ENVIRONMENT-LATAM: Logging Companies Moving into Central America

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 15 1996 (IPS) - Mahogany trees are being chopped down and hauled out of the Columbia River forest in the Toledo district on the border between Guatemala and Belize to the anger and dismay of local Mayans.

Toledo “is facing the threat of mass destruction of its environment. The jewel is about to be raped and turned into wasteland,” wrote one journalist from the Belize Times, who pointed out that the region was well on its way to becoming a major ecotourist attraction.

To add insult to injury, Atlantic Industries — the company carting away the majestic hardwood trees — is from neither Belize nor Guatemala, but faraway Malaysia.

But is this a unique situation.

Throughout the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico, foreign logging companies have begun to slowly, but surely, destroy the last rain forests of the middle Americas.

In Awas Tingni, an indigenous Sumo community in Nicaragua, near the Honduran border, the South Korean company Kum-Kyung has been granted permission to log 600,000 hectares of the Atlantic forest.

Just four years earlier, the Sumo successfully battled to cancel a similar logging contract awarded to Equipe Enterprise of Taiwan. The contract was canceled only after a major international outcry supported by expatriate Nicaraguans, including Bianca Jagger.

Asian companies, however, aren’t the only ones invading the region’s forests. In Costa Rica and the Honduras, the U.S. company Stone Container has been the target of numerous protests because of its logging plans.

Stone wanted to construct Central America’s largest wood chip mill in Punta Estrella, Costa Rica, which is located on the Golfo Dulce. The gulf and surrounding forest are an area of high biological diversity that serves as an ecological corridor between two national parks.

Protests forced Stone Container to cancel a preliminary agreement with the Honduran government that would have allowed the company to log some 10 million hectares of the Mosquitia forest in eastern Honduras.

A proposal by Wellington Hall, a North Carolina-based timber company, to expand logging operations in the same region of the Honduras was defeated when the ministry of defense joined conservationists in attacking the company’s plan.

Another U.S. company, Boise Cascade, signed lucrative agreements last year to log forests in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The firm will be working in Costa Grande, near the Pacific Coast resort of Acapulco.

Many of these companies have moved into the region because there is very little timber left in their home countries, where they have also faced major local protests.

For example, scientist project that forests in Sarawak, the home base of most major Malaysian timber companies, will be depleted by early in the next century as a result of logging operations, which produced 18 million cubic metres of timber in 1993 mostly from land belonging to 20 indigenous tribes.

And seven million of the 9.2 million hectares of forests in the neighbouring Malaysian state of Sabah had been felled by 1991. And environmentalists now fear the state will be deforested before the year 2000.

In the United States, Boise Cascade’s operations in the Pacific Northwest have been harried in recent years by thinning inventories, toughening environmental regulations, and dogged demonstrations,” according to John Ross of the Sierra Club.

Now, international logging companies are facing similar opposition from indigenous groups elsewhere in the Americas.

“This attack began in the year 1492 in the exploitation of our land. Now, the foreigners and people in high places are at it again by striking secret deals with foreign companies bent on destroying our forests,” said Mayan leader Basilio Ah at a recent public hearing in Belize.

Indigenous communities, however, have been thwarted in their fight by the difficulties they have trying to prove their historical links to the land under attack. And, even when they can establish these ties, many local governments do not recognise the links as legal ownership or title over the land.

“There is no evidence that leaders of the Maya tribes now living in southern Belize are from the ancient Maya tribes who once inhabited this country. Most of them are descended from immigrants who came to the country during or since the 19th century,” said Lou Nicolait, the managing director of the Belize Centre for Environmental Studies.

While the origins of the Sumo are arguably less disputable, they too have had to fight successive Nicaraguan governments for land rights. Today, they are they still waiting for President Violeta Chamorro’s administration to make good on its promise to recognise their claims.

But, the indigenous communities have begun to fight back with sophisticated new strategies bolstered by support from academics and environmentalists from the United States.

Recently, the Sumo used electronic geographic positioning equipment donated by the World Wildlife Fund to plot their forest land with the aid of computer programmers at Harvard University.

In Belize, two workshops were held in July to teach representatives of 41 Mayan villages mapping skills and interviewing techniques to document traditional agricultural, fishing and hunting practices.

The data were brought to the University of California at Berkeley last month, where it was compiled into a regional atlas. “This is the first time anywhere in the world that an indigenous peoples have made their own atlas,” said Bernard Nietschmann, a professor of geography at Berkeley.

Whether or not the maps, which also are being made in Honduras, will make a difference in the struggle to save the forests remains to be seen, but at least it will provide indigenous communities with a basis to argue their cases.

Meanwhile, at the urging of indigenous groups, including the Toledo Mayan Cultural Council, Rainforest Action Network, the Natural Resources Defence Council and other U.S.-based environmental groups have been preparing action alerts to rally members to protest the logging concessions in Belize.