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

262 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradinga 65-year-old resident of nearby Babboor village, RK Powergen isresponsible for serious deforestation. ‘First, the plant cut the trees ofour area and now they are destroying the forests of Chikmangalur,Shimoga, Mysore and other places. They pay 550 rupees per tonne ofwood, which they source using contractors. The contractors, in turn,source wood from all over the state.’ Another villager claimed that‘poor people find it difficult to get wood for cooking and other purposes’.Jobs promised by the firm, Tepaswami complains, were givento outsiders.Meanwhile, employees at the Karnataka Power Transmission Corporationclaim that its ‘equipment is adversely affected due to the fac tory’spollution’, while local villagers complain of reduced crop yields andplunging groundwater levels. Project managers deny the allegations. ‘Ifthere is deforestation’, said plant manager Amit Gupta, ‘then local peopleare to be blamed because they are supplying the wood to us’. 77Biomass projects have generally not been designed to benefit the agriculturalsector or increase farmer incomes, and money from sale ofcrop residues or the produce of energy plantations on wastelands donot accrue to landless households. Nor do biogas projects necessarilybenefit rural residents. The Bagepalli CDM Biogas Programmeproposed for Kolan district of Karnataka state is to set up 5500 twocubic-metrebiogas digesters for households that have an average oftwo cattle each or more. That excludes the ordinary rural poor, who,on average, own fewer livestock. 78What about plantation projects and other forestry ‘sink’ projects? Are they alsorunning into trouble?Carbon forestry projects made a late start in the CDM market becausethey are so controversial. The necessary legal framework, laid out inthe Marrakesh accords of 2001, was agreed only in late 2005 at the Montreal climate negotiations. So there is little concrete to point to yet.But carbon forestry is definitely on the cards for India. The WorldBank, forestry and other private sector interests, academics and thegovernment are all busy laying plans and calculating wildly differentfigures for the carbon credits India could get from trees. 79 In 2003,the Indian pulp and paper lobby issued a blueprint for ‘Re-GreeningIndia’ as part of its longstanding campaign to be allowed to lease‘degraded’ forest land on which to grow industrial plantations. Thepossibility of the plantations earning carbon credits was discussed indetail. 80 A National Environment Policy Draft circulated by the Ministryof Environment and Forests (MoEF) in 2004 meanwhile confirmsa new, ‘liberalised’ environmental policy that promotes carbon‘Government fi gures showthat there are about 5crore (50 million) hectaresof “wasteland” in India,land which…now liesopen to exploitationthrough carbon forestryschemes. What the centralgovernment does notsay is that most of this“wasteland” belongs toAdivasis and other forestdependentcommunities,who will be the fi rst to loseout from the developmentof such schemes.’Madhya Pradesh activist‘Joint Forest Managementand Community ForestManagement are beingused as tools to excludethe Adivasis from theirsurvival sources, and arecompelling them to slipinto poverty and migratein search of work. Insteadof…recognising Adivasirights to the forest, thegovernment is seekingtheir eviction through allpossible means.’Local activist