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

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 243‘The biggest problem ishow to secure food for thefamily. All our gardens,where we used to get food,have been taken over bythe park rangers’.Amina Gidongo,widow and mother ofseven children living in acave as a result of havingbeen evictedunhealthy, local villagers were suffering, and, as Trygve Refsdal, advisorto the Ugandan forest authorities, warned, Uganda was in dangerof being subjected to a ‘new form of colonialism’:Forest-planting in Uganda and other poor countries must, firstly,aim to meet the needs of the country and the local people, notthe needs of the “international community.” If these can be combined,it’s OK, but experience from similar initiatives show thatlocal interests, local needs, and traditional land rights are easilypushed aside, and that land confl icts arise when outside commercialinterests enter. 37Growing international criticism ultimately prevented Tree Farmsfrom claiming carbon credits for the project. But trees continued tobe planted. After lengthy negotiations, the Norwegian owners concededa little under 5 per cent of the land they had leased from thegovernment to local people, but locals complained that they were stillpaid badly and that most of the labour was not sourced locally.But perhaps the Tree Farms experience will lead to less exploitative arrangementsin the future.Sadly, the evidence suggests otherwise. The international carboneconomy has since played a big part in stimulating land grabs by privatedevelopers in Uganda’s state forests. In 2003, several officials ofthe Ugandan government, including not only former vice-presidentDr Specioza Kazimbwe but also officials familiar with the internationalclimate negotiations, received large concessions for land suitablefor afforestation and reforestation, while communities applyingfor concessions were left empty-handed and may be excluded fromaccess to the forests in the future.In addition, a carbon project of the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA)and The Netherlands’s FACE Foundation 38 to plant trees in a nationalpark has contributed to a raft of social and environmental problems.Not again!I’m afraid so. The idea sounded innocent enough: to plant mainly nativetrees in encroached-upon areas inside and along the 211-kilometrelongboundary of Mount Elgon national park near the Kenyan border.In 1994, FACE undertook planting of 25,000 hectares and in returnwas given rights over the carbon supposedly sequestered – expected toamount to 2.11 million tonnes of CO 2 over 100 years. 39 UWA’s role wasto manage the plantations, protecting biodiversity, safeguard park bordersand so on. In 2002, certifiers for the Societé Générale de Surveillance(SGS) found that a bit over 7,000 hectares had been planted.