A good antidote from Costa Rica (and for SA antidotes, we've got a recent book out that can be downloaded here: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/CCS_ENERGYSERIES_1005_COMPLETE.pdf ):
An ironic twist to the Kyoto Protocol Emission credits tagged as exploitive Nov. 26, 2005. 01:00 AM CAMERON SMITH Toronto Star
On the eve of the United Nations climate change conference that opens on Monday in Montreal, I came across a troubling academic paper that suggests the emission trading system, to which Canada is committed, has been exploiting debt-ridden Third-World countries by "colonizing" their forests.
The emission trading system allows polluters to achieve their emission reduction targets by paying for reductions - credits - achieved elsewhere. The paper suggests that paying to have Third-World forests protected, as a means of combating global warming, can result in hardship to families evicted from the forests.
The paper is a case study of Costa Rica entitled The Tragedy of the Enclosures, written from a feminist perspective by Ana Isla, an assistant professor in the sociology department of Brock University in St. Catharines.
The word "enclosures," used in this sense, is supercharged with emotion because it recalls the periods in European history when peasants were forced off what were known as the commons - areas that landowners left open for agriculture to all tenant farmers.
The expulsions occurred as landowners closed off (enclosed) the commons, first, during the 1400s and 1500s as the wool trade flourished, in order to create more pastures for sheep, and, again, in the 1700s and 1800s as mechanized equipment allowed landowners to cultivate larger areas.
In Costa Rica, according to Isla, forests are being enclosed by the government to create protected areas "along the lines of national parks in North America, from which people are excluded and denied any role in sustaining ecosystems."
By protecting forests that trap carbon dioxide, Costa Rica gains emission credits, which it can sell. Isla says protected areas now account for 24.8 per cent of Costa Rican national territory.
To compound the problem, she says, "United Fruit, the U.S. multinational corporation, (has) enclosed the southern part of the country with banana plantations; the local business community (has) enclosed the central valley with coffee plantations; and foreigners and local businesses (have) enclosed the northwest for cattle ranching."
As a result, 70.3 per cent of the country's territory is held by 0.71 per cent of its landowners (those with more than 100 hectares), and 1.12 per cent of the territory is owned by 83.4 per cent of landowners (those with less than 100 hectares).
The government promised to compensate families evicted to create protected areas at the equivalent of about $7,858 per hectare but, she says, at the last accounting about 745 families had not been paid, leaving them landless and impoverished.
Evicting people without compensation leaves them no alternative but to head for urban areas, principally San José, to look for work, Isla says. But, "the ideology of cities as having ... opportunities for well-paying jobs and upward mobility in Costa Rica is a myth."
The reality is, she says, that women are forced to become prostitutes to support their families, and there is an "astonishing amount of children who are bought, sold, and mistreated. ..."
The weakness of Isla's paper, which she notes is a work in progress, is that she hasn't documented the specific descent into prostitution for any of the evicted families. Nevertheless, the fact that there have been evictions and there are cases of families going without compensation should be cause for concern at the Montreal conference, especially since Isla claims that the emissions credit system would be open for similar abuse in other debt-ridden, Third-World countries.
The climate change meeting in Montreal is being hosted by Canada because, for the next year, Environment Minister Stéphane Dion is president of the U.N. body that drafted the Kyoto Protocol.
Dion has set three objectives for the conference. One is to add implementing details to the Kyoto treaty that came into effect this year; the second is to add more clarity to the "clean development mechanism" referred to in the treaty; and the third is to set targets further into the future.
The clean development mechanism requires that, in addition to reducing greenhouse gases, the buying and selling of emission credits must contribute, as Dion noted in a recent speech, to "the sustainable development of the developing country where the project is implemented."
There is no sustainable result if families are left destitute, as Isla claims is happening in Costa Rica.
Her paper can be found at http://www.cansee.org under the 2005 conference proceedings. It should be required reading in Montreal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- Cameron Smith can be reached at camsmith at kingston.net.