On Sunday, February 28, 2010, armed troops evicted villagers in Uganda’s Mubende District, to make way for a tree plantation. The troops were acting on behalf of a British forestry company that claims it fights global warming. The trees will supposedly absorb carbon dioxide, so that carbon-credits can be sold to transnational polluters, to stave off “dangerous man-made climate change and disruption.”
Long-time villagers in thriving communities were beaten by gun-toting soldiers who burned homes, destroyed crops and butchered livestock. Eight-year-old Friday Mukamperezida was sick in bed at home and was burned to death, while his mother was out getting medicine for the boy. Olivia Mukamperezida, the mother, was on her errand when she ran into friends who frantically told her to get home fast. When she got there, the house was sputtering to ashes. “I just cried,” she told a reporter. She buried her son’s bones, but isn’t sure if the grave is still there, now that the forest company planted its trees.
These are among the charges contained in a civil suit filed by 1,489 Mubende claimants in the High Court of Uganda at Nakawa. A report by the British group Oxfam corroborates the claims. The New York Times and other media outlets reported the story.
New Forests Company, the London-based carbon credit seller, denies the claims and says the settlers living in its leased land in the Namwasa and Luwunga Forest Reserves were illegally trespassing transients, who left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner. In 2005, the Government of Uganda had granted NFC a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests – non-native, water-hungry, invasive species – in three districts of one of the world’s poorest nations, which desperately needs the fees and taxes.
NFC has attracted investment from international banks and private equity funds since 2008. The European Investment Bank (EIB), the EU’s financing institution, has loaned NFC five million Euros ($6.5 million) to expand one of its Ugandan plantations. Oxfam assessed NFC with puzzlement:
It has economic power, professional expertise, and close political support. It has a hands-on chief executive with local knowledge and ethical credentials. The company and its investors have clear environmental and social standards they commit to uphold, and corporate social responsibility and accountability principles are embedded at the heart of its operations. Given all this, how is it possible that thousands of people in affected communities have alleged that land clearances, which have taken place to make way for NFC’s operations in Uganda, have been accompanied by distress and violence, and have left many in a state of poverty?
NFC posted its response to Oxfam, arguing that the encroachers were “illegally occupying land leased to an independent third party, NFC.” It relies upon an “extensive and exhaustive government-driven authentication process,” which it says confirmed that only 31 families on the Namwasa Reserve, and none in the Luwunga Reserve, had legal rights to remain on the land. It insists that it is respecting the rights of these families and that dealing with “illegal” settlers is solely at the discretion of the NFC, which regards the thousands of others who were living on the land as “illegal encroachers” who did not have a legitimate claim to compensation.
NFC maintains that the evictions were legal, within the letter of the law. However, the villagers had won a temporary injunction in 2009, ordering the evictions stopped, though they were given a deadline to vacate company premises under police surveillance. The deadline was February 28, 2010, and NFC enforced it immediately. The horrifying events of that day became part of court filings seeking compensation.
New Forests operates projects in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and Rwanda, where its combined deals total around 222,000 acres. In its defense, it said it runs education, health and income-generating programs with local communities. In Uganda, it says, it has built school rooms, health clinics, wells and latrines, and runs literacy programs, while out-sourcing some tasks to local businesses.
I asked my young Ugandan friend, Steven Lyasi, to see what he could find out locally. He sent a mountain of news clips showing that New Forests Company enjoys an excellent reputation with the national government, in media and environmental circles, and is backed by deep-pocket investors, including the World Bank. It wants to tap an emerging multi-billion-dollar market trading carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol and its successors. Some of Al Gore’s millions came from that Enron-like paper “market.” The company says it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.
The Uganda Government issued a rebuttal of the Oxfam report, Clarification by Govt of Uganda Regarding the Case Study by OXFAM.
All this is legal, but is it right? Absolutely not, says a growing body of professionals who blame corrupt climate science, avaricious profit seekers, and a soul-less, pitiless bureaucratic machine.
British geographer David Harvey calls the process “accumulation by dispossession,” the result of a Kyoto Protocol program called the “Clean Development Mechanism.” The so-called CDM provides for emissions reduction projects that generate “Certified Emission Reduction” units (CERs), which may be marketed in government-approved emission trading schemes – based on the increasingly dubious assumption that CO2 causes runaway global warming. The CDM legalizes the purchase of CERs by industrialized countries and allows companies to invest in emission reduction projects that are cheapest globally.
