The People Demand … the Execution of the Former Interior Minister.
Several thousand protesters rallied this afternoon in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, marching past several government ministries and returning to Tahrir without clashing with police.
The demonstration was meant to send a message to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that the continued brutality meted out by the police and military must be put to an end by the caretaker government and that political reforms must be implemented at more swift of a pace.
Egyptian flags were held aloft, as well as portraits of protesters killed during the uprising that began January 25th and led to the resignation of President Husni Mubarak, who ruled the country since 1981. Protesters marched toward the Ministry of Interior but turned back before reaching it in an effort to avoid a violent confrontation with security forces.
In this way, protesters also sought to send a signal to the broader Egyptian public. Following the pitched battles in the streets around Tahrir on Tuesday and Wednesday, Egyptian media outlets and a substantial portion of the Egyptian public have questioned the goals of these protesters. Are they counter-revolutionaries out to spoil the gains made since Mubarak’s resignation or riff-raff standing in the way of Egypt’s return to economic and political stability?
Avoiding a battle with the cops was meant to assuage these concerns and bring attention to the recent brutality of the government and police.
Not all of those present were so shy toward confrontation. Some protesters darted down a side street toward the Egyptian Parliament before being urged back by protest organizers and most of other demonstrators. Later, as the march doubled back toward Tahrir, protesters formed human chains blocking access to the same side streets. Meanwhile, chants went out: “The people want the execution of Habib,” in reference to Habib al Adly, the former Interior Minister who has been convicted on corruption charges but awaits trial for the killing of protesters during the January and February uprising.
Protesters will return to Tahrir next Friday for a march calling for the reclamation of the spirit of the January uprising and demand that SCAF make good on a transition to a civil government. While SCAF and other elites remain focused on scheduling elections for later this year and revitalizing Egypt’s floundering economy, the protesters in Tahrir seek to keep open the political space created during uprising.
Whether the uprising is, indeed, a revolution is still very much undecided. The numbers in Tahrir are far less than those of several months ago. And many Egyptians who supported the ouster of Mubarak’s are skeptical of continued protests. But the thousands in the street today maintain a buoyancy and purpose that will be difficult to quell — even when confronted by the remnants of Egypt’s brutal police and military apparatus.
Renewed Violence hits Cairo’s Tahrir Square
Major clashes broke out late last evening in Tahrir Square following several arrests and the beating of relatives of protesters killed during the January and February uprising that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Husni Mubarak.
These clashes signify a major escalation in the confrontation between Egyptians, who are growing tired at the slow pace of political reform and the prosecution of former regime officials, and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has been ruling the country since February 11th, when Mubarak stepped down.
Jack Shenker at the Guardian describes last night’s melee and juxtaposes the clashes with the dissolution of municipal councils throughout Egypt earlier in the day.
One person I spoke with this morning, with decades of experience in Egyptian social movements, thought that the relationship between the clashes and the dissolution of these councils is more than coincidental. They were the institutions from which the power of Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party emanated on the local level. That these local bosses were out of a job — and officially out of power — could very well have been the proximate cause of the attack on the martyrs’ families.
Here’s a video of the Tahrir clashes and a Nation piece that provides background on the grievances of the martyrs’ families. Egyptian blogger Gigi Ibrahim relates how the clashes began last night.
This morning, nearly fourteen hours after the riot broke out, tear gas continued to fill the air in Tahrir Square. Battles between police and demonstrators remained confined, for the most part, to a several block area southeast of Tahrir Square, where the American University of Cairo is located as well as the Interior Ministry.
As the front line of the battle ebbed and flowed from one block to the next, a steady stream of motorcycles and mopeds carried wounded protesters to ambulances parked in Tahrir.
I spoke with Dr. Mohammad Suttar, head of the ambulances services, who said that since the violence broke out last evening 95 people had been sent to the hospital with injuries. Another 600 were treated by ambulance crews and released. Injuries were primarily head wounds and suffocation from the use of tear gas. Dr. Suttar said that 23 ambulances were mobilized and parked at three locations around Tahrir. A staff of 59 was on hand to treat the injured.
