Thirty years of action: From demons to heroes

Renowned science writer and Fern Board member Fred Pearce has reported for decades on tropical deforestation. In this essay marking Fern’s 30th anniversary, he chronicles one of the biggest transformations in that time: how forest dwellers went from being widely seen as driving tropical deforestation, to being recognised as holding the solution to it.

Three decades ago, almost all media images of tropical forest destruction featured belligerent-looking farmers wielding firebrands and machetes.

Most commentators agreed with the widely quoted environmental scientist Norman Myers that “more rainforest is destroyed by peasant farmers than by anyone else,” and that taking control of the forests away from them was a big part of the solution.   Back then, Fern’s founding ethos of “dedication to protecting forests and the rights of people who depend on them” was regarded by many as an oxymoron. You couldn’t do both.

But change was in the air.  As an environment journalist, I first stumbled on the emerging debate in 1989, while researching a book called Green Warriors. I heard the conventional anti-peasant view from European greens in the offices of WWF, Friends of the Earth and others, but encountered a very different agenda while visiting FoE’s top affiliate in the Global South, Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM).  

Over lunch at their offices in Penang, the staff there insisted that the best way to protect tropical forests was by reasserting local control, rather than stripping it away. To show me this in practice, they sent me to their rainforest office in Sarawak. Its local chief, Harrison Ngau, was supporting native tribespeople who were being arrested 
for setting up roadblocks to keep logging companies out of their forests. This was at a time when WWF Malaysia was heavily funded by the same logging companies.

Later, SAM’s environmental heretics were adopted by the mainstream movement. Ngau won the Goldman Environment Prize, and the Penang group’s in-house economist Martin Khor went on to be a consultant for the World Bank and other international agencies. But back then, feeling unable to change the international environmental agenda, they set up their own global body, the World Rainforest Movement. They initially found more friends in Europe and America among human rights groups than environmentalists. People such as Marcus Colchester, then at Survival International in London, who when I interviewed him that year, was fuming at the number of times WWF and others turned up on the wrong side in his battles to help cultural minorities. 

Colchester subsequently founded the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) - putting environmental justice at the heart of conservation.  The Penang renegades were also the inspiration for the founding of Fern in 1995.

Displaced at gunpoint

Change was afoot. And not before time. The supposed damage being done to forests by peasant farmers and Indigenous Peoples was being used widely to justify draconian expulsions of traditional communities from their forests. In central Africa alone, anthropologists estimate that 40,000 people were permanently displaced from nine protected areas, with many more deprived of their hunting and gathering grounds. Often at gunpoint.

A few mainstream figures were becoming concerned at the human fallout from their conservation strategies. After an in-house coup in 1993, WWF had a director-general, Claude Martin, who publicly warned his colleagues that in their hands, environmental protection was “beginning to look just as narrow and selfish as the imperialism of old”, often taking “little or no account of the rights and needs of local people.” 

In 2004, I wrote a short authorised history of WWF for Claude Martin. In it, I reiterated his view that “too often in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, WWF helped organise the expulsion of tribal groups from their land on the pretext of preserving wildlife. The result… was often to alienate the very people who had successfully shared the land with big game for centuries.” The words were endorsed by Martin. But his organisation’s staff still found the message hard to accept, and edited out those sentences from the published version.

Community control

The tragedy was that this “fortress conservation” approach was usually both unnecessary and counterproductive. The environmental case against traditional methods of exploiting the biological largesse of the forests was unravelling. Not just against hunting and gathering, but also shifting cultivation. Often derisorily called “slash and burn”, this was a time-honoured and widely practised system of clearing patches of forest to cultivate the soil for a couple of years, before moving on, allowing the forest to recover.  

A 1997 review for the World Resources Institute (WRI) noted that: “Shifting cultivation and the people who practice it are widely perceived… to be primitive, backwards, unproductive, wasteful, and exploitative and destructive of the environment… They have been blamed for most of the world's tropical deforestation, land degradation, and climate disruption.” But as the widely revered Cornell agronomist David Pimentel had put it two years before, “a growing community of scholars and development experts” held that slash-and-burn was often “ecologically sound” and “adapted to the environment in which it is practiced.”  

