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| Torched Senger home. Photo: Justin Kenrick. |
Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 500 million acres of
land in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean was acquired or
negotiated under deals brokered on behalf of foreign governments or
transnational corporations.
Many such deals are geared toward growing crops or biofuels for
export to richer, developed countries - with the consequence that
small-holder farmers are displaced from their land and lose their
livelihood while
local communities go hungry.
The concentration of ownership of the world's farmland in the hands of powerful investors and corporations is
rapidly accelerating, driven by
resource scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US
land rights organisation Grain:
"The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting
farmland and water away from direct local food production to the
production of commodities for industrial processing."
And now, the carbon market is joining the race
Less known factors, however, include '
conservation' and '
carbon offsetting'.
In west
Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported,
over a thousand homes had
been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly
evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral
homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.
Since 2007, successive Kenyan governments have threatened Sengwer communities in the Embobut forest with
eviction. A deadline for residents to leave the forest expired in early January, prompting the most recent spate of violence.
The pretext for the eviction is that the indigenous Sengwer - labelled wrongly as
"squatters" - are responsible for the accelerating degradation of the forest.
Elsewhere in Kenya's Mount Elgon forest, however, the KFS' track
record reveals a more complicated story. In 2010, the indigenous Ogiek
were issued a deadline to
relocate in the name of forest conservation and reforestation.
In February this year, Survival International
reported that,
like the Sengwer, the Ogiek continued to be violently evicted from
their homes in violation of court orders, with reports of government
officials and their supporters seizing their land.
Easy on the powerful, hard on the weak
While deforestation is undoubtedly linked to the activities of poor
communities, the Kenyan government's approach illustrates favouritism
toward parochial vested interests. In addition to the indigenous
communities, the forests are also inhabited by many thousands of
tea-planters, loggers, and squatters.
According to an
internal report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2000, reviewing the Kenyan government's internationally-funded conservation programme,
"the forests of Mt Elgon are not being sustainably managed."
The report highlighted
"unsustainable harvesting of both indigenous and plantation forest on Mt Elgon", routine flouting of
"regulations and procedures for sound management",
"the rate of forest plantation harvesting" far exceeding
"the rate of replanting", lack of supervision of controls on
"forest harvesting operations authorised by the Forest Department", and consequently
"extensive loss of forest resources."
The IUCN review also alluded to the role of the Kenyan government's
relationship with RaiPly Ltd, a Kenyan company involved in manufacture
of wood products:
"It is not known why or how RaiPly presumably received a license
to harvest indigenous species, thus circumventing the ban on harvesting
in indigenous forests."
The answer - persecute indigenous communities
Official Kenyan parliamentary records from May 1999 show that Kenyan
political representatives have been concerned about these issues for
some time.
One question put to Kenya's then assistant minister for natural resources, Peter Lengees, by a Kenyan MP pointed out that
"trees are being cut in Mt. Elgon forest" threatening the region's rivers
"from both sides". Local government officials, the MP accused,
"have shared up the area between these two rivers" which are now
"drying up".
Lengees denied any knowledge of this, prompting a further question from late politician George Kapten, who said that
"lorries from Raiply" had been ferrying high-value teak timber from Mount Elgon forest.
"And I wish to add that the highest authority in this country has shares in RaiPly", he added. Lengees repeated his denial but admitted that RaiPly was
"licensed to cut trees from some forests in Kenya."
Currently, RaiPly is among several major companies that are
exempt
from a partial government ban on logging. Effectively, the government
is permitting powerful logging companies to accelerate deforestation to
buoy the Kenyan economy while systematically persecuting indigenous
communities whose environmental impact is comparatively negligible.
Behind it all, the World Bank
The devastating plight of Kenya's
indigenous peoples is symptomatic of the flawed approach to conservation on the part of international agencies.
The
World Bank's
Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP)
with the Kenyan government, launched in 2007, has involved funding for
projects in the Cherangany Hills under the UN's Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programme, including
"financing REDD+ readiness activities" some of which began in May 2013.
Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase
carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands.
Those credits turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon
reductions.
