No Debt for Nature

There is a dark side to the Northern environmental movement's growing concern with Third World environmental issues, evidenced now in "debt-for-nature" swaps. Good intentions notwithstanding, these arrangements, designed by U.S. environmental groups to save the world's rainforests, are yet another expression of industrialized country imperialism.

Proposed in 1984 by Thomas Lovejoy, then of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), debt-for-nature swaps involve Northern environmental groups paying off part of the debt of a Third World country in exchange for the country agreeing to protect forest land. They have been pursued most vigorously by WWF and The Nature Conservancy.

In theory, all parties benefit from the debt-for-nature arrangement. Banks have devalued loans repaid before their value sinks further; debtor countries' debt burdens are lessened; and the environment is protected.

In practice, debt-for-nature swaps do not work so well. The amount of debt paid off is so small in relation to the overall debt owed by many Third World countries that it is virtually irrelevant. And the protected lands--managed by local conservation groups--are often not protected. Reports on areas set aside in debt-for-nature swaps in Ecuador and Bolivia, for example, indicate that they have been despoiled by companies seeking to exploit their natural resource value.

The most significant problems with debt-for-nature swaps, however, are how they relate to indigenous people. An unstated premise of the swaps is that set-aside lands are governments' to set aside. But indigenous people who live in these areas--though they may not possess legal title to the land--reject this notion. They argue that the land is theirs.

They object most strenuously to the idea that they should help pay off a debt they did not contract. (In fact, many of the loans which now make up the debt funded projects that had directly negative effects on indigenous people.) Santos Adam Afsua, secretary-general of the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle, says, "The debt has been created by a total mismanagement of foreign loans, of foreign capital. The governments are responsible for this poor management and use of resources.... The debt-for-nature swaps cannot take place with our land because that debt is not ours; we have not contributed in any way to that debt."

Similarly, many progressive Third World political and environmental activists oppose any steps which legitimize the debt. In Brazil, a number of groups tied to the Workers' Party of Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva have protested the efforts of WWF to put together a debt-for-nature swap. They charge that Brazil's debt was incurred by a military dictatorship to which banks should not have made loans, and that it should not be repaid at all.

As well as violating the sovereignty of indigenous peoples, debt-for-nature swaps are based on a fundamentally flawed approach to protecting rainforests. While setting aside land is clearly necessary to preserve rainforests, it is a wholly insufficient solution, since it fails to address the root causes of deforestation. The Latin American and Asian experiences with "protected" reserves clearly indicate that such areas will be violated if social pressures on them continue.

Efforts to protect the rainforests should revolve around the following three principles:

First, indigenous people and forest dwellers should be guaranteed custody of the lands they occupy in order to preserve rainforests for future generations. They are morally entitled to it, and all experience indicates that indigenous people have the skills and priorities necessary to preserve forests.

Second, the external pressures which encourage Third World countries to exploit rainforests--primarily those brought on by their foreign debts--must be alleviated. As long as foreign countries are forced to orient their economies toward earning foreign exchange to meet outrageous debt repayment schedules, they will have almost no choice but to pillage their rainforests and other resource bases. The debt must be forgiven, in whole or in large part.

Third, the internal pressures on rainforests--colonists, ranchers and miners pushing in on the forest--must be relieved. What is needed above all is land reform. While issues of internal wealth distribution must be resolved in accordance with the democratic will of a country's population, it should be recognized that much of the wealth and land disparity in Third World countries is a colonial legacy that has been maintained by the economic and military aid policies--as well as direct and indirect military interventions--of Northern governments, especially the United States. Northern groups need not sit by and do nothing; they can work to change their governments' foreign policies.

For thousands of years, rainforests have been a home and provided a way of life for millions of people who have managed to sustain them. Today, they are threatened by the spillover effects of national and international economic and social conflicts. Strategies to preserve the rainforests must recognize and respond to these realities. Debt-for-nature swaps do not.