by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 12, 2013 | Indigenous Autonomy, NEWS
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
One-hundred and fifty years after a treaty with England granted the Miskito people rights over their land–a treaty which was never fully respected–the government of Honduras has officially handed over nearly a million hectares (970,000 hectares) of tropical forest along the Caribbean Coast to the indigenous people. The Miskito are found along the eastern coast of both Honduras and Nicaragua and number around 200,000.
“This is an unprecedented and historic moment for our peoples,” said Norvin Goff, chairman of Miskitu Asla Takanka (MASTA), a Honduras group representing the tribes.”The entire region is at risk from illegal hunting, logging and clearing of land to graze cattle. The Miskito people can protect it, but only if we have title to those lands.”
Over the last few decades, tropical forests along the Caribbean Coast have been infiltrated by land speculators, loggers, and ranchers, creating conflict between the illegal settlers and the Miskito. The Miskito now have title to seven land areas, comprising 128 communities, and about seven percent of Honduras’ total land area.
The official rights to their land will allow the Miskito to negotiate possible REDD+ treaties in the future. REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation, is a UN program that aims to cut global carbon emissions by paying tropical countries to keep their forests standing.
“We have been doing REDD for 500 years,” notes Goff. “Now we will be able to teach others how we have protected our forests and natural resources, and benefit from our role in helping the world that wants so badly to stop destroying the forests so we can slow climate change.”
Around 40 percent of Honduras is covered in forest, but the country has one of the highest rates of deforestation in Latin America. From 1990 to 2005, Honduras lost 37.1 percent of its forestland. The country is still home to a number of important Neotropical species such as the jaguar (Panthera onca), Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii), giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), and mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata).
“With a substantial proportion of the total territory of Honduras now owned by Indigenous peoples, we envision the creation of a new development agenda in Honduras, one built with guidance from indigenous peoples and with respect for our customary rights,” Goff said.
From Mongabay: “Indigenous people of Honduras granted one million hectares of rainforest“
Photo by Zaca Photo on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 27, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Listening to the Land
By Derrick Jensen, for Orion
Last night a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward. After he left I saw the two foxes again. Later, they went around the right side of a redwood tree as a black bear approached around the left. He sat on the porch for a while, and then walked off into the night. Then the foxes returned, hung out, and, when I looked away for a moment then looked back, they were gone. It wasn’t too long before the bear returned to lie on the porch. After a brief nap, he went away. The raccoon came back and brought two friends. When they left the foxes returned, and after the foxes came the bear. The evening was like a French farce: As one character exited stage left, another entered stage right.
Although I see some of these nonhuman neighbors daily, I was entranced and delighted to see so many of them over the span of just one evening. I remained delighted until sometime the next day, when I remembered reading that, prior to conquest by the Europeans, people in this region could expect to see a grizzly bear every 15 minutes.
This phenomenon is something we all encounter daily, even if some of us rarely notice it. It happens often enough to have a name: declining baselines. The phrase describes the process of becoming accustomed to and accepting as normal worsening conditions. Along with normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this way. And this can lead to further acceptance and further normalization, which leads to further amnesia, and so on. Meanwhile the world is killed, species by species, biome by biome. And we are happy when we see the ever-dwindling number of survivors.
I’ve gone on the salmon-spawning tours that local environmentalists give, and I’m not the only person who by the end is openly weeping. If we’re lucky, we see 15 fish. Prior to conquest there were so many fish the rivers were described as “black and roiling.” And it’s not just salmon. Only five years ago, whenever I’d pick up a piece of firewood, I’d have to take off a half-dozen sowbugs. It’s taken me all winter this year to see as many. And I used to go on spider patrol before I took a shower, in order to remove them to safety before the deluge. I still go on spider patrol, but now it’s mostly pro forma. The spiders are gone. My mother used to put up five hummingbird feeders, and the birds would fight over those. Now she puts up two, and as often as not the sugar ferments before anyone eats it. I used to routinely see bats in the summer. Last year I saw one.