Over the course of an hour and a half that I observed the ambulance and moped crews another two dozen injured were carried in, most of them arriving looking fatigued and overcome by gas. Several others though were bleeding from hands or heads, possibly from rocks or other projectiles.
Ninety-eight percent of those arriving at the ambulances were youths, most no more than in their late teens, several of them looking to be much younger. Most of them wore only crude, loose-fitting sandals, were shirtless and covered in dust from head to foot.
I spoke with one of the moped drivers, also covered in dust and looking fatigued, he told me that he’d been shuttling the injured to ambulances since 10:30 last night. I asked him how many injured had he transported. “A lot, a lot,” he responded and sped off, back toward the front line.
Several protesters retreating from the frontline carried remnants of the fight: tear gas canisters — clearly marked “MADE IN U.S.A.” — and shotgun shells. One youth displayed a metal pellet that looked to be from a shotgun slug.
Although the attire of the youths — meager foot-ware and tattered clothes — doesn’t necessary signify poverty, that the youth of lower classes might be the ones holding the streets and continuing to confront the security forces mirrors a larger dilemma of the Egyptian uprising. That is, that beyond electoral and constitutional reforms, many people — particularly among the poor and working classes— seek other, more substantial, forms of justice: economic and atonement for the past crimes of Mubarak’s regime, such as for the deaths of loved-ones during the January and February protests.
Major mobilizations are scheduled for next week on Tuesday and Friday. There’s a good chance that one will be able to look back on the past 14 hours and view them as mearly the opening salvo in a renewal of violent, mass confrontation in the streets of Cairo and perhaps other cities. But if the ouster of Mubarak demonstrated anything it is that one shouldn’t make predictions about the future of Egypt.
… You say you want a con-sti-tu-tion.
A new poll released by the International Peace Institute sheds some light on the pulse of the public in Egypt.
What caught my attention was that concerns about the economy are growing as those of “democracy” are declining.
The verdict is — at least with this poll, but there have been others (see here and here) — what good are liberal notions of free speech, electoral choice, the existence of a vibrant media culture etc. when the neo-liberal policies that were orthodoxy under Sadat and Mubarak remain in place. Or, what good’s a constitution or a newspaper with dissident commentators, if you ain’t got a job and enough money to feed the family.
A gloss of several economic, labor, and poverty statistics in Egypt bears out the why of this emphasis on the economy.
Food prices continue to rise, up nearly 19% this year compared to last, with key staples such as vegetables and bread rising 39% and 33%, respectfully. The unemployment rate is officially 11.9%, among young people it is 25%, which is significant when 75% of the population is under the age of 35. Twenty-two percent of Egyptians live below the poverty line, another 20% hover just above it.
Meanwhile, the US and the EU have dangled loan guarantees before Egypt’s transitional government. So, too, has the G20, World Bank, and IMF. The Egyptian government has promised to boost wages and is projected to run a budget deficit of 9% this year. Its a setting that could produce a re-entrenchment of privatization and austerity. Or, if Egypt’s dynamic labor movement increases its push for wage increases and robust public sector participation in the economy, a setting for some serious re-distribution of wealth from the top to the bottom.
There’s several signs that they later could prevail. But the G20 nations and the Bretton Woods institutions still know a thing or two about coercion.
That IPI most likely didn’t query the 4.5 million or so poor who are packed tightly into the slums on the outskirts of Cairo, only adding weight to its conclusions.
Base material grievances undergirded the January revolt and will likely continue to provoke widespread anxiety. And they won’t be resolved by re-writing the constitution, which is not to say that the outcome of the elections or the juridical framework of the political system are not crucial concerns. Only that they elide the core matter of the economy.
But liberals like laws and constitutions, not analyses of power and institutions.
Egypt: An Opening
I arrived yesterday in Egypt, where I’ll be (thanks to a international reporting fellowship from Columbia University) for the next two months, studying Arabic several days a week and reporting on others.
While I’m here, I’ll do my best to post to this website frequent round-ups of news from the Egyptian and regional press; analysis of political and social issues; interviews with Egypt scholars, artists, and activists; and some dispatches from my excursions around Cairo and, hopefully, other parts of the country.
One of the stories I will be following is growing disagreement over the chronology of Egypt’s political reforms.
