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

234 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingpicking up only the costs of seedlings. The community has also hadto take responsibility for replanting, due to maladapted trees dying.Yet the 20 per cent of the funds that should have been disbursed to thecommunity three years after the contract was signed in 1998 have stillnot been received. And the plantation has to be maintained for nearly15 more years until harvest. To top it off, if the community decidesnot to continue carrying out PROFAFOR’s plantation work at thattime, it must hand over 30 per cent of the income from the sale of thetimber to the company.In a workshop conducted with SigSig residents, an attempt was made todraw up a balance, showing how much the community had gained andlost from its agreement with PROFAFOR, although much of what thecommunity put into the plantations cannot be satisfactorily quantified,such as the minga and the work of the community leaders. Calculationswere made for plotting, dibbling, firebreaks, right of way, replanting,seedlings, maintenance, management, training and so forth.The community concluded that, even without taking account of thevalue of the environmental liabilities the project has saddled local inhabitantswith, or the cost of the plantations for another 15 years interms of labour, inputs, insurance, security, tools, harvest and timbermarketing, its losses already amount to over usd 10,000.Isn’t there anything the community can do to save the situation?PROFAFOR has a lot of power in this context. Once a contract issigned, there isn’t much communities can do to modify it, even when,as in SigSig, the agreement with the company was signed by only 50community members when there were over 200 registered. 20PROFAFOR can even claim payment of compensation if its staff decidesthat a community has not fulfilled its obligations. This compensationcan amount to up to triple the original payments to the communities,or many tens of thousands of dollars (see Table 6, below).One villager reported: ‘When I told the engineer Franco Condoythat we wanted to undo this agreement, he told us: “You cannot ridyourselves of the agreement, the commune is mortgaged.”’According to Ecuadorian law, Condoy is wrong. Communal propertyof indigenous communities is not subject to mortgages or landtax. Mortgages can only be contracted with private estate and landholders,individuals or corporate bodies.‘We made an assessmentand…it was like a bucketof cold water. On doingour accounts, we realisedhow much money we haveput in, and the trees arestill small…Although wehave no money left…wehave to look for a wardento look after the plantsand pay him, we haveto prune, we have to putdown manure, all the careand then the harvest…weourselves have to fi nd a[timber] market… Howis that?! We are depletingour land, we are providinglabour, doing harvestingand also giving 30 per cent.’SigSig community member