You can transpose this story to wherever you live and whatever members of the nonhuman community live there with you. I was horrified a few years ago to read that many songbird populations on the Atlantic Seaboard have collapsed by up to 80 percent over the last 40 years. But, and this is precisely the point, I was even more horrified when I realized that Silent Spring came out more than 40 years ago, so this 80 percent decline followed an already huge decline caused by pesticides, which followed another undoubtedly huge decline caused by the deforestation, conversion to agriculture, and urbanization that followed conquest.
My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl—in other words, only four human generations ago—there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home. Who in Nebraska today worries about being trampled by bison? For that matter, who in Nebraska today even thinks about bison on a monthly, much less daily, basis?
This state of affairs is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s harder to fight for what you don’t love than for what you do, and it’s hard to love what you don’t know you’re missing. It’s harder still to fight an injustice you do not perceive as an injustice but rather as just the way things are. How can you fight an injustice you never think about because it never occurs to you that things have ever been any different?
Declining baselines apply not only to the environment but to many fields. Take surveillance. Back in the 1930s, there were people who freaked out at the notion of being assigned a Social Security number, as it was “a number that will follow you from cradle to grave.” But since 9/11, according to former National Security Agency official William Binney, the U.S. government has been retaining every email sent, in case any of us ever does anything the government doesn’t like. How many people complain about that? And it’s not just the government. I received spam birthday greetings this year from all sorts of commercial websites. How and why does ESPN.com have my birth date? And remember the fight about GMOs? They were perceived as scary (because they are), and now they’re all over the place, but most people don’t know or don’t care. The same goes for nanotechnology.
Yesterday I ate a strawberry. Or rather, I ate a strawberry-shaped object that didn’t have much taste. When did we stop noticing that strawberries/plums/tomatoes no longer taste like what they resemble? In my 20s I rented a house where a previous resident’s cat had pooped all over the dirt basement, which happened to be where the air intakes for the furnace were located. The house smelled like cat feces. After I’d been there a few months, I wrote to a friend, “At first the smell really got to me, but then, as with everything, I got used to the stench and it just doesn’t bother me anymore.”
This is a process we need to stop. Milan Kundera famously wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Everything in this culture is aimed at helping to distract us from—or better, help us to forget—the injustices, the pain. And it is completely normal for us to want to be distracted from or to forget pain. Pain hurts. Which is why on every level from somatic reflex to socially constructed means of denial we have pathways to avoid it.
But here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you to listen to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing) fireflies. Even if you’re in a city—especially if you’re in a city—I want you to picture the land as it was before the land was built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.
If you do this, your baseline will stop declining, because you’ll have a record of what’s being lost.
Do not go numb in the face of this data. Do not turn away. I want you to feel the pain. Keep it like a coal inside your coat, a coal that burns and burns. I want all of us to do this, because we should all want the pain of injustice to stop. We should want this pain to stop not because we get used to it and it just doesn’t bother us anymore, but because we stop the injustices and destruction that are causing the pain in the first place. I want us to feel how awful the destruction is, and then act from this feeling.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 27, 2013 | Agriculture, Building Alternatives
By Cherine Akkari / Deep Green Resistance
Over the past few decades, our food system has become increasingly globalized [10]. With the rise of agribusiness, the ability to transport food cheaply over long distances and the development of food preservation techniques have enabled the distance between farm and market to increase dramatically.
Recently, such practices have been questioned for the damage they cause to the natural environment, their high energy consumption, and their contribution to climate change. In addition, the quality of the food available to residents is subject to increasing concern.
In fact, the trend toward increasing distances between producers and consumers has prompted many to question the environmental and social sustainability of our food choices [10]. The question of how to feed the urban population, particularly during crisis, is becoming urgent every day. Concerns about health and the loss of tradition and culture that began to take hold in post-modern society, the spread of the ‘food desert’, especially in poor urban areas [4], where there is no easy access to affordable food, food banks and soup kitchens, demonstrated that the urgency of access to food and food security for everyone must be confronted.
