March, the Argentine government cancelled the contract of the company’s disastrous Aguas Argentina subsidiary, citing poor water quality and the company’s failure to meet investment targets. Its Aguas del Illimani operations in El Alto, Bolivia met with a similar fate (see Nick Buxton, page 23 of the print version).

While it may be premature to talk of the end of water privatisation, that project has gone badly awry: ‘Due to the political and high-risk operations, many multinational water companies are decreasing their activities in developing countries,’ concluded the UN’s second world water development report, published in March.

What a difference a decade makes. In the 1990s, the World Bank, IMF and regional development banks (cheered on by the water corporations) pushed privatisation as the only solution to meet development goals. Instead of seeing access to potable water and sanitation as a basic right, a pre-condition for a dignified livelihood – they sought to impose ‘full cost recovery’ mechanisms, charging a market rate for water. Water was seen not as a basic resource but as an exploitable commodity. Subsidies were scrapped, and prices were hiked. In Bolivia, for example, the arrival of Bechtel in Cochabamba heralded an instant 60 per cent price increase.

The results in Bolivia are well known: successive ‘water wars’ saw the unpopular concession contracts scrapped and stimulated the rise of a new, more radical government. But this was by no means an isolated case. In June 2002, the Paraguayan parliament indefinitely suspended a privatisation scheme for the state-owned water company, Corposana (now called Essap), which was proposed in accordance with IMF targets for the country. Local struggles in Nkonkobe (Fort Beaufort), South Africa and Poznan, Poland, saw privatisation projects scrapped, while a successful campaign in Grenoble, France, saw the re-municipalisation of the city’s water services. Most recently, in November 2005 popular pressure led to the scrapping of a World Bank-funded privatisation project in Delhi, India.

But multinational withdrawals have not simply come from popular pressure. Contracts in the Central African Republic, Chad, China, Gambia, Malaysia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda have all been terminated after the private water operators failed to invest adequately (if at all) in new connections. In Mozambique, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe, meanwhile, privatisation was abandoned when the companies themselves decided to withdraw.

As this list of failures grows, the arguments to justify privatisation have also melted away. The competition myth – the idea that the market system could bring efficiency savings by introducing competition – was the first to go. Even if this neoliberal theory was correct, it has rarely been tested because Suez, Vivendi, Thames, SAUR and Anglian – the world’s largest water companies – are connected by a web of joint ventures designed more to protect their interests than stimulate ‘market conditions’.

The myth that the private sector brings investment has also started to crumble. ‘Private companies only invest where they can make a profit, not where there is the greatest need,’ says Peter Hardstaff, head of policy at the World Development Movement (WDM). This is backed up by WDM’s recent Pipe Dreams report, which shows that the private sector globally manages to make just 900 new water connections per day – falling some way short of the 270,000 per day new connections needed to meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without sustainable access to water and basic sanitation by 2015.

Against this backdrop, the private water multinationals have increased their efforts to influence global water policy with the establishment in October 2005 of AquaFed, a new corporate lobby group headed by Gerard Payen, a former CEO of Suez’s water division. It has already run into controversy, when it emerged that draft documents for the World Water Forum’s ministerial declaration originated from Payen’s computer.

Through corporate lobbying, the major water companies are pressurising the development banks – which use public funds to bankroll most development projects – to stand as guarantors against ‘political risk’ (the chance that the people might react unfavourably to price hikes) and losses arising from currency fluctuations. In effect, they are hedging their bets: urging the development banks and donor governments to offer terms that guarantee private investments, while at the same time threatening to withdraw altogether if these demands are not met. Yet this cannot mask the fact that the privatisation model has largely failed. For all the promises and projections, the reality remains that 90 per cent of the world’s water is still supplied by the public sector.

‘In a world where the multinationals are withdrawing, it is obvious that the public sector has to play a more important role,’ says Emanuele Lobina of the Public Services International Research Unit. ‘But public sector operations are created to provide a local service, and don’t have the same vested interest as multinationals in trying to promote their practices around the world.’

The opponents of neoliberalism are starting to respond. At the World Water Forum in Mexico City in March, an unprecedented 30,000 people marched in defence of water as part of a global commons, rather than a commodity. Beyond this, an International Forum in Defence of Water and a symposium on Public Water for All, heard exchanges of practical schemes to make this a reality. Public-public partnerships (PUPs) are at the centre of these proposals, encouraging public sector and community co-operation on a not-for-profit basis.

These are sometimes born out of necessity. For example, much of the water infrastructure in Caracas, Venezuela, was developed informally by residents with no formal land rights. So participation there, which takes the form of communal water councils, is essential if water providers are to understand how the system has been developed. ‘This wasn’t an urban planning issue,’ says Santiago Anconada, who advises the country’s minister responsible for participatory water management. ‘The water councils developed to map the situation on the ground. But they are as much part of the overall reformulation of power in the country.’

This emphasis on participation is increasingly widely shared elsewhere in Latin America. ‘Public means much more than the state’, says Alberto Munoz, of the Provincial Assembly for the Right to Water (APDA) based in Rosario, Argentina. He adds that citizens increasingly ‘demand participation in decision-making that ensures effective democratic control’.

