Tag Archives: right to information and consultation

Sins of Environmentalism

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During the opening ceremony of the (Conference of the Parties) COP15 of the Biodiversity Convention taking place in early December 2022,  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for a global agreement to protect 30% of the world’s land and water by 2030. This so-called ’30×30′ plan is opposed by a number of groups that promote the rights of indigenous peoples. According to Survival International, an organization campaigning for Indigenous rights, 30 x 30 will be the biggest land grab in history.

Already in many Protected Areas around the world local people, who have called the land home for generations, are no longer allowed to live on and use the natural environment to feed their families, gather medicinal plants or visit sacred sites.

‘Fortress Conservation’ is one example of a conservation model that excludes Indigenous communities. It began with the formation of Yosemite, the world’s first national park, in North America over 150 years ago.  To preserve the ‘pristine wilderness’ humans needed to be expelled so the native Americans, who had lived in and cared for the region for thousands of years, were evicted.

Only 3 per cent of the world’s land remains ecologically intact, and biodiversity loss continues at an alarming rate.  In 2010, member states of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) committed to placing 17 per cent of the world’s land within protected areas by 2020. Yet during that decade global biodiversity actually declined significantly.

There have also been systemic human rights abuses. Rainforest Foundation UK protects the world’s rainforests by supporting and empowering the Indigenous people and local communities which live in them.  But its research into 34 Protected Areas in the Congo Basin showed that without the presence of Indigenous communities, animal populations dwindled, and extractive activities increased. This was despite large investments having been channeled into them.  It also uncovered widespread disregard for local communities’ rights and livelihoods and conflict between forest peoples and conservationists in this region.

According to Joe Eisen, Executive Director of Rainforest Foundation UK, human rights abuses are commonplace in the Congo Basin. “Our research has shown these human rights abuses are not just the isolated actions of rogue park rangers but are rather part of a system in which displacement, torture, gender-based violence and extrajudicial killings are used to control Indigenous peoples and other local communities who live in, and depend on, areas of high conservation value,” he says.

Protected Areas are often managed by major international conservation organizations, who employ armed guards to evict the local population and prevent their return. These actions have long-term consequences and destroy Indigenous livelihoods and cultures.

There are calls for the development of a community-based conservation model, which empowers Indigenous people, rather than removing them from their ancestral lands.

Excerpts from Plans to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 could be ‘devastating’ for Indigenous people, Euronews, Dec. 8, 2022

The Mining Curse

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Two poor, fragile, post-Soviet democracies, two spectacular holes in the ground. Mongolia’s Oyu Tolgoi, or “Turquoise Hill”, is a vast mine in the southern Gobi desert, just 80km from the Chinese border. Kumtor in the Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan, operating since 1997, is if anything even more remote. Located beside a series of glaciers at 13,000 feet above sea level, it is the world’s second-highest gold mine.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of these two mines to their respective economies. Once completed, Oyu Tolgoi will be the world’s fourth-biggest copper mine. When the contract with Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian mining giant, was first signed in 2009, Oyu Tolgoi was predicted to add five percentage points to Mongolia’s annual economic growth, which, for a while, it did. The mine has created 15,000 jobs directly and another 45,000 indirectly, for a Mongolian population of 3.3m. As for Kumtor, its owner, Centerra, a Canadian exploration company, is the country’s largest private investor. In a good year the mine generates a tenth of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP and is the biggest contributor to the state budget.

Both mines loom large in national life. Both foreign operators won sweet, initial deals when naïve young states opened their doors to foreign investment. Controversy surrounding the mines was thus inevitable. Oyu Tolgoi has long been controversial. Politicians often accuse Rio Tinto of fleecing the country…In Kyrgyzstan the goverment accuses Centerra of corruption, enriching politicians instead of the national budget. 

Accusations of being cheated are common in poor, resource-rich countries. With Oyu Tolgoi, the stand-off is more easily resolved….A recent independent review makes it hard for Rio to deny it bears some blame for delays and cost overruns in developing the mine…. In Kyrgyzstan the situation is bleaker. There, bribery and corruption are not incidental to business but central to it….Foreign investors too often blame “resource nationalism” for their woes in host countries. That is self-serving. After all, the resources usually belong to the state. It is reasonable for citizens to ask how best to benefit from them…. 

Excerpts from Banyan: Mine for the Taking, Economist, Nov. 6, 2021

Keep Killing Environmental Defenders

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A report released by Global Witness in September 2021 reveals that 227 land and environmental activists were murdered in 2020 for defending their land and the planet. That constitutes the highest number ever recorded for a second consecutive year…The figures show the human cost of the destruction wrought by exploitative industries and corporations. At least 30% of recorded attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation – across logging, hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure, mining, and large-scale agribusiness. Logging was the industry linked to the most murders with 23 cases – with attacks in Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru and the Philippines…

Colombia was once again the country with the highest recorded attacks, with 65 defenders killed in 2020. A third of these attacks targeted indigenous and afro-descendant people, and almost half were against small-scale farmers. In 2020 the disproportionate number of attacks against indigenous communities continued – with over a third of all fatal attacks targeting indigenous people. Attacks against indigenous defenders were reported in Mexico, Central and South America, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Nicaragua saw 12 killings – rising from 5 in 2019, making it the most dangerous country per capita for land and environmental defenders in 2020.

