Fwd: Carbon Blood Money in Honduras

[Darren]

http://climate-connections.org/2012/03/09/carbon-blood-money-in-honduras/

Carbon Blood Money in Honduras
A new piece in our ongoing coverage of the war on peasants in the Bajo 
Aguan region of Honduras, cross-posted from Foreign Policy in Focus. – GJEP

By Rosie Wong, March 9, 2012

With its muddy roads, humble huts, and constant military patrols, Bajo 
Aguán, Honduras feels a long way away from the slick polish of the 
recurring UN climate negotiations in the world's capital cities. Yet the 
bloody struggle going on there strikes at the heart of global climate 
politics, illustrating how market schemes designed to "offset" carbon 
emissions play out when they encounter the complicated reality on the 
ground.

Small farmers in this region have increasingly fallen under the thumb of 
large landholders like palm oil magnate Miguel Facussé, who has been 
accused by human rights groups of responsibility for the murder of 
numerous campesinos in Bajo Aguán since the 2009 coup. Yet Facussé's 
company has been approved to receive international funds for carbon 
mitigation under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The contrast between the promise of "clean development" and this violent 
reality has made Bajo Aguán the subject of growing international 
attention — and a lightning rod for criticism of the CDM.

The Coup and Its Aftermath

In June 2009, a military coup in Honduras deposed the government of 
Manuel Zelaya, stymieing the government's progressive social reforms and 
experiments with participatory democracy. "It was not only to expel 
President Zelaya," says Juan Almendarez, a prominent Honduran 
environmental and humanitarian advocate. The coup happened "because the 
powerful people in Honduras were acting in response to the people's 
struggles in Honduras."

The result has been social decay and political repression. The homicide 
rate in Honduras has skyrocketed under the Porfirio Lobo regime, 
registering as theworld's highest in 2010. Human rights groups highlight 
the ongoing political assassinations of regime opponents. In this small 
country of 8 million people, 17 journalists have been killed since the 
coup. LGBTI organizers, indigenous rights activists, unionists, 
teachers, youth organizers, women's advocates, and opposition 
politicians have also received death threats or been killed. Those 
responsible arerarely punished by the justice system, which instead 
devotes its energies to prosecuting social and human rights activists. 
Protests are often met with teargas canisters and live ammunition.

The coup has also proved a setback for campesino activists seeking to 
halt the encroachment of large landowners on their farms.

The Struggle for Land in Bajo Aguán

Highly unequal land distribution has long been an issue in Honduras, and 
genuine land reform has been evasive. However, partial agrarian reform 
in 1961 made the rainforests of Bajo Aguán available for cooperatives of 
farmers who migrated there from other parts of the country. Clearing the 
forests to make the land suitable for farming was extremely difficult 
work, but the farmers' perseverance turned it into one of the most 
desirable and fertile agricultural lands in the country.

However, under pressure from international financial institutions, 
Honduras's government passed the Law of Agricultural Modernization in 
1994, allowing large producers to extend their territories beyond the 
maximum legal property limits. As a result, large landowners began to 
buy up the land of small farmers, effectively reversing whatever limited 
land reform had been achieved. The human costs were immense. According 
to Juan Chinchilla of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan (MUCA), 
"it forced masses of farmers to migrate to the cities and to the U.S. 
under terrible conditions."

An older movement, the MCA (Campesino Movement of Aguan), has organized 
several dramatic acts of resistance to this dislocation. In May 2000, 
the collective orchestrated a remarkable mass occupation of a former 
U.S. military base on a large tract of arable land controlled by 
agro-industrialists. Coordinating with landless farmers from all over 
the country, the MCA organized 50 trucks and, early one morning, entered 
the former base and tore down its fences. This occupation continues 
today, despite threats and persecution.

In 2008, MUCA occupied one of Miguel Facussé's palm oil processing 
plants and subsequently entered into negotiations with then-President 
Zelaya to have occupied lands legally transferred to small farmers. When 
the coup occurred and jeopardized these hard-won gains, landless farmers 
mobilized against it, with MUCA officials travelling to the Nicaraguan 
border to meet Zelaya on his second attempt to return to Honduras. It 
was there that MUCA decided to organize a mass land occupation starting 
on December 9, 2009.

But despite this resistance, aggressive landholders buoyed by the coup 
have continued their onslaught against the farmers of Bajo Aguán. 
According to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, 42 farmers 
were assassinated between September 2009 and October 2011 in Honduras. 
More recent reports have the numbers in the 50s by 2011. In one 
surprisingly brazen incident in November 2010, after five farmers were 
killed in El Tumbador, Facussé gave a press statement acknowledging that 
it was his hired security guards who were responsible.