To note here, the modern movement for LFS (local food systems) as an alternative to the conventional agricultural system is not new. It started in Japan in the 1970s with the teikei, which means ‘putting the producer’s face on the product’ [10]. The teikei were organized around consumer cooperatives, whose members would link up with producers and even helped with the work on the farm [13]. A similar model was also adopted in Québec by Équiterre in 1995 where consumers, organized into groups, pay up front at the beginning of the season and receive deliveries of food baskets each week, thereby sharing the risk inherent in agricultural production [1].
Agriculture is a major driver of human-caused climate change, contributing an estimated 25 to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, when done sustainably it can be an important key to mitigating climate change [12]. The sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity is likely to be particularly beneficial for small-scale farmers, who need to optimize the limited resources that are available to them and for whom the access to external inputs is lacking due to financial or infrastructural constraints [19].
Benefits on a large-scale can also be achieved by focusing on improvements relevant to large commercial farmers and conservation agriculture has already been effective in this respect. Inevitably, there is considerable skepticism over the practicality of the widespread adoption of agricultural production practices that embody a greater use of biodiversity for food and agriculture and a greater emphasis on ecosystem functions [19].
Two major geopolitical realities have a constraining effect on peoples’ thinking. Firstly, modern, intensive farming in developed countries receives very large levels of financial support and all sectors of the agricultural and food industries are linked to this highly subsidized system. Secondly, there is a continuing commitment to ensuring that food prices remain low and that basic foodstuffs are affordable by all sectors of society including the poorest. These both tend to lead to a disinterest in the nature of agricultural production systems and present a very real barrier to the development of new approaches to production [19]. However, it is increasingly recognized that an appropriate policy framework can largely overcome these constraints and, indeed, must be developed .
In the last few years, more localized food supply chains have been proposed as a vehicle for sustainable development [5]; [6]; [9]; [15] and [21]. We can note here that the term ‘local’ is still contested and its definition varies from one local market development organization to the next. Literally, the term ‘local’ indicates a relation to a particular place, a geographic entity.
However, as our literature review has uncovered, most organizations have a more elaborate definition of what is local, often incorporating specific goals and objectives that an LFS ought to deliver into the definition itself.
There are three aspects of LFS, which are proximity (geographic distance, temporal distance, political and administrative boundaries, bio-regions, and social distance), objectives of local food systems (economic, environmental and social objectives), and distribution mechanisms in local food systems (farm shops, farmer’s markets, box schemes, community-supported agriculture, institutional procurement policy, and urban agriculture).
Besides the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), there is a growing interest by the public sector for local food, which is mainly linked to the idea of food sovereignty – a global movement that aims to transform food systems into engines of sustainable development and social justice. To note here is La Via Campesina [21], which was the first organization to develop the concept of food sovereignty in 1993 in Belgium [13].
Thus, the pursuit of food sovereignty implies that work should be done in international treaty negotiations and human rights conventions in order to allow state sovereignty over food policy—that is, to prevent interference from foreign powers in the policy-making process, lift restrictions placed by international trade agreements, and eliminate dumping practices [1].
In 2007 in Montreal, a definition of food sovereignty was developed by a Québec-based coalition for food sovereignty that included producer organizations, civil society groups, food distributors, and development organizations. The definition states that “food sovereignty means the right of people to develop their own food and agricultural policy; to protect and regulate national food production and trade in order to attain sustainable development goals, to determine their degree of food autonomy, and to eliminate dumping on their markets. Food sovereignty does not contradict trade in the sense that it is subordinated to the right of people to local food production, healthy and ecological, realized in equitable conditions that respect the right of every partner to decent working conditions and incomes” [1].
