The REDD mafia

The logic is simple: let’s give a monetary value to forest conservation, by giving carbon credits to forest owners who don’t cut down trees, and we’ll stop deforestation. But anyone who knows or cares a bit about land grabbing realizes that it will rise when forests are commodified. That’s what’s happening right now all over the world, even before the REDD proposal is formally approved.

In Papua New Guinea, a native leader, Abilie Wape, from the Kamula Doso Peoples, was kidnapped and forced at gun point to give away the rights for the carbon stored in the idigenous’ forest. In Kenya, a UNEP-funded REDD project in the Mau forest has led to evictions and threatens the cultural survival of the Ogiek hunter-gathers (OneWorld.net).

In order to allow our industries to go on polluting, we are ready to give money to mobsters and participate in acts of genocide. As Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network puts it,

Everyone who cares about our future, forests, Indigenous Peoples and human rights should reject REDD because it is irremediably flawed, cannot be fixed and because, despite efforts to develop safeguards for its implementation, REDD will always be potentially genocidal.