In Brazil, the National Association of Municipal Services of Water and Sanitation (ASSEMAE) has played a key role in co-ordinating partnerships between authorities and civil society groups. Silvério da Costa, president of ASSEMAE, argues that this has helped the spread of socially controlled sanitation services in the country: ‘Actions that are not possible by a small municipality may be possible by a group. We are calling this arrangement a public-public partnership. But our experience in Brazil is that genuinely public water delivery must go beyond consultations with users to involve control over key financial decisions and citizens’ participation in setting priorities.’

‘We need to learn a lot from active participation in the South, especially now that we are seeing de-privatisation in Europe, including in parts of France and Italy,’ concludes Satoko Kishimoto of the Transnational Institute, based in Amsterdam. Reversing privatisation is not yet on the political agenda here in Britain, with few political actors yet campaigning for it and the water regulator Ofwat ensuring that the existing private water companies’ contracts are not up for renewal until 2027. But as Thames continues to lose up to a third of its water, and hosepipe bans likely to spread more widely, it is time that these lessons were learnt in Britain too.

For more information see www.waterjustice.org

Revealed: snooker link to illegal logging

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 18:28:00 +0000

An investigation has discovered that nearly 300,000 cues imported into the UK annually are made from the timber of ramin trees – a rare species listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) – chopped down and exported illegally from Indonesia’s dwindling tropical forests.

The Indonesian Government banned all cutting and export of ramin wood in 2001, yet Red Pepper has learnt that a number of British companies continue to import cues made from ramin for supply to hundreds of pubs, clubs and retail outlets, including Argos which advertises ramin cues for sale at 7.99. The timber is smuggled into China by criminal gangs before being manufactured into cues for export to the west.

Environmentalists have reacted with fury to the revelation which will come as a blow to the UK authorities who in 2002 signed a groundbreaking bilateral agreement with the Indonesian Government promising to crackdown on the trade in plundered timber between the two countries.

Indonesia is home to around 10% of the world’s remaining tropical forests and home to many rare and endangered species including the Orangutan, Sumatran tiger, Sumatran rhinoceros, clouded leopard and sun bear. Pressure groups such as the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) claim that over two million hectares of Indonesian rainforest is being destroyed each year by logging and that by 2010 virtually all the country’s lowland forests will have disappeared.

Illegal logging in Indonesia has been linked to widespread corruption and human rights abuses, with highly organised criminal gangs – dubbed the timber barons by environmentalists -brutally controlling the lucrative trade in stolen timber, much of it, including the highly prized ramin wood, plundered from inside supposedly protected forest areas.

In Central Kalimantan’s Tanjung Puting National Park – one of the largest conservation forests in Indonesia – millions of cubic metres of ramin trees are chopped down, hauled out and sold illegally each year, devastating the area’s rich ecology and costing the country’s economy millions of pounds in lost revenue. Those opposed to the activities of the logging cartels have faced violence and intimidation.

Ramin is a tropical hardwood only found in the swamp areas of Borneo, Sumatra and in the peninsular region of Malaysia and is classified under CITES as a vulnerable tree species. Once processed it can fetch a $1000 per cubic metre on the international market for use in picture frames, wood blinds, decorative mouldings as well as pool cues.

Much of the stolen timber used in the cues destined for the UK is believed to be exported to China where the cues are manufactured before being dispatched to the west. Red Pepper has learnt that at least four key companies are importing ramin cues into the UK for distribution to coin machine operators contracted by brewery groups to supply their pub games equipment.

Pool is one of the UK’s favourite pastimes, with over 5.2 million people playing the game each week on some 62,000 tables in public houses, clubs, hotels and in private homes. According to industry sources around 99 in every 100 cues used in British pubs are made from ramin.

Devon based Pot Black Ltd distributes cues by mail order to high street outlets including Argos, Littlewoods, Toys R Us and John Lewis. Cuecraft Ltd of Nottingham supplies snooker club chains with ramin cues supplied from China; the Merseyside based Leisure Services Group also imports them.

Another importer of ramin cues is Bristol Coin Exchange (BCE) / Critical Place Limited. The company, which sponsors leading snooker players Ronnie O’Sullivan and Jimmy White, is understood to import around 100, 000 cues each year from a Taiwanese owned factory in Xiamen, China.

Most of the companies contacted were unaware they needed permits to import ramin. David Nichols, of BCE / Critical Place Ltd, said his company had switched to an alternative timber source.

Under CITES legislation, companies importing ramin products must hold the appropriate permits guaranteeing that the wood comes from sustainable sources. But because ramin only grows in Indonesia and Malaysia, where investigations have discovered that Indonesian ramin is frequently laundered illegally, pressure groups maintain that no ramin imports can be trusted to have come from ecologically friendly sources.

Sam Lawson, of the EIA, said: “I find it shocking that wood from rare and endangered tropical trees is being used for cheap throw-away cues. This is only possible because these trees are being stolen, often from national parks.

“But what is more shocking is that ramin is a special case. Millions of pounds worth of illegal timber enters the UK every week and for most of this wood there is no UK law stopping companies from importing and selling it. New laws are urgently needed Europe wide to ban the import of all timber which was illegally sourced.”