Since taking power in February, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has proposed holding parliamentary elections in September, followed by a presidential vote in November. Then a constituent assembly would be convened to draft a new constitution that would be put to voters in a referendum.
Yet, just this morning, Egypt’s interim Prime Minister Essam Sharaf voiced his support for delaying the parliamentary elections. He joins a growing — and increasingly vocal — segment of the Mubarak-opposition-come-political-mainstream calling for a delay in the parliamentary vote and instead write a constitution.
By front-loading the parliamentary elections, so the argument goes, SCAF has underestimated the obstacles that stand in the way of forming political parties after three decades of censorship and repression. The protest forces that coalesced around toppling Mubarak have not been able to ramp up their party apparatuses: develop coherent election platforms, communicate with potential voters, and build mechanisms for getting them to the polls.
Some liberal-secularists further point out that holding parliamentary elections sooner rather than later benefits the Muslim Brotherhood, which was able to field candidates in previous elections despite being banned by the Mubarak regime and has built strong political support through its robust network of religious, health care, and community centers. September elections could also benefit remnants of the National Democratic Party that might re-enter politics in the post-Mubarak era.
Yet given the extent to which Egypt’s economy has ground to a halt and the high expectations for political change that remain in the country, delaying the vote could backfire.
Before leaving the U.S. I spoke with Fadhel Kaboub, an economics professor at Denison College, who focuses on the Middle East and North Africa. He called this a classic chicken and egg problem: Does one support the drafting of a constitution, then the election of a parliament and a president or, conversely, the selection of representatives who then preside over constitutional reforms?
He pointed to Tunisia for comparison. Elections for an assembly that will re-write the country’s constitution were recently pushed back to October. In the meantime, officials on the local and provincial levels are often unwilling to carry out any reforms without go-ahead from the interim government on the national level. “Tunisia is paralyzed,” Kaboub says.
This might be a warning to Egypt’s political movements. Perhaps a more deliberate reflection on political reform, though, might allow space for them to consider the issue that seems to be the third rail of Egyptian politics — that is, shifting the country’s economic model away form the neo-liberal policies that spanned the Sadat and Mubarak regimes and towards one that addresses the country’s massive poverty and economic inequality.
Kaboub warns that Egypt might get a new constitution, “but if the old economic model remains in place then little will change.”
The Invention of Lying: Why do conservatives hate science?
June 3, 2011 - The American Prospect
Despite this spring’s ferocious weather, which scientists warn could become more commonplace as the planet warms, climate change denial is en vogue, particularly among congressional Republicans. They claim the science is unsettled, and seek deep cuts in programs that would research and prepare for climate-change.
The GOP’s current attacks on climate science, though, are part of a decades-long narrative that questions scientific authority. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and her co-author Erik M. Conway detail the right-wing’s history of obscuring connections between tobacco smoke and cancer, sulfur dioxide emissions and acid rain, and, currently, fossil fuels and climate change. The Prospect talked with Oreskes about the denial; why tornados, floods, and wildfires should come as little surprise; and how Cold War ideology continues to define political debates — even around climate change.
In your book, you trace the use of scientific doubt as a political strategy in blocking government regulation. What got you interested in the topic?
In the scientific community, you expect there to be a disagreement about scientific matters. If the scientific issues that are being debated require different expertise and different expert communities, then you would not expect the same faces to appear over and over again. When we realized that the same faces were appearing over and over again, whether with tobacco smoke or acid rain, that’s when we smelled a rat. That’s when we realized there’s something else going on other than normal scientific debate.
Chicago Protest Ups the Ante in Fight Against Big Coal
May 25, 2011 - The Nation
Kelly Mitchell’s adrenaline surged as she began her ascent up the 450-foot smoke stack at the Fisk coal-fired power plant in Chicago. Wearing a tight-fitting safety harness and loaded down with industrial climbing gear, Mitchell, along with seven other activists from Greenpeace, scaled the stack at the break of dawn on Tuesday in order to paint “Quit Coal” in bright yellow on the side of the towering structure.
Greenpeace coordinated this action — the most high profile anti-coal protest the group has orchestrated in the U.S. — to protest both the local problems associated with coal-fired power generation (air pollution that causes sickness and death) and its aggregate contributions to global warming as a leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.