Over the last 60 years, Canada‘s overall food system has become more geared to large-scale systems of production, distribution and retail. In Quebec, the agricultural, food processing, and retail sectors account for 6.8% of GDP and 12.5% of all jobs. The province produces fresh and processed food worth $19.2 billion, while only consuming $15.4 billion (a 25% surplus), and retailers imported $6.9 billion worth of fresh and processed foods last year. About 44% of Quebec’s raw and processed food production finds its way into Quebeckers’ plates, the rest being exported to other Canadian provinces (30%) and overseas (245) [20].
We can note here that since 1941, the evolution of Quebec’s agricultural landscape is characterized by the decrease in the number of farms and a market concentration dominated by few producers. And this is very similar to what we see in other Canadian provinces and other industrialized countries [8].
As it was already mentioned in this report, local food systems are proliferating in Quebec [8]. There is now a growing interest in the production, processing, and buying of local food. New “local food systems” are being set up to organize the various components that will meet the needs of all the stakeholders in the community or region [7].
The initiatives that are helping in this process in Quebec are: organic and other specialized agriculture ((316 certified organic livestock production units, 341 organic maple syrup producers, and 585 certified farms [18]), farmer’s markets (network of 82 open markets, seasonal or permanent, daily or occasional), community- supported agriculture (CSA) and solidarity markets (a new phenomenon, solidarity markets allow consumers to order through a web portal) [8].
Despite the growth of these initiatives, there remain several obstacles inhibiting their expansion. The three main obstacles are: lack of financing (for example, banks are not willing to issue micro-loans at competitive rates), economic power (in fact, the food retail sector is marked by high rates of market concentration; supermarkets have been able to achieve economies of scale because they do not have to pay for the social and environmental costs of their business practices), and knowledge (the lack of demand for local food attributed to a lack of information about where to procure it, and a lack of information about prices).
Now, identifying every obstacle, policy and existing initiative related to the nodes in the value chain in the literature of [1], we notice there is a dilemma between land protection and land access. This is mostly attributed to the case of zoning policy.
In 1978, and in the context of rapid economic development, speculation on land, fragmentation of the land, and non-agricultural use, the government of Quebec passed agricultural land protection legislation, the second in Canada. This law reflected a desire to plan and regulate in this area and an overseeing agency was also created – the Commission de protection du territiore agricole du Quebec (CPTAQ). This law effectively organized the use of agricultural land over the years. However, today with greater concentration of ownership and fewer people in the business of food production, the zoning law is causing problems since it acts as barrier for entry for smaller and more value-added producers who need smaller plots [8].
In fact, the zoning law is one of the laws that facilitates industrial long-distance agriculture at the expense of small-scale sustainable agriculture and short supply chains (e.g. zoning laws that favor big farms, subsidy systems that favor big retailers, funding schemes targeted at large producers, and so on) [1]. At the same time, we can see this on an international level – the pressure for city expansion, speculation and non-agricultural use is still strong.
Moreover, beyond the provincial level, municipalities have authority over certain zoning laws and by-laws that can facilitate or inhibit the development of LFS, particularly regulations concerning the use of agricultural zones for commercial purposes [1]. Though aimed at protecting agricultural zones from industrial development and other forms of encroachment, such by-laws effectively prevent on-farm direct sales or the use of farmland for farmers’ markets or farm shops [17] and organizers of such initiatives typically have to negotiate with municipal authorities for special permits or designated spaces [3].
However, agricultural zoning per se (designations for tax purposes) falls within provincial government jurisdiction or a land management agency, such as the Agricultural Land Reserve in British Columbia or the Commission pour la protection des terres agricoles du Québec [1].
To conclude, to achieve this vision of food sovereignty, LFS have to go beyond the distance traveled by food products before they reach the final consumers (food miles) and integrate social, economic and environmental benefits. Also, Farmers’ markets, CSAs and other initiatives are becoming increasingly present in industrial countries in recent years, but they still only represent a very small part of the food market [1].
For example, in Quebec, Équiterre’s CSA went from 1 to 102 farms between 1995 and 2006. It contributes to 73% of the average turnover of the farms, and yields an average annual profit of $3,582 annually when conventional agricultural produces an average annual loss of $6,255 [2] . In addition, regarding the zoning law, there are some good possibilities.
