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

266 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingconsultation and has resulted in the marginalisation, displacement andviolation of the customary and traditional rights of the Adivasis in thestate. 90 Many state governments implemented JFM programmes ondisputed lands. Many Adivasis have lost land and access to essentialforest goods.Current problems with JFM in Madhya Pradesh, according to manylocal people and activists, include:• Confl icts within communities as a result of economic disparitiesbetween VFPC members and non-members.• Confl icts between Adivasi groups and other communities generatedby the imposition of VFPC boundaries without reference tocustomary village boundaries.• Curtailment of nistar rights (customary rights to local natural goods).• Confl icts over bans on grazing in the forest and on collecting timberfor individual household use.• Indiscriminate fining.According to some Harda activists, JFM has opened deeper rifts withinand between Adivasi villages and between different Adivasi groups,and has engendered confl ict between communities and the Forest Department.Although funding for the local JFM scheme is now exhausted,VFPCs are still in place in many villages, recouping salaries fromthe interest remaining in their JFM accounts and from fines imposedon members of their own and neighbouring communities. Communitiesinterviewed also claim that VFPC financial dealings are nottransparent. In July 2004, non-VFPC villagers in Harda reported thatthey would like to see funding of VFPCs stopped and, ultimately, thecommittees disbanded. They also wanted to see forest management returnedto them and their rights to their traditional lands and resourcesrestored. 92 In the words of anthropologist K. Sivaramarkishnan, ‘whenenvironmental protection is to be accomplished through the exclusionof certain people from the use of a resource, it will follow existing patternsof power and stratification in society’. 93So maybe these embattled village forest protection committees are not the idealbodies to carry out CDM carbon projects.That would be an understatement. CFI’s proposal that, in order toreduce transaction costs, a federation of VFPCs ought to be createdin the Handia range to carry out a pilot carbon offset project is alsoquestionable. So, too, is CFI’s suggestion that the Forest Departmentshould adjudicate cases of confl ict there, a proposal that many communityresidents would find unacceptable.Fieldwork on the involvementof the Chhattisgarh and WestBengal sponge iron industry incarbon trading, as well as onenergy, forestry and climatechange in India, was carriedout in 2006 by SoumitraGhosh of the NGO Nesponand the National Forum ofForest Peoples and ForestWorkers (NFFPFW) (above)in collaboration with HadidaYasmin and Arindam Das ofNespon, Devjeet Nandi ofNFFPFW (see next page)and Nabo Dutta of NagarikMancha.Fieldwork on the likelyconsequences of carbonforestry in India wasundertaken by Emily Caruso(right) of the Forest PeoplesProgramme in collaborationwith Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy(left), Yakshi Shramik, AdivasiSangathan and local activistsin July 2004.