“Sustainable” Forestry and the International Scourge of Corporate Greenwashing
- Author
- Published on
What is a forest?
The first inklings of global frameworks for environmental protection and coordinated efforts to address climate change began with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, with countries recognising the need to coordinate action to reduce carbon emissions. The Protocol was influenced by the involvement of the forestry industry itself, which pushed for the inclusion of monocrop plantations into the definition of what comprises a “forest”. Even as succeeding agreements, most notably the Paris Agreement of 2015, have acknowledged the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services that occur within plantation “forests”—as opposed to extant indigenous forests—the most common form of carbon sink that is purchased as credits and traded around the world today is monocrop plantations composed mostly of exotic, fast-growing species such as eucalyptus and pine. Those plantation companies who seek to be labelled “green” and “sustainable” often pursue certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which, from their own webpage, means that the planation “is managed in a way that is environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable.” However, the idea of a plantation being “environmentally responsible” also hinges on further warping the definition of “forest”, as in addition to being able to classify plantations as forests, these companies can define land that they want as “not forest” in order to claim that they are adding green value to degraded land.
“Demised land” and Environmental Destruction
The recent establishment of a Forest Stewardship Council-certified plantation in Sierra Leone, West Africa, began with the negotiation of a contract with the governing body of the targeted chiefdoms. That contract specified that the company would target “demised lands” on which to establish its plantations, preceding language now extant in the Paris Agreement that reforestation on “degraded” lands was a solid short-term strategy for carbon abatement, and could form part of a longer strategy of carbon sequestration, if properly managed. Considering that the involved chiefdoms had formerly been the site of contract tobacco farming that had rendered much of the land infertile, this seemed an appropriate “green” intervention into land that was truly unusable by local communities. However, the company was instead utilising a 1990s-era definition of climax forest, namely that which is in the last stage of succession, notably high-canopy forests. Anything else was considered “demised”, which, in a country with a thousand-year history of shifting agriculture, meant that none of their secondary forests—which had long been part of the farming cycle—counted. In adhering to this internationally-acceptable definition, the company leased hundreds of hectares of farmland for periods of fifty years or more. They then cleared large tracts of secondary forest—forest that is acknowledged to contain high biodiversity levels—and also has been curated through eons of human use to provide foundational services to humans; in this case, natural palm oil, medicinal herbs, browse for ruminant animals, firewood, and wild fruits and plants, in addition to holding the area’s water table high. Most of the trees planted were eucalyptus hybrids, which lower the water table, kill soil microbes, and destroy undercanopy biodiversity. The large-scale seizure of this land for “sustainable” wood production is already leading to higher incidences of malnutrition, childhood diseases, and increases in water-borne diseases.
“Demised land” and Human Rights Abuses
In addition to the costs to human health and biodiversity of losing their forest-farm mosaic come a more insidious form of human rights abuses enabled by a Western-centric notion of property ownership, and the impact of these contracts on the ability of thousands of people—particularly women—to make ends meet for their families. The FSC operates on a foundation of only certifying land that was leased through “clean title”, meaning that there is a clear standard of ownership, and the land is not being grabbed from community-owned or managed land; an issue that has plagued indigenous people whose land has been occupied by non-certified plantations. However, traditional systems of land ownership in Sierra Leone was one of “ruling houses”, the first families to settle in an area, who laid claim to the lands that they and their people could farm. As land was only historically valuable in Sierra Leone if there was sufficient labour to work it, land was held in a stewardship arrangement, where the “owners” brought people into their influence and gave them usufruct land rights. This still holds true today, with a village of hundreds of people likely only having two or three families that “own” all the land. However, with an emphasis on clean title, single landowners now receive rent for hundreds of hectares of land that used to be farmed through user rights by everyone in the village. The FSC is happy that the land has been acquired legally, while dispossessing thousands and thousands of people who now have no livelihood—no land to farm to feed their families or to sell the surplus to send their children to school, nowhere to keep or graze animals, nowhere to gather firewood, and nowhere to get forest food products. And they receive nothing from this “green”, “sustainable” forestry that is supposed to move the world into a carbon-neutral future. The landowners receive USD 2 per hectare per year, and everyone else is left holding the green bag. This is a situation of rural lumpenisation, of the creation of humans with no productive value, created by capitalism and the collusion of plantation companies, international treaties, governing bodies, and the corporations who rely on “sustainable” forestry to buttress their own corporate images.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.