Pimentel called for more studies, arguing that their findings “may serve in the political defence of Indigenous societies”. And so it has proved. Ever since, I have reported on a growing body of research – from Borneo to Brazil and Peru to the Philippines – showing the superiority of Indigenous and community conservation and management of forests.

Not many policymakers – or other journalists - noticed this new research until 2014, when a report from the WRI and the Rights and Resources Initiative, reviewing 130 studies from around the world, concluded that deforestation rates inside Indigenous reserves were typically only a tenth of those in forests outside, including in state-protected areas. 

“Many people still think if governments give communities the rights to forests, they will just cut them down,” David Kaimowitz, a former head of the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and by then also a member of Fern’s board, told me. “But the evidence shows that community control is usually the best way to conserve those forests.”  

The growing political presence of the wider movement of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities has underlined the message, which Kaimowitz has carried wherever he went.  In 2021, while working for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the lynchpin of global policymaking on forests and farming, he authored a report on how local communities “are the best resource to protect the Amazon rainforest”. He noted - somewhat sarcastically, I thought - that “as more and more forest not managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities disappears, the conservation community has realized that increasingly these are the only forests left.”

Or some in the community have realised this. But not all, for the debate goes on. Kaimowitz told Mongabay in 2021: “Conservation has two strong long-standing strains. One harks back to nobles and moguls, who wanted to stop villagers from poaching big animals they hunted for trophies. The other finds its voice among those who depend on (and often nurture) nature to survive. The question is who will speak for conservation?”

Fortress conservation has lost the intellectual high ground. But the old ethos has not gone away. In 2020 the UN Development Programme, following up media investigations, concluded that for many years after Martin left, WWF leaders continued to turn a blind eye to how they funded the brutal treatment by park rangers of Batwa people seeking to return to ancestral lands in national parks in Central Africa.

Two years later, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, an arm of the African Union, condemned the wholesale expulsion of thousands of Batwa people from the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, and said they should receive an apology, compensation and be allowed to return to their ancestral homes.  But the groundbreaking ruling has yet to be implemented. And the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which has helped manage the park area since its inception and has been effectively in charge since 2022, still refuses to tell me whether it supports the ruling or will help to implement it.

Europe’s hidden hand in tropical deforestation

So, if it is not the peasants destroying the forests, then who is?  The full truth emerged in 2014,  with a detailed analysis of trade and other data by independent researcher Sam Lawson, formerly at Chatham House in London and now founder director of Earthsight. He found that commercial agriculture is now responsible for more than 70% of all tropical deforestation, and half of that deforestation is illegal. Internationally traded commodity crops such as palm oil, soy, beef and cocoa are the prime culprits, and the EU is their biggest importer.

Fern’s co-founder Saskia Ozinga drew the lesson from my news report on the study: “Belying its environmental rhetoric, Europe’s is the hidden hand in tropical deforestation.” Or as Kaimowitz put it at a conference organised by Fern, Europe’s supermarkets have become “crime scenes.”

Lawson’s analysis, subsequently confirmed by others, became a cornerstone of Fern’s successful campaign over the past decade to create an EU Deforestation Regulation that will require traders to eliminate the EU’s devastating footprint in tropical forests. Though Fern is still working to ensure the EU deals with concerns about how the requirements of those regulations will impact on smallholders, they come into force at the end of 2025.

Amid the new normal, it is worth remembering the scale of the narrative change that has overtaken rainforest policymaking (if not always the practice) in the past three decades, and the role of Fern and its allies in bringing that about.  

Suffice to say, the “crime scenes” when Fern started were widely believed to be distant forest clearings where forest dwellers scratched a living.  Today they are in a supermarket aisle near all of us. 

This piece was first published in Fern's 2024 Annual Report.
Image: Bruno Kelly/Amazônia Real/Flickr

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