Excerpt from  LAND AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENDERS, Global Witness Press Release, Sept. 13, 2021

How to Create a National Park? Beat Up and Intimidate Indigenous Peoples

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Armed ecoguards partly funded by the conservation group WWF to protect wildlife in the Republic of the Congo beat up and intimidated hundreds of Baka pygmies living deep in the rainforests, according to a UNDP investigation. A team of investigators sent to northern Congo by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to assess allegations of human rights abuses gathered “credible” evidence from different sources that hunter-gatherer Baka tribespeople living close to a proposed national park had been subjected to violence and physical abuse from the guards over years, according to a leaked draft of the report obtain by the Guardian in February 2020.

The allegations, reported to the UN in 2019, included Baka tribespeople being beaten by the ecoguards, the criminalisation and illegal imprisonment of Baka men, summary evictions from the forest, the burning and destruction of property, and the confiscation of food.  In addition, the UNDP’s social and environmental compliance unit heard how the ecoguards allegedly treated the Baka men as “sub-human” and humiliated some Baka women by forcing them to take off their clothes and “be like naked children”.

The report says: “These beatings occur when the Baka are in their camps along the road as well as when they are in the forest. They affect men, women and children. Other reports refer to ecoguards pointing a gun at one Baka to force him to beat another and guards taking away the machetes of the Baka, then beating them with those machetes.

“There are reports of Baka men having been taken to prison and of torture and rape inside prison. The widow of one Baka man spoke about her husband being so ill-treated in prison that he died shortly after his release. He had been transported to the prison in a WWF-marked vehicle.”

The draft report, dated 6 January 2020, adds: “The violence and threats are leading to trauma and suffering in the Baka communities. It is also preventing the Baka from pursuing their customary livelihoods, which in turn is contributing to their further marginalisation and impoverishment.”

The $21.4m (£16.6m) flagship Tridom 11 project in northern Congo set up in 2017 with money from the WWF, UNDP, the European commission, US and Congolese governments and the Global Environment Facility, as well as logging and palm oil conglomerates, includes as its centrepiece a 1,456 sq km area of forest known as Messok Dja.

This global biodiversity hotspot is rich in wildlife, including elephants, gorillas and chimpanzees, and has been lived in and used for the hunting of small game by the semi-nomadic Baka tribes for millennia. The WWF has pressed for it to be designated a protected area, or national park, for 10 years, on the grounds that it will reduce wildlife crime and act as an ecological corridor linking national parks in neighbouring Cameroon.

The WWF says the ecoguards were employed by the Congolese government, but admits contributing to their training and wages along with other funders through the Tridom interzone project (ETIC), a Congo government collaboration with WWF. It adds that there are no legal restrictions preventing Baka using the forests….The investigators also identified multiple failures of the UNDP to adhere to human rights policies and standards, and said little consideration had been given to the impact of the project on the Baka peoples….Investigators also said they found no evidence that the UNDP had taken into account the risk of co-financing the project with palm oil and logging companies whose work by its nature threatens large-scale biodiversity loss.

The report strongly criticises the way conservation is practised in central Africa. “The goal of establishing Messok Dja as a protected area was pursued by following the established patterns of conservation projects in the Congo Basin, which largely exclude indigenous peoples and treat them as threats rather than partners,” it says.

Excerpts from John Vidal, Armed ecoguards funded by WWF ‘beat up Congo tribespeople’, Guardian, Feb, 3, 2020

A Way to Monetize African People: their DNA

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Whistleblowers who formerly worked at the Cambridge-based Wellcome Sanger Institute claimed in October 2019 the institute wanted  to use the DNA samples it obtained from universities across Africa to make money.  They said staff there planned to build a medical research tool, gene chips , based on the DNA, which it could then have sold commercially.

As a result the Stellenbosch University in Western Cape has called for the Sanger Institute to return the DNA samples to the African universities it got them from.  Critics argued the people who donated the samples – members of indigenous communities such as the Nama people – did not consent to it being used this way.    The DNA samples were collected by various African universities and the Lebanese American University in Beirutl.  The samples were shared under so-called ‘material transfer arrangements.’   DNA donors included members of indigenous communities — such as the Nama people of Botswana, Namibia, Uganda, and South Africa.

Participants were reportedly told samples would only be used to study ‘population history and human evolution.’…  The Stellenbosch University in South Africa reportedly wrote that it had provided DNA samples from the Nama people ‘to be used solely for research purposes.’  ‘It was recently brought to [the university’s] attention that […] the Wellcome Sanger Institute intends to proceed with commercialisation of the research, data and Nama DNA,’ they continued.  ‘This conduct of the Wellcome Sanger Institute raises serious legal and ethical consequences.

South African scientists demand the return of hundreds of tribal DNA samples after a British institute was accused of trying to use them to make money, Daily Mail, Oct. 14, 2019