While Greenpeace is demanding that Fisk and the nearby Crawford plant be shut down, it is also sending a message to other parts of the environmental and climate justice movements. In the wake of failed efforts to push Congress to pass comprehensive climate change legislation, many in the movement — not least, those perched atop the smoke stack at Fisk — argue it is time for more radical tactics.
REDD Alert: Is Indonesia’s program to stop deforestation suffering a meltdown?
Back in December, I wrote an article for Mother Jones about Indonesia’s efforts to reduce its levels of deforestation and, by extension, its greenhouse gas emissions, which are the third highest in the world, trailing only the U.S. and China. This endeavor is part of a U.N. scheme called REDD — Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation — that aims to funnel billions of dollars of rich country aid to developing ones, like Indonesia, Guyana, and Brazil, that cut down millions of acres of trees a year due to logging, oil palm and acacia plantations, and biofuels production. In exchange for aid, these countries ween their economies away from forest resource extraction.
By way of the small town of Sungai Tohor, which is located in Sumatra, I showed how Indonesia is at crossroads. On one hand, it is set to receive billions of dollars from Norway and the U.S., among other countries, in exchange for imposing a moratorium on the issuance of logging permits and setting up a system for monitoring, verifying, and reporting activities in its forestry sector. On the other hand, Indonesia’s government has been inextricably linked for decades to the logging industry and in more recent times palm oil and pulp/paper producers. Corruption is rampant. So, too, is illegal logging (although on the decline). How, I asked, could Indonesia turn all this around and go from being an enabler of forest destruction to a steward of the forests.
Since December, Indonesia has clearly not turned the corner on deforestation. Implementation of its REDD program has lagged, corruption continues to cast a dark shadow over the forestry sector, and communities like Sungai Tohor remain threatened by expanding mono-crop plantations of oil palm and acacia trees, which are used to make paper. In other words, little has changed beyond the government’s public support for reigning in the logging sector and there’s scant evidence that this will change anytime soon.
In exchange for a billion dollars in Norwegian aid, Indonesia was meant to impose a two-year moratorium on the issuance of new logging permits. The moratorium was set to take effect at the beginning of 2011. Yet, nearly five months later there is no moratorium in place and various government agencies are split on how to interpret what types of forests should be protected.
The central hang-up within the Indonesian government is whether or not industrial-scale plantations should be allowed on lands that have been partially degraded. The Indonesia government wants to boost oil palm and acacia production in order to increase GDP while at the same time reducing deforestation of natural rainforests and carbon-rich peat soils. Allowing industrial plantations on degraded land is an important concession to the oil palm and pulp/paper companies who fear a strong moratorium will cut into their profits. But conservation groups point out that even degraded lands provide important habitats and store vast amounts of carbon when developed and should be vigorously preserved.
Meanwhile, Mongabay.com reports that Wandojo Siswanto, a former member of Indonesia’s climate change negotiating team and an advisor at the Ministry of Forests, was found guilty of receiving a $10,000 bribe from a telecommunications company seeking a contract with the ministry. He will serve three years in prison. Corruption within the forestry sector has been rampant. An Ernst and Young audit found that during the 1990s over $5 billion from a national reforestation fund could not be accounted for by the Ministry of Forestry.
A new report by Greenpeace highlights an emerging area of dysfunction within Indonesia’s REDD program. The group documents how the recommendations of international consultancy firm McKinsey Group could lead to Indonesia implementing a REDD program that does little, if anything, to reduce amounts of deforestation. According to Greenpeace, McKinsey is promoting methods that understate the financial impacts of cutting GHG emissions due to smallholder agriculture (like Sungai Tohor’s), while setting extremely high financial costs for clamping down on industrial forestry and agri-business. The firm’s cost curve assumptions bias plantations over smallholder activities, which contradicts the stated goals of the U.N. program — reducing carbon emissions, while also protecting forest communities and biodiversity — that were codified at the U.N.’s latest meeting in Cancun, Mexico this past December.
As if McKinsey’s relationship with Indonesia isn’t enough of a cause for concern, the firm has a near monopoly on providing advise to other REDD-fund eligible countries, like Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guyana. Greenpeace details McKinsey’s work with these countries as well and shows that, like in Indonesia, it is promoting policies that cut against the aims of U.N. REDD.