In fact, within the existing law, new initiatives are emerging elsewhere and new possibilities can be developed in other provinces. These include cooperative land trusts and the collective buying of land and green belts [8]. However, other aspects require reform. CPTAQ should be more flexible to LFS needs.
For example, in one case, the CPTAQ has agreed to allow municipal authorities in Ste-Camille to take management over a large farm that was for sale in order to help new young families establish small farms. In order to do this, the CPTAQ de-zoned the land, thus technically empowering municipal authorities to develop it however they chose; however, there was an understanding that the municipality would keep the land for agricultural use.
If this case is inspiring, there should be a formal way to make such arrangements without necessarily de-zoning the land and placing it at risk. The main and remaining question is how to allow the creation of small farms without endangering land protection for the future of agriculture in Quebec, especially in the context of rising non-agricultural activities in farming areas (e.g. shale gas exploitation) [8]. Even though there is no national policy to promote LFS, provincial governments have been active with various programs in this area.
There is much variations from one provinces to another, but the existing programs tend to cluster on the demand side, focusing on consumer education and marketing projects, even running some themselves (the origin labeling and promotion programs). To a lesser extent, there are some programs to support organic farming (transition programs) but very few focusing on processing and distribution. Moreover, it is important to provide knowledge for policy action on food sovereignty given the gap which exists in understanding the impact of existing public policy initiatives [1].
Agriculture is a globally occurring activity which relates directly and powerfully to the present and future condition of environments, economies, and societies. While agriculture has provided for basic social and economic needs of people, it has also caused environmental degradation which has prompted a burgeoning interest in its sustainability [17].
Moreover, like the concept of ‘sustainable development’, the term ‘sustainable agriculture’ has been interpreted and applied in numerous ways. At the broadest level there is some consistency in definition [17]. Most analysts and practitioners would probably accept that sustainable agriculture has something to do with the use of resources to produce food and fiber in such a way that the natural resource base is not damaged, and that the basic needs of producers and consumers can be met over the long term [17].
Despite this, it seems that there is little agreement on the meaning of ‘sustainable agriculture’. There is a little agreement on the meaning of ‘agriculture’, let alone the stickiness of a word like ‘sustainable’ [17].
References:
[1] Blouin et al. (September, 2009). LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS AND PUBLIC POLICY: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE. Équiterre &The Centre for Trade Policy and Law, Carleton University.
[2] Chinnakonda, D., and Telford, L. (2007). Les économies alimentaires locales et régionales au Canada: rapport sur la situation. Ottawa: Agriculture et Agroalimentaire Canada.
[3] Connell, D.J., Borsato, R., & Gareau, L.( 2007). Farmers, Farmers Markets, and Land Use Planning: Case Studies in Prince George and Quesnel. University of Northern British Columbia.
[4] Cummins, S. and Macintyre, S. (2002). Food Deserts – Evidence and Assumption in Health Policy Making.” British Medical Journal Vol. 325, No. 7361: 436-438.
[5] Desmarais, A. (2007). La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants. Halifax, London, and Ann Arbor, Michigan: Fernwood Pub. Pluto Press.
[6] Halweil, B. & Worldwatch Institute. (2002). Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market. Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute.
[7] Irshard, H. (2009). Local Food – A Rural Opportunity. Government of Alberta. Agriculture and Rural Development. Retrieved from http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$Department/deptdocs.nsf/all/csi13484/$FILE/Local-Food-A-Rural-Opp.pdf
[8] Lemay J-F. (2009). Local Food Systems and Public Policy: The Case of Zoning Laws in Quebec. Retrieved from
[9] Lyson, T.A. 2004. Civic Agriculture. UPNE. Available at:
[10] MacLeod, M., and Scott, J. (May, 2007). Local Food Procurement Policies:A Literature Review. Ecology Action Centre For the Nova Scotia Department of Energy. Retrieved from
[11 ] Mundler, P. (2007). Les Associations pour le maintien de l’agriculture paysanne (AMAP) en Rhône-Alpes, entre marché et solidarité. Ruralia 2007-20. Available at: http://ruralia.revues.org/document1702.html [Accessed July 15, 2009].
