Colonialism and the Green Economy The Hidden Side of Carbon Offsets

Subject: Colonialism and the Green Economy The Hidden Side of Carbon Offsets

Sylvie and All,

This is heartbreaking, because there is no way I can reach out and fix it.  Millions of us could, if we chose to. 

We are just one more natural resource to the rich and powerful as they jockey for dominance. 

Carl Jarvis

----- Original Message -----

Subject: Colonialism and the Green Economy The Hidden Side of Carbon Offsets

Colonialism and the Green Economy The Hidden Side of Carbon Offsets



By Daniel C Marotta and Jennifer Coute-Marotta



Truthout, Sunday, December 23, 2012



http://truth-out.org/news/item/13477-canary-in-the-smokestack-the-human-toll-of-trading-carbon-for-lives-and-livelihoods?tmpl=component&print=1



Nueva Colombia is a coffee growing hamlet straddling the border of a natural
protected area within the Sierra Madres of Chiapas. A cloud forest of
incredible biodiversity, the area is one of the few remaining homes of the
Quetzal bird, revered by the Aztecs and Mayans alike.



Although some market-based strategies to mitigate global warming do benefit
some communities, they more often serve as a cheap way for the world's
biggest polluters to avoid true ecological reforms and deprive people who
can least afford it of their livelihoods, their land and their homes.



Eleazar Graciliano Lopez Roblero is an inquisitive man with a farmer's
frame, thick, curly hair and staunch hands, who wore a collared shirt and
carried a small red notebook with a pen keeping his page. He referred to it
a few times, but for the most part he was jotting down notes while the
interpreter organized his translations. His wife, a reserved woman with a
serious demeanor, sat next to him in the large room that served as their
bedroom and living room while his children milled about.



In the courtyard, his sister was preparing a chicken and his niece was
cooking tortillas over an open fire. Roblero is the secretary of Nueva
Colombia, a tiny village of less than 200 people nestled in the Sierra
Madres of Chiapas, Mexico.





'Coffee is everything', according to Mr. Roblero. Nueva Colombia had been
subsidized by the Mexican government to reforest half their lands. The
Mexican government, in return, controversially obtained the rights to the
carbon sequestered by the growing trees.



Nueva Colombia, a coffee growing hamlet resting on a small plateau on an
otherwise steep mountainside, has unwittingly been catapulted to the
forefront of the battle against climate change. Roblero's land, like
everyone's in this village and others nearby, was granted to his family
during the land reform program after the Mexican Revolution. Before that,
they were landless peasants working for a German landowner. The people of
the region produce coffee on the border of a protected natural area called
the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve. A mountainous cloud forest of incredible
biodiversity, El Triunfo is known not only as one of the few remaining homes
of the Quetzal, a bird revered by the Aztecs and Mayans, but also for its
potential to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration.



By calculating the amount of carbon captured from the atmosphere and stored
in growing forests, carbon credits are generated. One ton of carbon is equal
to one carbon credit. Interested companies and institutions can then buy
those credits through a carbon market, thereby offsetting their greenhouse
gas emissions. The practice, which creates a financial incentive to conserve
forests through the marketization of trees' natural ability to store carbon
as biomass, is called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD).



One of the fastest growing international mechanisms for combating climate
change, it is based on theory that a ton of carbon sequestered by a forest
in the Global South is identical in function to a ton prevented from leaving
a smokestack in the Global North. However, the logic becomes suspect when
one considers the burning of fossil fuels as an injection of greenhouse
gases into an otherwise closed system known as the carbon cycle. Although
some carbon offset projects do good for local populations, they more often
serve as a cheap way for the world's biggest polluters to avoid true
ecological reforms and continue on with business-as-usual.



A Surprising Realization



A REDD project has been in existence in the coffee region buffering the El
Triunfo Biosphere Reserve since 2008. Managed by Conservation International
and in partnership with Starbuck's Coffee, the project creates carbon
credits by growing trees as a shade cover for the coffee farms dominating
the first slopes of the Sierra Madres. Starbuck's buys the shade-grown
coffee, which conforms to their Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) practices,
while participating farmers receive a subsidy to make up for the lower yield
shade-grown produces. The subsidy comes directly from the Mexican government
which, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization,
controversially obtains the rights to the generated carbon credits.