This is the clearest evidence yet that the U.N. REDD is skewed by corporate influence and is doing little to change business as usual in the forestry sector and mitigate global GHG emissions. There are billions of dollars at stake in Indonesia’s U.N. REDD program alone. McKinsey is virtually writing the playbook for how the program will be implemented there — and beyond.
And what of Sungai Tohor? Lafcadio Cortesi of the Rainforest Action Network told me after returning from a recent trip to the area that the logging has stopped for now as the community continues to advocate for a government-imposed halt to logging.
But chainsaws rarely sit idle for long in Indonesia.
Pennsylvania’s GOP Governor Lets Gas Industry Have Its Way With Public Parks
Published at The Nation
Robert S. Eshelman | April 19, 2011
Situated amidst the bucolic forests and Appalachian peaks of southwestern Pennsylvania, Ohiopyle State Park offers one of the best settings for outdoor recreation in the country. One and half million people visit the park each year to hike, hunt and fish, kayak, and contribute millions of dollars to the regional economy.
By coincidence of geology and biology, though, Ohiopyle also sits atop a highly coveted portion of one of the largest natural gas deposits in the world — the Marcellus Shale formation. All sorts of aspirations and mythologies have been bestowed upon the extraction of millions of years worth of decayed organic matter (i.e. natural gas) that lies a mile below ground, such as creating 200,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania and helping to wean the nation from oil imports.
Last October, outgoing Democratic Governor Ed Rendell sought to slow the pace of the natural gas industry’s scramble for Marcellus riches — and address growing concerns about the environmental and public health impacts of drilling — by signing an Executive Order prohibiting the issuance of any new drilling leases on public lands.
But newly elected Republican Governor Tom Corbett has pledged to overturn Rendell’s moratorium. Since taking office in January, Corbett has rolled back environmental oversight of natural gas drilling on public lands.
“The whole concept of a public commons is under threat,” says John Quigley, who was head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) under Governor Rendell. DCNR is the agency tasked with overseeing the state’s public parks and forests, which is recognized as the best-managed in the country.
Think of it as an environmental counterpart to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s attack on public workers’ right to bargain collectively.
Corbett’s support for the natural gas industry comes as no surprise; the oil, natural gas, and mining industries contributed $1.5 million to his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
And with largess comes rewards. Corbett’s first appointment came in December, a month before taking office. He selected a man named C. Alan Walker to head the state’s Department of Community and Economic Development. Walker, who has contributed nearly $200,000 to Corbett political campaigns, is president and CEO of Bradford Energy Company and served as a member and past chairman of the board of directors of both the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry and the Pennsylvania Coal Association.
In addition to the appointment, Corbett granted Walker special power to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” With a stroke of his pen, Walker could render environmental regulations meaningless.
Then, in February, Corbett rolled back a key environmental hurdle for the natural gas industry, ending state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) review of drilling activities on state-owned land. Where once DEP worked in tandem with DCNR to anticipate and propose mitigation measures for potentially harmful drilling activities, now a drill operator is required only to submit a checklist confirming that it has taken adequate steps toward avoiding certain environmental impacts.
DCNR’s budget has suffered, too. Corbett made funding of state parks contingent on the revenues that they generate from leasing natural gas. Since the 1950s, says Jan Jarrett, President of PennFuture, a state conservation group, leasing revenues went into a fund used to buy up greater amounts of parkland, for instance, or promote conservation, rather than into DCNR itself. But with this year’s budget, Corbett has used those revenues to fund the department. In other words, rather than funding the DCNR through General Fund allocations, he is making it more dependent on revenue from resource extraction.
Jarrett is worried about this precedent. “If the department is running off of timber or natural gas lease sales, there becomes a motivation to increase the number of leases or boost revenues from resource extraction.”
Corbett has yet to lift the drilling moratorium, but there is no regulatory hurdle stopping him.
“To Corbett’s credit, he did not propose any additional leasing in his current budget,” says Quigley, “However, his spokespeople have indicated that the Governor thinks that the moratorium should be lifted.”