[12] Nierenberg, D., and Reynolds, L. (December 4, 2012). Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production. WorldWatch Institute. Retrieved from http://www.worldwatch.org/supporting-climate-friendly-food-production
[13] Pimbert, M. (2008). Towards Food Sovereignty: Reclaiming Autonomous Food Systems. London: International Institute for Environment and Development.
[14] Pretty, J. (1998). The Living Land: Agriculture, Food, and Community Regeneration in Rural Europe. London: Earthscan.
[15] Rosset, P. & Land Research Action Network. (2006). Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform. Oakland, California & New York: Food First Books.
[16] Smit, B., and Smithers, J. (Autumn, 1993). Sustainable Agriculture: Interpretations, Analyses and Prospects. Department of Geography, and Land Evaluation Group,
University of Guelph. Canadian Journal of Regional Science/Revue canadienne des sciences régionales, XVI:3), 499-524. ISSN: 0705-4580
[17] Wormsbecker, C.L. (2007). Moving Towards the Local: The Barriers and Opportunities for Localizing Food Systems in Canada. Master of Environmental Studies in Environment and Resource Studies. University of Waterloo.
[18] CARTV, (2009). Statistiques pour l’appelation biologique. Retrieved from
[19] FAO. (2011). Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture: Contributing to food security and sustainability in a changing world. Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research (PAR). Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/biodiversity_paia/PAR-FAO-book_lr.pdf
[20] MAPAQ. (2009). Statistiques economiques de l’industrie bioalimentaire. Retrieved from http://mapaq.gouv.qc.ca/fr/md/statistiques/Pages/statistiques.aspx
[21] Vía Campesina. La Vía Campesina: International Peasant Movement—Small Scale Sustainable Farmers are Cooling Down the Earth. Available at: [Accessed June 13, 2009].
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 21, 2013 | ACTION, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Inter Press Service
“We can’t sow our fields, which they have rented for next to nothing. What good do we get out of it?” Guadalupe Ramírez complained about wind farms operating in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Ramírez said, “the governments play favourites with big business; our land produces more than what the companies are offering … They said they would come to help us, but that’s a lie,” this 62-year-old Zapotec Indian told IPS when she and other campesinos came to Mexico City from the municipality of Unión Hidalgo, 560 kilometres to the south, to protest the situation.
The Piedra Larga I wind farm, which has been operating in the town since October 2012, comprises 145 wind turbines producing 90 MW of power. It is the property of Desarrollos Eólicos Mexicanos (DEMEX), a subsidiary of the Spanish company Renovalia Energy and the private U.S. investment firm First Reserve.
In 2007 DEMEX approached local people and began to sign rental contracts with members of the “ejido” or communal land, treating them as if they were independent smallholders and not communal rights holders, and setting an average monthly rental of 20 dollars a hectare. The campesinos of Unión Hidalgo farm between three and four hectares each.
But in other municipalities wind energy companies are paying up to 80 dollars a hectare. Moreover, land tenure in Unión Hidalgo is collective, and all decisions pertaining to ejido land have to be made by the entire assembly of the ejido members, so the contracts signed are not actually valid – a fact that at first was not noticed by those who rented out their land.
Ejido members farming communal land in the municipality accuse DEMEX of tricking them by not explaining the clauses of contracts that were written in Spanish rather than Zapotec, of not calling the obligatory assembly of the ejido members, of polluting their land and of denying them freedom of movement on their land.
In 2014 the company will begin operating the Piedra Larga II wind farm, occupying 300 hectares in Unión Hidalgo, which has a population of 13,970, mainly native Zapotec people. A Resistance Committee against the Wind Farm Project has been created, several of whose members came to the capital to protest on Wednesday Jun. 12.
