Bio-diesel is fuelling starvation throughout the world - 120 million native people threatened

With the World Food Summit starting in Rome next week (16th – 18th November) the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) has warned of the dangers of increasing the production of bio-diesel at the expense of native peoples. Some 120 million native peoples in Asia, Africa and South America are threatened with starvation and the destruction of their means of life if new plantations of energy plants are set up on a large scale. Heads of state from all over the world will be discussing at the World Food Summit how starving people can be given more effective aid. The GfbV called emphatically for a moratorium on new large-scale projects for the production of bio-fuels and the extension of large plantations.

"For centuries indigenous peoples have managed to survive by adapting to new conditions”, said the STP Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius, on Wednesday in Göttingen. "But now they are powerless since radical forest clearance and the sale of more and more land to foreign investors are making these people homeless.” The problem cannot be resolved by the provision of aid in the form of food, for if these forest peoples can no longer live from the forest their existence and identity are destroyed. "What the colonialists did not manage in hundreds of years is now being done in next to no time.”

In Indonesia alone 45 million native people are threatened, reported the human rights expert. Every year two million hectares of forest are lost, more than ten million hectares have been scheduled for new plantations since 2004. The situation is particularly bad for the more than 300 indigenous peoples in West Papua, in the west of New Guinea . Every year hundreds of thousands of hectares of land are leased to investors at home and abroad. The heavy use of pesticides and the enormous need of the plantations of water have such an adverse effect on arable farming in the vicinity that harvesting becomes practically impossible. On the island of Kalimantan ( Borneo ) three million hectares of forest have been destroyed for plantations, but so far only 300,000 hectares have actually been used for planting oil-palms. In the neighbouring Malay province of Sarawak the native people have resisted the radical clearing process, with the result that several of their leaders have been arrested since August 2009.

Although Burma is constantly ravaged by famine the military government has now decreed that every province must set aside at least 202,000 hectares of land for the planting of the energy plant jatropha. In Cambodia also, in Laos and in India the situation of many indigenous peoples is desperate as the result of the selling-out of their land. In India one million hectares of jatropha are to be planted by 2012. Even in the Indian federal province of Mizoram large-scale plantations are scheduled although there was a famine in the winter of 2007.

Ethiopia is planning the use of three million hectares for large-scale plantations by 2011. Both the nomads of Afar and the farmers of Oromo would be the ones to suffer. In Kenya , Tanzania and Uganda too the native people are suffering from the ruthless exploitation. In South America the situation is particularly bad in Columbia .

Ulrich Delius can answer questions arising at politik@gfbv.de