Low Carbon Develop-ment is about the ‘air we breathe,’ falsely camouflaged as an issue about carbon and green development.
Tom Goldtooth, Execu-tive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network has made the following complaint. “What’s happening is that in this whole market system is that it’s put a market value on traditional people and traditional teachings. Those things that we hold sacred to our people. This is evil at its worst. They’re trading air that is sacred. We’re looking at some spiritually profound values that people of industrial society really have a difficult time grasping. So when we talk about commodities – whether it’s the sacredness of trees, and especially air now – is in order to trade CO2, in order to trade greenhouse gases – this is air – is they have to define it as a property. It’s a property. Someone has to own the air in order to trade it. Very fundamental. So, the question is: who owns the air then?”
Yes indeed. Someone has to own the air we breathe in order to trade it as a property. This is a very dangerous global precedent that will lead to scarcity, wars, civil conflicts and the burning down of forests as a new form of terrorism. Once we move down this slippery slope of making air a property, then water will be the next property to be owned and traded as a global commodity. Countries from which the source of water begins, will claim they own the water passing through other countries. This is already happening in Africa.
But let us return to the ‘privatization of global air’ by the re-colonization minded developed world. Having destroyed the atmosphere, and having threatened life on Mother Earth, these countries are proposing a new re-colonization scheme through a high-tech lynching financial technique call Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). The United Nations is protecting its masters.
Eight tropical countries contain 80% of the world’s remaining forest cover. They call themselves the Forestry Eight. Guyana is not one of them.
As a matter of fact, the countries with the largest forests in numerical size are Brazil, Congo (Zaire), Peru, Indonesia, Colombia, Papua New Guinea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico, Suriname and then Guyana. Guyana’s Merchant Banker friends at McKinsey & Company are making the argument Guyana should be paid US$580M per year for its forests. This payment will be forever and ever. If this is true, then what will the world have to pay? Brazil has 1.3 million square miles of forest. Guyana has about 60,000 square miles. This means Brazil should receive twenty-one-and-a- half times what Guyana receives from the West, or approximately US$15.53B per year forever and ever.
Brazil has rejected this proposal. Instead, Brazil favours a different approach, outlined at the last climate change talks in Poland. Brazil plans to establish a voluntary fund into which developed countries, companies, and other entities pay to reduce emissions from deforestation. With complete control over how the funds are spent and no allocation of conventional carbon credits to contributors, this strategy maintains Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon and gives it an unprecedented financial incentive to preserve the region’s forest cover. What Brazil does is crucial, since it is home to more than 60 per cent of the Amazon and accounts for nearly half of global tropical forest loss annually.
Guyana’s role in this global re-colonization process is to create a price point (US$580M per year) which will then be used to create a market for the owning and selling of the air we breathe. What is more frightening is that private companies and not governments will be responsible for the trading of carbon credits. Madoff and Stanford will look like angels. President Jagdeo talks about preserving Guyana’s sovereignty, but why didn’t Guyana join Brazil in a joint strategy with the Forestry Eight group of countries to control their own economic destiny and sovereignty?
Once the re-colonization of air (and therefore the developing world) is completed, the developed world will effectively have colonized ‘water,’ which is the source of life and a very scarce commodity that developing countries do not have. If Brazil were to be trapped in REDD or LCDS, its 15% of the world’s fresh water would be captive to monitoring and foreign control.
Finally, President Jagdeo needs to be more transparent about the Trojan horse private deal that currently exists in Guyana’s forests. In March 2008, a private equity firm, Canopy Capital, purchased the rights to environmental services generated by a 1,432-square-mile rain forest reserve in Guyana. Canopy’s website states “Canopy Capital has created an investment template for first-movers in an emerging market for Ecosystem Services. These include rainfall generation, moderation of extreme weather, carbon storage and biodiversity maintenance.”
I wonder what rainfall generation is. It seems we now have new gods! According to Tom Griffith of the Forest Peoples Programme, Canopy Capital and its legal advisers have admitted that the deal was not adequately discussed with the implicated communities but just discussed and agreed with the Board of Iwokrama, which has one community representative.
However, he says, the community of Fairview that has titled lands within the reserve was not consulted directly and communities that use the reserve and have never surrendered their ancestral ownership over the area were not directly involved.
Asked about why the deal had been shrouded in secrecy, Canopy Capital and Iwokrama advise that for reasons of “commercial confidentiality” it was not possible to broadcast the issue before the deal was done and for this reason also the agreement remains confidential.
President Jagdeo states Guyana does not have to give up any of its sovereignty with his LCDS approach. Yet, the IMF has held Guyana’s sovereignty for decades. Who is he kidding?
Now he is playing three-card monte with our sovereignty in a new move by the West to re-colonize those countries that have precious forests. Oil has been replaced by air. Soon it will be water.
Yours faithfully,
Eric Phillips
