Saving rainforests needs both property rights and payments
FORESTS lock up a lot of carbon. Cutting them down accounts for around 20% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. On paper, halting deforestation should be the simplest way to cut emissions. Achieving a similar reduction by building wind turbines or nuclear-power stations, or by mandating more fuel-efficient cars and buildings, would take years and cost billions. In practice, however, halting deforestation is hard: much of the world’s rainforest has already succumbed to loggers and farmers. That is because it is difficult to align the interests of people who live in forests (now 20m in the Brazilian Amazon) with those of the rest of humanity.
The best way of doing so involves a mixture of two ideas: establishing clear property rights over land and paying its owners not to cut down trees. If these policies are to work anywhere, it will be in Brazil, which possesses 60% of the world’s greatest tropical forest. Brazil has powerful motives for preserving the Amazon. Deforestation does terrible damage to the reputation of a country that is a pioneer in renewable energy. It also puts at risk the Amazon rain factory that enables Brazil to be one of the world’s biggest agricultural exporters.
Brazil now has a sophisticated system for monitoring deforestation from satellites and aeroplanes. It has set aside some 40% of the Amazon as national parks or Indian reserves. It has laws that restrict deforestation in the rest. The problem is enforcing those laws over a vast area where many of the inhabitants dislike the rules (see article). The first step is a proper land registry to confirm who owns what. Some 15-25% of the Amazon is private property, which is supposed to be kept 80% forested (though often is not). Most of the rest is nominally federal land, but in practice is up for grabs: title deeds are forged, people are killed and deforestation accelerates because of competing claims. Some farmers even clear trees as a way to solidify land claims: fines from Brazil’s environmental agency can create a paper trail that acts as proof of ownership.
A law approved this month by Brazil’s Congress aspires to end this mess—but at a price. It would grant title to all landholdings up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) occupied before 2005 in the Amazon, comprising an area the size of France, and ban further land claims. The law entrenches injustice: it risks rewarding people who used violence to obtain land, including large landholders who occupy almost 90% of the area under discussion. Brazilian greens want to limit the measure to smaller plots, and to ban their resale for ten years.
Yet that risks defeating the object. Better for the government to complement this attempt to end battles over privately owned land with a decision to take the rest of the Amazon into public ownership, as parks or reserves. Countries with rainforests also need to have due regard for their preservation and for the Indians who live in them when allowing mining and oil exploration. The lack of such procedures was behind a bloody clash in Peru this month (see article).
Lay down that axe and you will get cash
At the moment it makes economic sense to cut down trees: those who do so can sell the timber and turn the land into farms or ranches. So the second idea for saving forests lies in changing economic incentives by paying people not to chop down trees—an idea known in the ghastly jargon of climate-change diplomacy as “reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation” (REDD). Since many rich countries felled their forests as they developed it seems fair that they should pay some of the cost of this.
There are difficulties, though. One is that “avoided deforestation” is hard to define and quantify. Another, raised by officials in Europe who have chosen not to include REDD in the European carbon-trading scheme, is that the carbon market would be flooded with deforestation credits that will push down the price. Companies would then buy cheap credits and continue doing business as usual rather than cutting their own emissions. Further tricky issues abound: who should have the right to sell credits? How should the money be split between central governments, local governments and indigenous people? And should the money be paid in perpetuity?
REDD schemes will require careful monitoring to ensure that forests really are left intact and that carbon credits for an area are not claimed more than once. Murky goings-on in Papua New Guinea, one of the leading advocates of REDD, highlight such worries (see article).
Even so, it is worth trying, simply because avoiding deforestation is so effective in slowing carbon emissions. So REDD deserves a place in the world climate treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December, to replace the Kyoto treaty when it expires in 2012. As with other forms of carbon credit, today’s voluntary and experimental REDD schemes will need to be replaced by more rigorously accredited and monitored schemes. But they have a chance of working only if the countries in which they operate define forest land rights clearly. Brazil’s flawed attempt to do this is a step forward.