PennFuture’s Jarrett speculates that a Corbett decision to lift the moratorium may come down to budget considerations after all. “There’s been a huge outcry over the cuts to public and higher education,” she says, describing the Governor’s primary remedy for addressing the state’s $4 billion budget deficit. “I suspect that the General Assembly will balk at the level of cuts that Corbett wants and he’ll have to give some of that money back. So he may look again to the state forest land.”
Currently, about one third of Pennsylvania’s public lands — 700,000 acres — are leased to drilling companies. While Rendell’s moratorium put a stop to further leasing, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania does not own the subsurface mineral rights to 80% of state parks. About half of the state’s 117 parks, according to Quigley, lie above the Marcellus Shale formation. So even with Rendell’s moratorium in place, the natural gas industry has wide access to the public lands, including Ohiopyle. Further weakening the state’s regulatory authority, a 2009 state supreme court decision limited DCNR’s ability to impose use conditions on public lands to which it owns only the surface rights.
With the construction of a natural gas well pad on public land comes the need for miles of service roads and belowground pipelines that fragment both critical wildlife habitat and areas of uninterrupted outdoor recreational space. Thousands of truck trips are required for each well due to the millions of gallons of chemical-infused water that is needed to fracture the subsurface geologic formations and release the gas trapped inside. “The question,” says Quigley, “is what are the limits of resource extraction on the public lands?”
Thanks to Quigley, though, this is no longer an open question. Under his direction, DCNR conducted a two-year study of the likely impacts of natural gas extraction on the public parks system. The study determined that “no additional leasing involving surface disturbance can occur without significantly altering the ecological integrity and wild character of our state forest system.” Rendell’s drilling moratorium was in response to this finding, along with peaking concerns over the environmental and public health impacts of natural gas drilling.
“There is a huge outdoor recreation culture and ethic in Pennsylvania,” Quigley continues. “The hunting and fishing opportunities that our public lands provide define to a significant degree the character of our state. This parks system was built so that every citizen of the state could have access to their natural inheritance. Its grounded in the state constitution.”
In March, Corbett empanelled a Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission, which will deliver a final set of recommendations to the Governor this summer. The panel — remaining consistent with Corbett’s financial backing — is stacked in the industry’s favor and conservationists speculate that the panel might provide political cover for the Governor to reverse the moratorium in exchange for a nominal production tax or local impact fee.
In the meantime, Quigley appeals to the Governor’s rational side: “I’m hoping that he will have an opportunity to review the analysis that DCNR did and he can be persuaded that we need to take a much more conservative approach to drilling on public lands.”
Indonesia’s Billion-Dollar Climate Experiment: Can rich nations pay a corruption-riddled government to protect its rainforests?
(Originally published at Mother Jones)
On a humid afternoon in Sungai Tohor, a coastal village in Sumatra’s Riau province, 50 or so men are packed into a town-hall conference room. They sit in neat rows of blue plastic chairs, many clad in knee-high rubber boots, loose-fitting polo shirts, and baggy pants—the casual uniform of an Indonesian farmer. Women and children peer in through open windows and doors. There’s excitement in the air, thanks to a gaggle of visiting journalists and enviros who have come to discuss the fate of the village—and a way of life now under siege.
Over multiple generations, residents of Sungai Tohor have built a thriving trade network that has brought them relative prosperity. Each month, they ship several hundred tons of sago paste—a starchy dietary staple produced from trees they cultivate in the jungle—to Malaysia and Java. The proceeds have enabled them to buy bright new motorbikes, build quaint homes, and maintain a slow-paced lifestyle that prioritizes family and community above all else. Some families can even send their children to college.
Last year, however, Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry told PT LUM—a supplier for the Singapore-based pulp and paper giant APRIL—that it could cut down nearly 26,000 acres of lush rainforest surrounding Sungai Tohor and replace it with acacia trees, used to make paper products. The proposed plantation overlaps with the sago groves and other areas that the villagers use to grow rubber and coconuts.
Among the town-hall speakers is Kaka, a slender, ponytailed man who works as an organizer for the Indonesian environmental group WAHLI. As he explains it, Indonesia is accepting cash from Western governments to protect its rainforests even as it enables outside corporations to destroy them. Back in May, in exchange for $1 billion from Norway, Indonesia’s president agreed to place a two-year moratorium on new logging permits. In theory, his administration is also supposed to work closely with locals to develop sustainable forestry practices—such as Sungai Tohor’s sago trade. But government officials have yet to address the villagers’ formal complaints.