A community member from the Marañones settlement in Bajo Aguán described 
an eviction of small farmers from the Guanchía cooperative on 8 January 
2010, carried out by a contingent of 500 police and soldiers with 
teargas and guns: "It was a violent eviction where they had nothing 
legal to show us; the first greetings they gave us were the weapons. 
They began to shoot at us, to capture and beat our compañeros. There 
were captured children, nine of them… compañeras were raped… our homes 
were destroyed, our food – they took part of it and destroyed the other 
parts."

Almost every farmer I interviewed said that it was unsafe to leave their 
settlements. The countryside is dotted with military checkpoints, and 
farmers have been killed travelling to or from their settlements. "The 
way we see it, it has become a crime to be a farmer here," Heriberto 
Rodríguez of MUCA explained. There have been at least four military 
operations in the area since 2010.

Palm Oil and Power

Bajo Aguán's small farmers are already under siege. But carbon trading 
with the global North could help to fuel in this aggression even further 
under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Set up under the current UN 
climate treaty, the CDM is supposed to encourage "clean" technology in 
the South and to provide Northern actors with the most efficient (i.e., 
cheapest) way to reduce global pollution. The basic equation is simple: 
a project in the global South that ostensibly reduces carbon emissions 
generates carbon credits. These credits can then be bought and sold by 
companies in the global North, who can use them to meet government 
requirements to reduce pollution without actually reducing emissions in 
their factories or power plants.

Dinant, Facusse´s palm oil company, has set up one of these projects. In 
the past, the company's palm oil mill pumped its waste into large open 
pits, a process that produces large quantities of methane. Dinant's 
project involves capturing this greenhouse gas and using it to power the 
mill. The project's blueprint claims that it will reduce pollution in 
two ways: first, by not letting the methane from open pits escape 
straight into the atmosphere, and second, by preventing pollution from 
burning the fossil fuels that were formerly used to power the mill.

Dinant's approval is obviously problematic for a number of reasons.

First, with the expanding palm oil industry contributing to massive 
deforestation in sensitive tropical regions, it's ironic that Dinant 
would be rewarded for environmentally sound practices. Moreover, its CDM 
approval essentially endorses a business model of producing palm oil 
for export—instead of food for local consumption—in a country where one 
in four children suffers chronic malnutrition. As Heriberto Rodríguez 
argued, "We don't need palm oil here. We need what we can eat."

Finally, if Wikileaks cables detailing some of Facussé's more unsavory 
dealings—including but not limited to his potential links to drug 
traffickers (to say nothing of his documented violence against local 
farmers)—are any indication, Facussé's misdeeds are no secret to the 
North. And yet one CDM board member told a journalist that "we are not 
investigators of crimes" and that there is "not much scope" to reject 
the project under CDM rules.

As rights groups have brought these problems to light, Northern 
companies associated with the project have pulled out one by one, 
including a consultant that contributed to the project application, the 
German government bank that had agreed to give a loan to Dinant, and the 
French electricity company that had agreed to buy the credits. This has 
left Miguel Facussé and Dinant out on a limb. However, the struggle to 
stop European carbon market money from flowing to Bajo Aguán is not 
finished: the CDM board has re-approved the project, and the British 
government has not withdrawn its support, which means that new buyers 
could still appear.

Not for Sale

At an international human rights conference held in Bajo Aguan in 
February,MUCA signed an agreement with the Lobo regime that included a 
financing plan for the farmers to pay the large landholders for occupied 
land. But critics say that even if the government can be trusted (itself 
a questionable proposition), the crucial issues of assassinations and 
impunity were ignored. Facussé´s company is now accusing farmers of new 
"invasions."

Needless to say, the situation in Bajo Aguán continues to be incredibly 
dangerous. Local rights groups have called for a Permanent Human Rights 
Observatory to witness, document, and discourage the ongoing violence 
against farmers in the region.

Although growing international condemnation has made it more difficult 
for Dinant to access carbon market money, the project remains officially 
sanctioned, and loans from international development banks have not been 
cancelled.Heriberto Rodríguez, speaking from his roadside hut in an 
Aguán settlement, had no doubt about the impact of this international 
support: "Whoever gives the finance to these companies also becomes 
complicit in all these deaths. If they cut these funds, the landholders 
will feel somewhat pressured to change their methods."

MUCA spokesperson Vitalino Alvarez rejects the idea of carbon trading 
projects altogether. "To get into these deals is like having [our land] 
mortgaged," he said. "So to this we say no; this oxygen, we don't sell 
it to anybody."