HIDDEN behind a row of trees and a rusted barbed-wire fence on a rutted dirt road in the Ecuadorean jungle, Shushufindi 61, a pit in which oil waste is dumped, is hardly a beauty spot. But it has attracted a string of visitors ranging from Hollywood actresses to Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, and managers from Chevron, an American oil company. It is one of several hundred such pits that are at the centre of a long-running legal wrangle between Ecuadorean and American activists and Chevron. For the activists, the case shows that oil companies are nowadays held accountable for their actions in developing countries. For Chevron’s supporters, the case amounts to an attempt at judicial extortion that throws doubt on whether multinational oil companies can ever get a fair deal in parts of Latin America today.
At issue is waste dumped by Texaco (bought by Chevron in 2001) as long ago as the 1960s in the region around Lago Agrio in the Ecuadorean jungle. From 1977 onwards, Ecuador’s state-owned oil company (now called Petroecuador) took a 62.5% stake in the field, though Texaco continued to operate it. In 1992 Petroecuador took over the whole operation and Texaco withdrew from Ecuador.
In a suit first filed in a New York court in 1993, lawyers representing 30,000 people in the Lago Agrio area argued that billons of gallons of waste dumped by Texaco in several hundred pits such as Shushufindi 61 caused damage to human health as well as to the jungle. They also argued that the oil company should compensate Indian people for their forced displacement. American judges ruled three times that they had no jurisdiction over the matter.
But as a result of the publicity generated by the cases, Texaco agreed with the Ecuadorean government that it would clean up 161 pits, or its share of the total, at a cost of $40m. The work was done by 1998 and the government signed an agreement releasing Texaco from any further liability. Petroecuador was supposed to clean up the rest of the pits, but didn’t do so, partly because it continues to use some of them (including Shushufindi 61).
Meanwhile Ecuador enacted an environmental law, something it had previously lacked. This is not retroactive. Nevertheless the plaintiffs filed a claim against Chevron under this law in 2003 in a court in Lago Agrio. They sought $6 billion in damages. Last year a court-appointed expert, Ricardo Cabrera, filed a 4,000-page report arguing that Chevron was liable for no less than $27.3 billion in damages. Of this $9.5 billion is compensation for 1,400 deaths from cancers that he alleges were caused by the pollution; $8.4 billion is for “unjust enrichment”; the remainder is for environmental clean-up.
Chevron has filed a 9,000-page rebuttal of Mr Cabrera’s report. It disputes his fitness as an expert, arguing that he has little experience of the oil industry. It found evidence that he used the Amazon Defence Front, a group working for the plaintiffs, to collect soil samples from sites. Sections of his report repeat verbatim documents filed by the plaintiffs. Chevron also notes that in 2007 a California court dismissed as fabricated some individual claims that the pollution caused cancers; it fined one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers for this. As for “unjust enrichment”, a Chevron manager points out that Texaco’s total profits from its operations in Ecuador were only $497m, while over the 20 years to 1992 Ecuadorean governments received $25.3 billion in profits, taxes and royalties from the field.
The judge in Lago Agrio, Juan Nuñez, is expected to rule on the case later this year. He has made no secret of his sympathy for the plaintiffs. The lawsuit appears to have the backing of Mr Correa’s government. Last year it objected to the 1998 agreement with Texaco, arguing that since the company was the operator of the field it should have cleaned up all of the pits. The attorney-general charged seven former senior officials who had signed the agreement with fraud, as well as two Ecuadorean lawyers for Chevron.
Chevron has filed a claim in an international arbitration court in The Hague and has asked the American government to review Ecuador’s trade preferences. But it faces political pressure in the United States as well as in Ecuador. On May 4th Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney-general, sent a letter to Chevron requesting information on the case on behalf of the state’s pension funds, which have more than $1 billion invested in the company.
If the Ecuadorean courts rule against Chevron, the plaintiffs’ lawyers can be expected to file suit in the United States to collect the settlement. Since they are working on a contingency basis, they stand to gain a substantial portion of any damages.