In practice, however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to
accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.
A
FPP background brief on
the role of the World Bank claims that the implementation of NRMP -
overseen by the very same KFS forces conducting a scorched earth
campaign in Cherangany - violates the Bank's own operational safeguard
policies
Burning homes and food stores
A formal Sengwer complaint to the Bank lodged in January last year alleged that human rights abuses by Kenyan forces were
"a direct result" of the World Bank-funded programme. According to the FPP brief,
"One example of the harm caused by the project was that it
changed the border of the Cherangany forest reserves such that Sengwer
families, without any consultation or notice, found themselves on the
inside of the forest reserve and therefore automatically subject to
eviction by the KFS, evictions effectively funded by the World Bank.
These evictions were customarily executed by burning homes and food
stores in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013."
In a
statement in
February, the World Bank disavowed any link between its programme and
the forced evictions, but also offered to the Kenyan government:
" ... to share best practices in resettlement in line with its
safeguard policies. These seek to improve or restore the living
standards of people affected by involuntary resettlement."
A
letter to
the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) - a group of
African civil society organisations - signed by over 60 international
NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of
" ... both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of
the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan
government to cover-up cultural genocide."
As
"carbon credit financier and broker", the World Bank is
"aiding
and abetting the forced relocation of an entire Indigenous People
through its Natural Resource Management Plan (NRMP) which includes REDD
(Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), in the
Cherangany Hills", said the letter.
World Bank paves the way for massive 'carbon grabs'
The Sengwer's complaint is currently under investigation by the World
Bank Inspection Panel. Although the report is now complete, a Bank
spokesperson, Phil Hay, said that it would not be reviewed by the Board
until August or September.
"The World Bank is not associated with the evictions and has not
supported or financed resettlement in forest areas under the now closed
Natural Resource Management Project (NMRP)", said Hay.
"Nonetheless we are not bystanders either. We have been concerned
about how the evictions have been handled and have been in frequent
touch with the Kenyan government."
Notably, the Bank's professed concern here is with
"how the evictions have been handled", not with evictions being carried out in the first place.
A damning
new report from
the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) based in Washington DC thus
warns that the UN and World Bank approach to REDD is paving the way for
large-scale
"carbon grabs" by foreign governments and investors, putting at risk the land rights, livelihoods and lives of indigenous communities.
The report surveyed 23 low and middle income countries in Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, covering 66% of the developing world's
forests, concluding that REDD had not established laws or mechanisms by
which indigenous peoples and local communities could profit from the
carbon in the forests they inhabited.
"Their rights to their forests may be few and far between, but their rights to the carbon in the forests are non-existent", said Arvind Khare, RRI executive director.
A genocide in the making
At the
United Nations climate
negotiations in Warsaw in November 2013, delegates reached an agreement
that would allow REDD to move forward which, however, excluded
questions around who should control and benefit from the new carbon
value found in standing forests.
Instead, the World Bank Carbon Fund's approach to defining carbon
rights has been widely criticised by civil society groups for creating
conflict between new property rights to carbon, and existing statutory
and customarily held rights of local communities.
The lack of clear safeguards and measures opens up an unprecedented opportunity for corporate and government land grabbing.
Tony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of
the intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in
Copenhagen and Durban, said:
"The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support the
forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide
national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens
from the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for
generations."
According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because
indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles
that their implementation could lead to
outright genocide.
Chris Lang, a British forestry expert who runs the
REDD Monitor blog, agrees that under REDD schemes involving forested or agricultural land,
"the rights to the use of that land could be taken away from
indigenous peoples who depend on their forests for their livelihoods.
Destroying livelihoods on this scale could conform to the parts (a),
(b), and (c) of the [UN Convention] definition of genocide."
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT - set in a near future following a Fourth Iraq War.
Follow Ahmed on
Facebook and
Twitter.
This article was originally published on
Guardian Environment, and is reproduced by kind permission via the Guardian Environment Network. It was inspired by a
blogpost by
British film-maker Dean Puckett who is travelling to Kenya this month
(August 2014) to investigate the plight of the Sengwer.