The Norway deal is part of a broader United Nations program with an insufferably wonky title—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)—that aims to tackle climate change by paying developing countries to preserve their forests. Because the destruction of rainforests and their carbon-rich peat soils releases vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, and because the payoffs seem like a relatively cheap and straightforward fix, REDD is likely to be one of the hottest negotiation items at the current round of climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. Among the major sticking points: What, exactly, constitutes a forest? (Logging interests argue that their plantations should qualify.) And how much say will forest communities like Sungai Tohor have in the process?
Back at the town hall, Nong, a gregarious sago mill owner, stands to speak his piece. “If this company comes in,” he says, “the sago groves will be destroyed and we will lose our way of life. Soon they will clear the trees and plant acacia. We will then lose the animals—the deer, the pigs.” He looks over at the foreigners. “We ask you to help us to keep our village, our food supply, our livelihoods.” He takes his seat amid murmurs of agreement and nodding heads.
The village secretary rises in turn to remind everyone what happened in 2003, when PT LUM received a similar logging concession nearby. The residents “rejected them in a harsh way,” vandalizing equipment and setting up security camps to protect areas they claimed as their own. When the government sent in troops to assist the company, the men grew infuriated. They marched to the house of their kepala desa (chief)—who had taken the company’s side—and burned it to the ground.
The new kepala desa stands with the villagers.
****
Indonesia is an attractive target for international climate-change efforts, because it boasts the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest on the planet, and one of the most biodiverse—its emerald-green jungles are home to iconic endangered mammals like Sumatran tigers, elephants, rhinos, and orangutans. Some 30 million Indonesians also rely on the forests for subsistence, taking wood to build homes and boats, and animals to eat.
More to the point, Indonesia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, second only to the United States and China. The overwhelming majority—85 percent—of those emissions result directly from the conversion of jungle to agriculture. Since 1990, companies like APRIL and Sinar Mas have cleared nearly 91,000 square miles of mature Indonesian rainforest—an area larger than Minnesota—and planted acacia and a variety of palm whose oil is used in everything from breakfast cereals to cosmetics to biofuels.
Worldwide, this sort of land conversion generates more greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector, which is why wealthy nations, including the United States, are now handing over cash to curb the destruction. Much of the $4.5 billion pledged thus far is destined for Indonesia, where President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (Indonesians call him “SBY”) has vowed to cut overall emissions 26 percent by 2020—or more, provided the cash keeps coming.
That, however, would constitute a complete turnaround in Indonesia’s forest policy. For one thing, SBY recently pledged to increase acacia and palm oil production even while curbing deforestation, a seemingly contradictory goal; for another, the government has for decades handed out huge logging concessions to firms with close ties to “the military and state elites,” says Christopher Barr, a forest policy expert with the US-based consulting firm Woods & Wayside International. He adds that “corruption is widespread at all levels within the sector,” and powerful interests “have often displaced rural communities that have managed these resources for generations.”
Following the town-hall meeting, I’m whisked away on the back of a moped along a narrow, cracking concrete path—what passes for a road in these parts. I dismount in front of a single-story wood home where I’ve arranged to chat privately with Kaka and Alfian, the current kepala desa. Or not so privately, as it turns out: Alfian’s living room is like an auxiliary town hall, with dozens of villagers coming and going during our conversation—rushing to greet their chief with handshakes and smiles. Alfian, clad in a plaid shirt and neat black slacks, returns the good will, offering each man his hand and attentive gaze.
Even before Kaka got involved, Sungai Tohor had partnered with other villages under threat from paper companies and collected 30,000 signatures on a petition protesting the concessions—which WAHLI helped distribute to regional and federal officials. He hands over a thick stack of paper that includes the signatures, along with arguments detailing why the concessions are illegal and how they will destroy the local economy.