Their protest shows the increasing discontent of Mexican communities with wind energy projects because of their economic, environmental and social consequences. The future of the sector is turning cloudy, just when Global Wind Day was celebrated on Saturday Jun. 15.
The energy ministry estimated on Wednesday Jun. 12 that wind energy generates 1,304 MW in Mexico, followed by geothermal power with 812 MW, biomass and biogas with 581 MW and mini-hydropower projects with 450 MW. Without including large hydroelectric power stations, renewable energy sources contribute five percent of the total national energy supply, and the proportion is increasing.
The strong winds in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico which includes parts of the southern states of Oaxaca, Tabasco, Veracruz and Chiapas, have made it an epicentre for several wind farm projects. Land ownership in this area is primarily collective and communities are governed by traditional custom.
To date wind energy exploitation occupies 11,000 hectares nationwide, with investments since 2007 totalling five billion dollars, according to the Mexican Wind Energy Association (AMDEE).
The energy reform of 2008 allows individuals and businesses to generate their own electricity from renewable sources, supply it to the national grid and be rewarded with preferential feed-in tariffs.
As a result, many companies are buying cheap wind energy to become self-sufficient in energy and reduce their electricity bills. However, critics of this strategy argue that the communities where wind parks are installed have the least to gain.
“There is a pattern of human rights violations in the communities. Wind energy companies advertise themselves well, offering money and jobs, but the jobs are temporary. The companies’ actions are not transparent, nor do they meet established standards,” Alejandra Ancheita, the head of Proyecto de Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales (ProDESC – Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project), told IPS.
Following the wind energy boom in Oaxaca, activists fear the negative aspects of the model will be repeated in wind farm projects in other states.
“They have brought no benefits. The energy companies violate collective property rights, agrarian laws and the traditional laws of indigenous peoples,” Bettina Cruz, the founder of the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Defence of Land and Territory (APIIDTT), told IPS.
DEMEX has denied the allegations against it, saying that the contracts are valid and that it has the necessary authorisations for construction and operation of the wind park.
“Conditions in the communities have not improved,” said Benjamin Cokelet, head of the Project on Organising, Development, Education and Research (PODER), an NGO for corporate accountability. In his view, the companies may be in violation of international conventions.
In the towns of San Dionisio del Mar, Álvaro Obregón and San Vicente, close to Unión Hidalgo, local people have blocked similar wind energy projects through direct protests and legal appeals.
In the towns of San Dionisio del Mar, Álvaro Obregón and San Vicente, close to Unión Hidalgo, local people have blocked similar wind energy projects through direct protests and legal appeals.
For instance, in San Dionisio, the Spanish company Mareña Renovables is planning a 392 MW wind park with 75 million dollars of financing from the Inter-American Development Bank. But the project is at a standstill due to legal action.
On Tuesday Jun. 11 the Unión Hidalgo Resistance Committee presented a lawsuit to the agrarian court, which deals with land rights, seeking to invalidate the contracts that have been signed and suspend the working of the wind farm and its expansion, with immediate effect.
In April, they presented a complaint to PROFEPA, Mexico’s federal agency for environmental protection, against pollution caused by the wind park.
“It’s not right for the government to negotiate with the companies over our land. We have been badly off ever since they arrived. They say it’s clean energy, but that’s not true: lubricating oil from the turbines is contaminating the soil and the groundwater, the blades are killing birds, and the turbines are noisy,” Esteban López, a 55-year-old Zapotec Indian who grows maize and sorghum, told IPS.
The three private banks financing the project are signatories to the Equator Principles, a set of voluntary guidelines for assessing social and environmental risk in credits, adhered to by more than 70 international financial institutions since 2003.
Cokelet said PODER is considering lodging a grievance under the Equator Principles over irregularities in Unión Hidalgo.
“We are not smallholders, we are community farmers with collective tenure, and the company ignored that. They didn’t explain what they were going to do on our land. The contracts are unfair and one-sided,” Ramírez said.
By 2020, Mexico expects to generate some 12,000 MW from wind power.
From Inter Press Service
Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