But they are cheapest only for the investors and their operations. For the people who live on the land they covet, the price is everything they own and possess. In the private sector this would be called a Ponzi scheme. In government circles it’s called saving the planet. The new critics call it “Green Grabbing.”
This hideous new imperialism has become a global ignominy that thankfully is now being tracked by professionals, who evaluated it last year in the British peer-reviewed Journal of Peasant Studies.
A special issue — “Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature?” — revealed some of the forces behind Green land grabs like those in Uganda. “Things Green have become big business.” They require “the construction and perpetuation of a sense of crisis,” the analysts explain. “There would be no carbon trading without the science-policy discourses that have discerned global warming.”
As the New York Times reported, “Development experts say there is a dark side to some ostensibly ‘Green’ market initiatives: the appropriation of resources for biofuels production, carbon offsets, eco-tourism and so on can have devastating consequences for local people.”
Melissa Leach, director of Britain’s Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability Center, is one of the three authors of the special issue. She wrote “Green grabbing: the dark side of a green economy,” posted by the Green Economy Coalition. “We are seeing a new kind of colonization,” said Leach. “Small farms and villages that have thrived alongside nature are being replaced by a landscape of grabbed concessions, while people, if they have any rights at all, are being reduced to laborers in ecosystems in which they no longer have any stake.” Or any rights to justice or due process.
She points out how this vulture environmentalism is victimizing developing countries: “Green grabbing involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances. Pension funds and venture capitalists, commodity traders and consultants, GIS service providers and business entrepreneurs, eco-tourism companies and the military, Green activists and anxious consumers, among others, find once unlikely common interests.”
Green grabbing is simple greed – rabid, self-righteous Green greed. Where’s the justice in that, and why is it immune to the rigid regulation that governments force upon industry and common stock traders? What happened to the environmental credo of making industries pay for all the costs they impose on others?
And, yes, Leach said even the military. In Guatemala, she noted, the government has authorized turning the Maya Biosphere Reserve into a “Maya-themed vacation land,” which, she wrote, “will generate eco-tourism profits, while conveniently assisting the government’s war on drugs and counter-insurgency. In the process, people are being violently excluded.”
I have been to Tikal, where Guatemalan soldiers stopped our expedition bus at the entrance gate, to interrogate each visitor – and sell us little US$10.00 English-language tourist guides, which everyone was prudent enough to purchase.
So not all Green grabbing is about “global warming control” – just enough to highlight the perfidy of the whole concept. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed steadily for the past 17 years, but planetary temperatures did not budge. That is sending carbon traders into full panic mode. Billions in paper climate credit fortunes stand to evaporate like Enron stock shares, if the CO2-temperature disconnect continues.
So we get panicky movies, like the current flop “Greedy Lying Bastards,” diverting attention from inconvenient facts and attacking climate change “deniers.” Well, who are the real greedy lying bastards?
I nominate the Greedy Green Land Grabbers.
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Examiner columnist Ron Arnold is Executive Vice President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Portions of this article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner and are used by permission.
Once again it is shown the cure for global warming is worse than the disease.
James H. Rust, Professor
Yes, that is right, Mr. James H. Rust – but that is not to stop the ideological and philosophical doctrines of environmentalism and democracy from attacking various societies, cultures and economies around the world. BE WARNED as always. – J.P.K.
Again, as I correct my typo today, you said that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease – but, that is not enough to stop the dubiously ideological and philosophical doctrines of environmentalism and democracy from attacking various societies and economies around the world. BE WARNED as always.
And another thing, you have to be honest with what I know about the current reality on the ground. It is as depressing as activist ideologues thought that the kind of politics are different. I personally oppose the way how democracy is mistakenly benefiting various societies and economies around the world. Would they feel shamed of themselves for aggravating the situation?
I am still not going to give up on what I stand for: good, tried-and-tested traditional values and customs, rejoicing the good ones while recognising the bad, respecting and improving the genuine role of traditional institutions (including the institution of monarchy), protecting the environment while improving society and economy, maintaining and upholding political stability, and many more.
Remember that: depressive politics is still a bane to people like me. It deserves to be challenged much more vigorously to ensure stability, integrity, decency, honesty, and, above all, respect.