Since Hurricane Matthew in September of 2010, the village of Nueva Colombia
has been without medical facilities or school teachers. Jaltenango, the only
town in the area and over four hours away, is where the mobile hospital unit
is now stationed.



In 2010, seeing other communities benefiting from doing something they
already do, Nueva Colombia asked to join the program. Yet, since the farmers
of Nueva Colombia already produced shade-grown coffee, they were ineligible
for the program. In response, the Mexican government decided on a novel
approach - subsidizing the farmers of Nueva Colombia to completely reforest
half their lands. Incidentally, all the lands allowed into the contract were
lands used to grow corn for personal consumption.



For two years, the people of Nueva Colombia received this subsidy and laid
fallow the lands agreed upon. Then, in July of 2012, they were visited by
officials of the Mexican forestry agency. They were informed that they'd no
longer receive the payments for reforesting their lands, and worse, that
they still couldn't plant on them either. Doing so would be illegal, they
were told, since the lands are now a part of the El Triunfo Biosphere
Reserve.



In August of 2012, we visited Nueva Colombia and talked with Roblero. He
thought we were there for another reason, but after some prodding and
bringing the subject back to reforestation, he told us of how his lands were
seized by his government. Surprisingly, he expressed confusion as to why he
and his fellow farmers were being subsidized to reforest in the first place.
He had never heard of REDD or the carbon market, nor the ways in which
carbon credits were generated and what they were used for. We apparently
were the first to do what is supposed to be done under REDD protocol and
international law - tell participants about what a REDD project does, and
why. He couldn't believe it, and as the discussion turned serious and his
disposition indignant, he told his children to go to the courtyard.



Sustainable Rural Cities



Roblero thought we were there to discuss a housing development that is under
construction in Jaltenango, the only town in the region, at the eastern base
of the Sierra Madres of Chiapas. It is more than four hours from Nueva
Colombia. At 197 acres and with 625 identical houses, the development will
nearly double the size of Jaltenango. It is one of five Sustainable Rural
Cities (SRC) built - or in the process of being built - in Chiapas.





After Hurricane Matthew in 2010, the Mexican government convinced some
families to give up their land in exchange for a free title to a house. They've
been living here since, waiting for the SRC to be completed.



All the families in Nueva Colombia and people from nearby hamlets are slated
to move to the SRC when it is completed by the spring of 2013. The Mexican
government has offered them a title to a house for free, and at the same
time, has been dispatching officials to the various communities to inform
them of the natural hazards of where they are living. A construction worker
at the SRC site stated he was told his community was in danger of plummeting
to their deaths when the ground they live upon breaks from the rest of a
mountain, and that Nueva Colombia is in danger of a catastrophic flood.



In fact, in September of 2010, Nueva Colombia did flood and was affected by
serious mudslides. Since then, the community has used the money from the
reforestation subsidy to pave roads and create a drainage system.



But from that incident, the Mexican government convinced many families to
give up their land in exchange for the free title to the house. They've been
living in a makeshift tent city in Jaltenango ever since, waiting for the
SRC - which they were told back then would be ready in six months - to be
completed.



In addition, many people left Nueva Colombia after the flood when the
Mexican government did not allow the teachers or the mobile hospital unit to
return to the village, Roblero said. The community has been without medical
services and a functioning school for two years now. It was obvious to him
that his government has wanted residents out of the area, but it wasn't
until we explained the carbon market that he put all the pieces together.



The Roblero family said they were not willing to move to the Sustainable
Rural City, and became more resolute in their decision once we showed them
pictures of the development. Cornell University conducted an analysis of the
program, citing countless faults. In every house in the Jaltenango SRC, for
example, were two children's rooms, each barely larger than the small bunk
beds inside, with a thin, shoddily built wall that did not go to the ceiling
between them. The roofs were made of aluminum and, unlike traditional
house-building practices in the area, there was no space between the roof
and the tops of the wall to let out the hot, humid air.



