In Scramble for Land, Oxfam Says Ugandans Were Pushed Out - NYTimes.com
KICUCULA, Uganda — According to the company’s proposal to join a United Nations clean-air program, the settlers living in this area left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner.
People here remember it quite differently.
“I heard people being beaten, so I ran outside,” said Emmanuel Cyicyima, 33. “The houses were being burnt down.”
Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers.
...
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.
The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
In 2005, the Ugandan government granted New Forests a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests in three districts, and the company has applied to the United Nations to trade under the mechanism. The company expects that it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.
But there was just one problem: people were living on the land where the company wanted to plant trees. Indeed, they had been there a while.
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6 comments:
Someday this whole thing about AGW is going to be the first hit sitcom about insanity.
I feel sick. I never realised that the man-made global warming hoax would have these sorts of consequences. Greenies: friends of the 3rd world? I don't think so.
What a scandal. and this company is planting non indigenous tree species both of which are susceptible to wildfire.
Greenies have NEVER been friends of the 3rd world. They see the undeveloped countries as sources of people that need to be suppressed. No DDT kills people, but that's OK as it's a natural death. Biofuels are OK as they raise the cost of food and starve people to death, naturally. Wind and solar energy are so unreliable, 3rd world countries and villages could never develop and join the 21st century, but they will be not developing "naturally," as the Greenies want them to be dependent forever of unreliable "natural" energy. The Sun sets and the Wind dies.
Nope. Greenies hate people and particularly detest those who threaten their rarified, arrogant, mindless, uninformed faith in being better than everyone else while exhibiting a certain level of self-loathing for being stuck with being human. It's just a burden they have to bear.
I see from the article that Eucalyptus trees are being planted, are these not eh same trees that famously burn extremely well in the Australian Bush fires?
I guess that when burned, the company can then again sell new tree planting to the eligibles.
This has been going on in Brazil for 10 years. "Between 2000 and 2002, The Nature Conservancy set up a deal with three of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters: General Motors, Chevron and American Electric Power. (TNC seems to be particularly chummy with AEP, the biggest coal burner in the USA. AEP is also involved in TNC’s Noel Kempff project.) The companies handed over a total of US$18 million to TNC, to invest in forests and to offset their emissions... There are many people living in and around the reserves in Guaraqueçaba. TNC’s position on these people is clear. “The carbon idea is not really tangible to people in the community,” Miguel Calmon, the Nature Conservancy’s director of forests and climate in Latin America told Schapiro. “You can’t go into these private reserves. That land is not their land anyway. If you used to go [into the forest] from your house across the road, now you can’t. That land is already owned.”
http://www.redd-monitor.org/2009/11/06/injustice-on-the-carbon-frontier-in-guaraquecaba-brazil/
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