Thank you very much. – J.P.K.
The worldwide deadly disease is called: green huggers.
Many are infected like Barry Obama Soebarkah and his dream team, other CO2 swindlers, Al Gore, IPCC´s Pachauri, etc., etc.
Yes, and I find the situation more depressing when activists’ demagogic agendas are a big concern, right now. Environmentalism is actually still a bane to both humans and the environment – and the justifications of a philosophical and ideological doctrine continue elude reality.
I am also concerned about the political-shell-game sort of system of governance known as democracy that makes a terrible mistake whenever the situation happens.
I hope both of these dubious doctrines will be challenged vigorously, because they could have a negative effect on various societies and economies around the world. – J.P.K.
P.S.: Please look more closely at the ideologically-motivated environmentalist “land grab” that recently took place in Uganda. I am still wondering why was it happening there because of the justification of environmentalism? Anyway, thanks very much.
The only thing “green” about the new Eco-fascism is the money changing hands.
Corporate Ethnic Cleansing !
http://nollyprott.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/the-corporate-nazi-arch-plan-for-the-uk-agenda-21/
this is beyond shameful, it is wicked, but just a symptom of satanic rule getting desperate due to his short period of time (he has been cast out of heaven) and he know his time is short before he is abyssed. he has to corrupt as many as he can. he has to use people’s sinful natures against them to get them to do his dirty work, how do you think he gets people to massacre people like stalin did or lenin, or mao, or military adventures into other nations under some guise (_____just fill in the blank) you have to break down a persons natural conscious in order to get to do horrible things, you know justify it in the minds of your lackeys so they will do harm thinking they are doing good.
An entire village wiped out on a false premise. Way to go, Gore worshipers.
It is important for people like me to keep an unobstructed eye on the ideological and philosophical doctrine of environmentalism. It is time to take action once more. – J.P.K.
Rome Made the Sahara Desert from a Huge Forest once there, Exactly the way the United Nation Socialist intend to do now with REDD+ !!
Global Warming Third Party enforcement over Forestry in other Countries will Guarantee their destruction.
Florida State Forestry useing tried and true Principles to maintain our Florida Forest by Controlled Burning in Wet season. Global warmers will prevent this.
Controlled burning burns the under brush during Wet season producing a small heat around the base of these trees which kills off parasites and builds a better Wood product.
Control burning cuts down on future Forest fires by Denying that forest of Under Brush that will catch the tops of the tree on fire in Dry season Burning the Entire Forest down !
Controlled Burning is necessary during Wet season to drive rodents away from the land that strip all the seeds out of Pine Combs ! Pine Cones that only open when heat of a small brush fire is present and Seed growing another tree. Forest Do not Reproduce with out these Controlled Burning Fires during Wet season because their is no water present during Dry season for the seeding to survive.
THE UNITED NATION’S THIRD PARTY REDD+ Approach to forestry will be totally devoid of any valid of any real tried and true forestry like Florida Forestry because their Demented View is that CO2 Necessary to all botany growth is EVIL !!
Letting the United Nation Socialism Control our Local Forest around the world will be a world DISASTER OF EPIC PROPORTION Because of the UN’s Ignorance of the Obvious reasons I have mentioned here !!
REDD+ Plans of an Historical idiot !!
Redd+ Has been done before in south america ! Taking investment in forest away from the host country and their own Banking system only guarantees DEFORESTATION !!
Again these are rules made up by Idiot Communist that aren’t aware of history on this subject ! and islamic are the most ignorant seeing that their Firteral crescent is now a desert.
Craig this is exactly what Rome did with the Corinthian Forest they under Roman rule burned all of north Africa’s Forest to heat their roman bath’s !! Then when all the trees were gone the used up all the nitrogen in the soil for raising wheat tell that land became the Sahara desert !!
Third party ownership of these forest will only burn them down to make Charcoal in South America ! And you will not be able from the United Nations be able to stop them ! Moneys reaped from these Forest must be made by the local people to maintain them for their prophet only or you create a third party situation causing of Poverty that causes Deforestation !!
REDD+ is particularly troublesome to indigenous and local townspeople who often find their land transferred to the control of government, or Green NGOs, for the purpose of fulfilling these carbon transfer arrangements.