Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Upsetting the Offset
The workers have had accidents and health problems, and there have even been
cases of deaths.
Also, the new usage of the Cerrado has contributed to a crisis in the local
economy, which is based on products from that native vegetation. Various food
factories in Curvelo closed down due to lack of raw material, increasing the
already high unemployment in the area.
Despite all of these practices, the company received FSC (Forest
Stewardship Council) certification in 1998, but only for 4.8% of its land with
eucalyptus plantations. This was sufficient for Plantar to sell the so-called
‘carbon credits’. The certification enabled Plantar to submit a project to the PCF
in which they stated they could help to stop climate change through the
‘sustainable’ plantation of eucalyptus trees. As a result, the Plantar Project
started in 2000, ignoring all the ill practices listed above.
In March of 2003 representatives of citizen movements, churches,
parliamentarians, city councilors and citizens of the state of Minas Gerais and its
neighbor states, Espirito Santo, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, sent a letter to the
PCF directors stating their concerns over the expansion of large-scale
monoculture eucalyptus plantations, which has caused a series of negative social,
economic, environmental and cultural impacts. In April of that same year the
company also sent a letter to the PCF refuting the concerns of the population
by stating they had ‘lack of knowledge’. The company then invited the main
NGOs engaged in the campaign against the Plantar Project, FASE 11 and WRM,
to a meeting at their office. The NGOs representatives stated they wanted to
meet at the eucalyptus plantations, but this was denied by the company’s
sustainable development manager who alleged lack of time for that.
Given the situation, FASE and WRM turned down the company’s invitation
and visited the area to meet with local people. Here we reproduce their
testimony on the visit:
The overall impact of the company’s operations were summarized by a local
woman who simply said: ‘Plantar finished with all we had.’ The meaning of that
was made very clear to us by the local people that showed us around the area.
Within the plantations, the only thing green were the eucalyptus saplings and
trees. The rest was brown, resulting from the widespread application of the
herbicide glyphosate (Round-up). The water had either dried up or had been
contaminated with agrochemicals, thus depriving local people with the fish they
used to catch and eat. Local fauna – which constituted an important element for
people’s livelihoods – had also disappeared, making the ‘hunting and fishing
prohibited’ sign posts a mockery. Hunt and fish what – said an angry local man –
if the company has killed everything? 12
Conclusions
Climate change is one of the main and most urgent issues we face. It has been at
the forefront of the concerns of environmentalists and activists since at least the
1960s, but it was the Kyoto Protocol that finally gave visibility to it at a world
stage. Despite all the talk of ‘sustainable development’ in the Kyoto Protocol, it
115