The women of the family were especially taken aback by the massive power
lines that divided the SRC, and the buzzing sound they emitted, which could
be heard from any corner of the development. Truthout interviewed an
engineer of the housing development. He stated that it was the UN that
decided on the housing plans and the materials used, and that it is in line
with the UN Millennium Goals.



Roblero can't help but see a connection between the Sustainable Rural City
and the Mexican government's desire to generate as many carbon credits as
possible. All the communities slated for relocation are at least partially
within the boundaries of the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve, which was created
in 1990.



He was never afraid of the warnings of the officials who come every so often
to warn of the natural dangers of the area, stating there are many
communities all over the world in a worse position than they are in. But
Roblero said he and his family will not leave their land, even if their
government tries to use violence to relocate them.



Canary in the Smokestack



The Mexican government is receiving funding from The World Bank, the UN and
other multilateral institutions to create a national REDD program. The
objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of national-scale REDD programs
on efforts to conserve ecologically intact forests of the Global South.



However, trees as a canopy for coffee farms or plantations of palm trees for
biofuels - both of which are currently generating carbon credits in Mexico -
hardly resemble a forest. Currently, all REDD contracts in Mexico are for
five years. On average, however, individual REDD projects have a contract
length of 30 years. What happens then?



Truthout interviewed Jose Carlos Fernandes Ugalde, the financial director of
Mexico's national REDD program. He refused to respond to several questions,
including this one What happens when the farmer, whose livelihood depends on
the reforestation subsidy, no longer receives that subsidy, and the area
reforested during the contract no longer has an economic value





One section of the SRC. Every front and back yard will contain an orange
tree, the fruits of which will supposedly benefit the community through
their export. Note the irony of clear cutting this area in order to generate
carbon credits through reforestation in another area.

Mexico plans to shovel the credits it is generating now into the carbon
markets in June of 2013. The country sees itself as a future leader in the
nascent green economy by becoming a top supplier of carbon credits for the
Global North. At an average of $6.20, quite a few credits will have to be
generated to make it economically worthwhile.



As part of this strategy, California, whose cap-and-trade system for
reducing emissions statewide goes into effect in January of 2013, is
building the legal framework to eventually buy carbon credits specifically
from Chiapas. The first of its kind, this deal will solidify into REDD
practice the human rights abuses inflicted upon the people of Nueva
Colombia, including the possible forced evictions once the otherworldly
housing development is complete. Thus far, this is the only international
source for carbon credits California is considering using as an acceptable
way for its companies and institutions to offset their emissions. If
accepted, it would be upon the backs of the farmers of Nueva Colombia that
California, one of the world's worst polluters, is dumping its
responsibility to mitigate climate change onto.



As stated in the Framework Document of the United Nations REDD Program, REDD
projects have the potential to lock up forests by decoupling conservation
from development. It also states that asymmetric power distribution [could]
enable powerful REDD consortia to deprive communities of their legitimate
land development aspirations.



Truthout interviewed Tamra Gilbertson, one of the founders of Carbon Trade
Watch, which provides research on environmental policies and climate justice
with a special focus on carbon trading, forest issues and land rights.



Gilbertson said her research has confirmed the reservations expressed in the
UN-REDD Framework Document. She had this to say As REDD develops into large
government programs in the Global South, the negative impacts on local
communities seen in individual projects to date will become
institutionalized in both governmental policy and through REDD protocol. The
lack of accountability then becomes entrenched within a framework that
violates human and indigenous rights for the sake of so-called 'sustainable
development.' This is the way REDD will work as it, and the cap-and-trade
systems and national programs it is merging into, continue to grow in
popularity.



We should consider this the canary in the smokestack.





The sun had risen and eventually dried up the clouds rolling through the
valley. On a walk to the coffee farms, amidst impassioned discussions of all
that could be and has been stolen from these resolute people, beauty was
still to be found.



The immediate Roblero family. Like the rest of the community, they didn't
understand why they were being subsidized to lay fallow half their lands.
Against REDD protocol, they were never informed about the carbon market or
the concept of carbon rights.