Three-quarters of the world's temperate rainforests, an estimated five million hectares, are on the Pacific coasts of Canada, the United States and Chile. Ninety-five percent of the United States' temperate rainforest has been destroyed, while in B.C. and southern Chile approximately forty percent still remains in each area.
Clear-cut logging on a vast scale is rapidly foreclosing the opportunity to preserve these forests. The remaining pristine areas are as much coveted by trans-national forest companies in Chile as in B.C.. Chilean old-growth native forests (including all types of temperate forests, not just rainforest) are being destroyed at the rate of 122,000 hectares per year, or about 10 soccer fields every half-hour.
At this rate Chile's 4.75 million hectares of unprotected, native forests would be eliminated in just 39 years and in even less time if the rate of logging continues to accelerate. Additionally, the most ecologically valuable stands ~ because they are the most commercially viable ~ that always fall first.
The destruction is not only ecological, but social. Just as in B.C., lack of local control over the land and its resources is at the heart of the problem. The Mapuche natives' symbolic land recuperations in 1992 were met with the detention of one hundred people by the police. According to one native Mapuche "if we lose the land, we lose our language and slowly we will also disappear." With little participation of local people in decisions regarding the management of their natural resources, sustainable community-based alternatives ~ inclusive of the indigenous people ~ are displaced by the interests of trans-national corporations.
Does this rush to ecological monotony and social dislocation have a corresponding economic benefit? No. The paradox is the squandering of the economic potential of Chilean forests as one of the world's richest ecosystems is reduced to wood-chips by foreign capital and state subsidies. Foreign multinationals, which don't see the value of the forest until it is cut down and don't have a stake in maintaining its sustainability for the local people, twice rob them of the economic potential of their land: first, as only a fraction of the forest's economic potential is utilized, and second, as much of this wealth escapes the community and even the country.
The sustainable alternative is a locally-controlled forest industry which transforms the wealth of the forest into valuable forest products, not wood-chips, and guarantees the forest's ecological integrity. This ensures that the economic benefits stay in the community and will continue to stay for future generations. Forestry legislation currently under discussion in Chile, while necessary for the rational management of native forests, has some sections which threaten to exacerbate rather than alleviate the ailing health of Chilean forests. This law, Recovery of Native Forest and Promotion of Forest Management, would privatize many of the functions of Chile's National Forestry Corporation (CONAF), rather than strengthen its regulatory effectiveness. It would stack a forestry consultative committee primarily with industry representatives and foresters to the exclusion of indigenous peoples, environmentalists, forestry workers, and scientists. And it would officially authorize the continued substitution of native forests with plantations of the fast- growing Monterey pine and Eucalyptus, which has long been carried out informally with tacit state approval. Such official sanction for the chipping of pristine forests to make way for plantations makes little sense given the three million hectares of deforested land that is already available for plantation forestry.
What you can do
Please send letters to Chile and copies to:
Project WILD,
20 Water Street,
Vancouver, B.C, V6B 1A4,
fax: 604-683-8229, ph: 604-669-9453
Send or fax letters
generically to:
Excelentisimo Señor Presidente, Republica de Chile
Casa de la Moneda, Santiago, Chile.
Fax 011-562-697-3262.
Señor Presidente del Senado,
Senado de la Republica, Valparaiso, Chile.
Fax 011-563-223-2654.