Some 60 percent of the targeted area, Kaka explains, is by law the villagers’ customary land. In addition to the sago areas, he says, PT LUM is preparing to clear areas of untouched rainforest that the company and the ministry falsely claim are “degraded.” (In a new report, Greenpeace warns of precisely such a ploy by paper and palm oil interests aiming to expand by rebranding their activities as land “rehabilitation.”) Already the company has cut a clearing just outside the village boundary, where it has dug several 20-foot-wide canals through the thick peat soils—another legal violation, he adds.
The canals, Kaka explains, are meant to drain the peat—acacias prefer dry soil—and to create a waterway that can be used to transport cut trees to the pulping mill. As the soil dries, so too will the sago trees, which thrive in the moist soil. “There’s already a drop in the water table,” Alfian says, based on his last excursion into the forest.
Kaka and Alfian suspect that PT LUM bribed government officials to secure the concession—this, they believe, is why the Ministry of Forestry has yet to review their petition. I ask the men whether, in the absence of a federal review of the permits, the villagers are prepared to confront the company as they did back in 2003. They turn toward one another, eyes wide. “We’re going to try to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Alfian responds. “We don’t want to use anarchistic or violent methods. We want to use democratic means.”
****
After leaving Alfian’s, I go visit some sago mills on the village outskirts, where man-made structures give way to a lush wall of Sumatran rainforest. The harvested logs are floated here from deep in the forest by way of a slow-moving river that runs adjacent to the row of mills.
I watch a man strip dry brown bark from the logs with slow, deliberate heaves of an ax. Another worker, a cigarette dangling from his lips, chops the stripped logs into wedges, which are then fed into a pulping machine—its motor chuffing like a riverboat stuck in mud. The pulpy ivory-colored mass pours out of a rubber hose at the base of the machine and into a long rectangular pool where the starch is separated from the wood fibers. Next to the bath, dozens of sacks of sago paste stand upright and ready to ship. Surrounding each mill are piles of bark to be burned for fuel or used to make floors or fences.
Over at his mill, Nong, who is 66 but could pass for mid-forties, becomes animated when he talks about the setup. Rather than simply harvesting logs for prosperous mill owners, the farmers grow, process, and sell the paste themselves—paying mill owners a small sum for use of their machinery. “That way,” Nong says, “even families with only a few logs are still able to produce their own sago.”
Now that their economy is under threat, villagers are warily looking to the Norway pact for a strategic opening. The petition Kaka showed me plays up the role of forests and peatlands in mitigating climate change, and some farmers told me they were developing proposals for how REDD funds could be used to improve sago production. “We will support the government’s program,” Alfian explains, “but only if it goes to saving the forests.”
That remains to be seen, of course. In late October, Wandojo Siswanto, formerly a top climate-change negotiator and architect of the Norway pact, was arrested and charged with accepting a $10,000 bribe to grant a company’s no-bid contract with the forest ministry. Siswanto told reporters that he was simply obeying ministry orders, a claim the government denied.
The buck now stops with Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, an SBY confidant whom the president has put in charge of implementing the Norway deal. Kuntoro enjoys a clean reputation, having supervised a $7 billion donor fund as head of post-tsunami reconstruction in hard-hit Aceh province. “We are now fighting very hard to have a country with high integrity,” Kuntoro told me. With “REDD and reconstruction in Aceh, we’ve proven that when it comes to starting from zero, we can design something different than what we had before.”
His definition of success is simple: lower emissions. But when I asked whether the government would reconsider concessions such as the one near Sungai Tohor, Kuntoro turned vague. “It all depends on where the concession is,” he said. “We are going to limit development on peat land; there are a number of factors that we have to consider before making a decision to review or not to review.” He would not elaborate.
PT LUM has yet to start clearing around Sungai Tohor in earnest. But unless the government does step in, there’s nothing to stop it from doing so. The company has doled out work to villagers here and there, but nothing that would make up for loss of their sago. Standing in the clearing alongside one of PT LUM’s canals, farmer Numun Daya grips his machete. “It was 1903 that my ancestors first opened land here. When I think of that time, I think of the hardship for them,” he says. “We have lost 13 areas of sago, and there is only a tiny bit of work from the logging company. We still have six more sago areas in danger.
“With those fields,” the farmer adds, “we have a future.”
Click here to view the author’s video version of the story (5:33). Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
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