Chilean Forestry Project Symbol of Concerns Over WTO

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org

http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Archives

http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation

11/16/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

Chile's temperate rain forests are emblematic of the threats posed to

remaining large forest regions by free trade dogma. Organizations

like the World Trade Organization (WTO) insist on the right to strike

down national environmental laws because they impede trade. When the

last forest is logged, the last hillside mined, and the last water

reservoirs spoiled because of lack of environmental protection; the

World and all its occupants will pay the price for this fundamentally

flawed worldview. The WTO is so alienated from the natural World

that it thinks economics does not require ecological systems. They

are wrong--and will be told so in Seattle.

g.b.

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Title: ENVIRONMENT-CHILE: Forestry Project a Symbol of Fight

Against WTO

Source: InterPress Service

Date: November 11, 1999

Byline: Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, Nov 11 (IPS) - The rain forests in southern Chile have

become a symbol of the struggle by environmentalists against the rules

of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which holds a Ministerial

Conference at the end of the month in Seattle, Washington.

The "World Day Against the WTO", celebrated by environmentalists in

more than 135 countries last week included protests against the

Cascada-Chile project, which would see the end of a large area of

forest some 1,000 kilometres south of Santiago.

To international "greens", the project embodies the environmental

destruction that will occur throughout the world if the Seattle

meeting reinforces the global trend of liberalisation and deregulation

of trade and investment policies.

The WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle is scheduled for Nov. 30-

Dec. 3, and likely will be the springboard into a "Millennium Round"

of multilateral trade talks.

Negotiations will focus on getting the 135 WTO member countries to

subscribe to new rules for global trade liberalisation, in accord with

the principles that gave birth to the organisation on Jan 1, 1995.

Labour unions, social, consumer and environmental groups reject the

WTO rules on the grounds they put the interests of powerful

transnational corporations ahead of those of average citizens.

Environmentalists argue that the WTO is attempting to deregulate trade

in agricultural produce and services. They say the WTO wants to open

up the natural resources of developing countries for exploitation by

giant logging, mining and seafood companies based in the

industrialised world.

One of the leaders of the Cascada-Chile opposition movement is

Mauricio Fierro, who heads the ecology collective Geo-Austral

based in Puerto Montt, some 1,044 kms from Santiago.

''From the environmental point of view, this liberalisation and

deregulation (by the WTO) will allow the biggest and most destructive

logging companies to gain free access to vast tracts of pristine

forest,'' Fierro says.

In the case of Chile, it will increase the process of devastation of

the southern forests, which will in turn trigger ''destruction of the

local economy and culture of ethnic southerners,'' he says.

The Cascada-Chile project, led jointly by the US transnational Boise

Cascade and the local company Maderas Condor S.A., intends to build a

sawmill and pulping plant in Ilque, 20 kms from Puerto Montt.

The project has been in the planning stages since May 1997. It was put

on hold due to a series of lawsuits, but the Supreme Court has finally

given the companies the green light to proceed.

They also managed to win the approval of the Regional Environmental

Commission (Corema), which ecologists, politicians and businessmen

opposed to the project accuse of corruption and influence peddling.

The project represents an investment of 180 million dollars and,

according to the companies, will create 200 directs jobs and 1,500

indirect jobs, in addition to employing 700 people during the

construction phase of the plant, which will operate using ''clean

technology,'' according to executives.

Ilque is a small town on the Pacific coast with 700 residents, mostly

fishermen, farmers and workers at a salmon company and mollusk farm.

The fishermen,salmon and mollusk companies, are opposed to the

Cascada-Chile project because they believe it will pollute and destroy

one of the cleanest bays in the Puerto Montt area.

The international environmental watchdog Greenpeace says Cascada-Chile

''represents a serious risk to native forests and their associated

biodiversity,'' and that its approval reveals ''a legal vacuum for the

qualification of projects that use native forests as raw material.''

A Native Forest Law has been awaiting government approval since the

administration of Patricio Aylwin (1990-94), bogged down in Parliament

due to pressure from logging companies, according to charges by

environmentalists.

On the anti-WTO day, green groups organised peaceful protests in front

of Boise Cascade company offices in several different countries, to

urge the transnational to cease its exploitation of forests and to

drop the Chile project.

Fierro called on Chileans to continue their campaign and to demand

that the government of President Eduardo Frei ''halts the destruction

of natural resources.'' (FIN/IPS/ggr/ag/en-if/ks/ m

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