A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 229‘At an assembly thisengineer told us thatthousands of dollarswould enter the commune[for tree-planting]…thatafterwards we were goingto have sources of worktill after the harvest, thatwe were going to collectwho knows how muchmoney. And the assemblysigned…you know,sometimes we countrypeople, we don’t know, wefall for it naively.’SigSig community memberScholar Veronica Vidal found not only that the soils in PROFAFORplantations are releasing more carbon than the firm takes account of,but also that the pine plantations are capable of absorbing less carbonthan the firm claims. She concluded that the net carbon balance inPROFAFOR plantations may well be negative: ‘We are facing a loselosesituation, in which those who most lose are the future generationsthat will have to face the problems of climate change.’ 12But according to PROFAFOR, local soils have been ‘degraded by extensiveuse’, and planting pine and eucalyptus in the paramo will restore them andprevent erosion.Although some of the sites used by PROFAFOR, situated betweenroughly 3,200 and 4,800 metres, have been used for grazing, theyhave not usually been cultivated, due to their remoteness and theharsh climate. The idea that the soils on these sites, which still fulfiltheir original functions, are being degraded in any way that pineplantations could remedy is simply false. As for erosion, it is the pineplantations and their firebreaks themselves that are likely to create thegreater problem.Wait, I’m getting confused here. PROFAFOR says that this environment isin bad shape. Following the Spanish conquest, many indigenous peoples hadto retreat to high altitudes because Hispanic and mestizo communities werespreading out in the inter-Andean valleys and the Spaniards were taking overland for large estates or private ranches. The land reform laws of 1964 and 1973helped intensify the exploitation of the paramo even further by transferringhigher, less productive areas of hacienda lands to indigenous peoples. Today,agriculture is being practised up to 3,900 metres, and cattle-raising up to 4,500metres. 13 On its plantation sites, PROFAFOR says, the land is so degradedthat farming is just ‘not profi table and the land is not suitable for subsistenceactivities’. 14 In this context, surely pine trees will be both an ecological and aneconomic improvement, no? And a way, as PROFAFOR puts it, of ‘takingadvantage of land that is not being used and that could generate income to thelocal economy’?Confusion is only to be expected in a situation like this, in whichPROFAFOR is saying one thing (largely to an international audience)and local people are saying another thing (largely to themselves).But it’s useful to remember that there’s a long global history to thekind of claim that PROFAFOR is making, that a certain set of commonlands are ‘waste’, ‘degraded’ or ‘unused’, and are idly waiting tobe brought into the commodity market before they can become ‘productive’.It’s a claim that was used in the Americas during the colonialera to seize indigenous peoples’ cropland and hunting and gathering