Texaco may have benefited from Ecuador’s past lack of environmental standards. It is questionable whether any of the pits would have been cleaned up had it not been for the campaigners. But the lawsuit may now be preventing Chevron from helping Petroecuador to clean up the rest. Ecuadoreans were the main beneficiaries from the oil—although some of them suffered some damage from it. They will also be the most important victims if the Chevron case shows that the rule of law is the servant of politics in Ecuador.
It's A Jilla
Yep, you guessed it
I heard the beat and I just had to come and bless it
I've been well rested
Since my last verse
I hung the mic up
And thought the game needed a hearse
In 03 I retired my rhyme book
When rap dudes started changing up like sam cooke
A lotta blingin and singin
And a lotta negativity
But they forgot the creativity
Plus I was in school
Bush over Baghdad created new world rules
I switched from writing rap pages to pushing mag pages
A different type of publishing
And even thought about government
Figured out that was the wrong route
I graduated in two-thou-six and went all out
The corporate world is my scene
Infinite chase for the green
But is this what the King really dreamed?
I'm on my quarterlife biz
Dedicated to alluv my quarterlife kids
I'm on my quarterlife biz
Stay up nights thinkin, "is this all life gives?"
X2
Now I'm a New York kid
Walk the same streets all my favorite rappers did
Nasty Nas, Ghostface, Rae, and Deck
Digable Planets, gotta pay my respect
Cause they were rap pioneers to me
A down south boy wondering what big city life could be
But the apple is rotten
Some girls came on the train screamin
Saw an old man and rocked him
I mean, right in his face
He just wanted some peace after a long day in the rat race
And everyody who saw it, did nothing
That's what the city breeds, if it aint you - it's nothing
And I'm as guilty as them, homey
Even around eight million people how you still feel lonely?
This is the quarterlife biz
Dedicated to alluv my quarterlife kids
This is the quarterlife biz
Stay up nights thinkin, "is this all life gives?"
X2
So you think that a girlfriend can take you out the whirlwind
Or family can make a better man G
But you'll never be nothin without inner lovin
Always lesser like 3 vers a half-dozen
I still hear screams in my dreams
Know what I mean?
But ion't think it's depression
Just agression
My ambition crying out in exhaustion
Fighting off submission, anxiety, and caution
And I'm saying my prayers, too
Even though the road gets hard I'm still trying to be faithful
And just stay on my grind
So when it's time
I can say that I went for mine
I went for mine
So go for yours
Cause this is quarterlife biz
Dedicated to alluv my quarterlife kids
It's the quarterlife biz
Stay up nights thinkin, "is this all life gives?"
I'm on my quarterlife biz
Dedicated to alluv my quarterlife kids
I'm on my quarterlife biz
Stay up nights thinkin, "is this all life gives?"
Greenpeace’s undercover investigation into the Brazilian cattle industry has exposed the many convoluted steps in the complex global trade in leather and beef products from part-Brazilian-government-owned corporations Bertin, JBS and Marfrig. We have identified hundreds of ranches belonging to these companies that are within the Amazon rainforest and supplying cattle to slaughterhouses in the Amazon region. Where we were able to obtain mapped boundaries for ranches, satellite analysis reveals that significant supplies of cattle come from ranches active in recent and illegal deforestation. Trade data also reveal trade with ranches using modern-day slavery. Additionally, one Bertin slaughterhouse receives supplies of cattle from an illegal ranch occupying Indian Lands.
These slaughterhouses in the Amazon region ship their hides and beef to company facilities thousands of miles away in the south of Brazil for further processing before export. In a number of cases, additional processing takes place in import countries before the final product reaches the market. In effect, criminal or “dirty” supplies of cattle are being “laundered” through this supply chain to an unwitting global market.
The Brazilian government is bankrolling a massive expansion of the cattle industry in an attempt to dominate the global market for agricultural commodities, including cattle products. Brazil already maintains the largest commercial cattle herd in the world, and is the leading exporter of beef as well as the largest exporter of tanned leather (a title it shares with China). The total value of Brazil’s cattle trade in 2008 was nearly $7 billion, more than a quarter of which came from leather. One in every three tons of beef traded internationally comes from Brazil, and the country’s government forecasts that by 2018 almost two out of every three tons of beef will come from Brazil.
