03 November, 2003
BEATING THE AXE - TVE SEES THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
On the eve of global transmission of Blood Timber Earth Report series editor, Robert Lamb reflects on nearly two decades of covering the unfolding tragedy of the destruction of native forests on television.
(Blood Timber transmits (GMT) Monday November 3rd 22.30; Tuesday 01.30, 09.30; Saturday 18.30; Sunday 07.30. And on BBC News 24 Saturday 16.30 and 05.30 Sunday. Local broadcast times available by looking up www.bbcworld.com)
'Flawed TV Show Beats Axe' blared the headline in an Australian newspaper. 'BBC to keep green team...'
After more than a year of examining microscopically every line of a TV programme we made about the clear felling of the temperate rainforest in Tasmania, the only thing the UK Broadcasting Standards Council (BSC) could find wrong was that two sentences might be considered 'unfair' to the Australian timber interests.
The 'Australian Timber Communities' had lodged a formal appeal with the Council claiming that Paper Tiger, the Earth Report in question, was inaccurate and biased in the favour of the environmental groups campaigning to safeguard the ancient forests of the island state. The irony was that Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown complained to the BBC that it was too biased in favour of the timber lobby.
Bob Brown and Don Doug
The episode had a P.G. Wodehouse side to it.
Judging Paper Tiger for the BSC half a world away in Britain, were two Church of England clergymen. When it comes to reporting on forestry in Tasmania, the BBC stricture for 'fair and balanced' reporting is all but impossible. In Tasmania the electorate is split down the middle. Politicians get elected either because they are pro-logging or anti-logging. It is almost as simple as that.
This 'temperate' rainforest is an even more endangered commodity than its tropical cousin. In Canada's British Columbia there are trees that take 900 years to reach maturity. In Chile, the allerce, a tree that was a sapling about the time of the Biblical King David will only just about now be reaching the end of its natural life.
In our Earth Report series on BBC World, we've covered the fate of these ancient arboreal ecosystems from Russia to Rondonia in Brazil.
In the bits of the temperate world where clear felling is still allowed, it is an issue that divides society. In Wealth and Wilderness, our programme from Chile, we told the story of how Douglas Tompkins sold his Esprit clothing firm and used part of the proceeds to buy up a huge chunk of the country's surviving old growth forest, creating the world's largest privately owned park.
In southern Chile, you are either pro 'Don Doug' or anti; he is either a 'gringo green imperialist' or the man who saved South America's last patch of old growth forest.
It's a similar story in Tasmania where the timber industry's hate figure is Greens Senator Bob Brown. Unlike Douglas Tompkins he revels in controversy. The Senator's party was recently described by the London Economist as the 'Third force in Australian politics.'
But it is all relatively civilised. The worst that has happened to the greenies in Hobart is to have the wheel nuts removed from their cars. In Chile, an ex-president and local mayors say rude things about 'Don Doug'. But his Pumalin Park has not been invaded and he is allowed to stay in the country.
A Life and Death Issue
It is very different in the tropical forest countries where if you are a defender of the forest, you risk life and limb.
My introduction to this was in the 1980s when TVE supported Adrian Cowell's Central TV series, Decade of Destruction from the Brazilian Amazon. Several programmes featured rubber tapper leader, Chico Mendes. In one interview he even predicted he would be slain by the people who would like to see the whole of the Amazon turned into cattle pasture.
We recently joined forces with ABC Australia to report the Environmental Investigation Agency's exposure of a ruthless timber poacher, Abdul Rashid in Kalimantan. An Indonesian journalist working on the story had part of his arm cut off by a machete and was left for dead. He eventually needed over 100 stitches.
From the Pacific Coast of Russia we reported in Tiger, Taiga how a tiny troop of WWF-funded guards are fighting a hopeless battle to save the remnants of the original forest from poachers who are supplying about 40 Chinese companies operating there.
Pygmies, Primates and Pillage
In No Hiding Place we showed how building roads to get timber out of the Central and West African rainforest was providing a highway for the bushmeat poachers. They come from as far away as Sudan. Bloody bags intercepted at London's Heathrow airport show that the bushmeat is crossing borders.
This week's programme, Blood Timber tells the story of the descent into virtual slavery of the pygmies or Baka forest people who have watched helplessly as European timber companies in league with corrupt governments and have laid waste to their forest home.
In a follow-up programme we may use footage shot by an incredibly brave local cameraman who has recorded the whole sorry business and who got 90 days on 'death row' in the Republic of Congo for jeopardising the "external security of the state."
We also have an interview with an internationally-funded 'Eco Guard' who admits that when the cameras are on, pyrrhic arrests of poachers are made. But when the foreigners leave, its back to the business of graft and trading bush meat with the drivers of the logging trucks.
The dominant Bantu people can't get enough of it. Each day a train comes into Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon with sacks full of bush meat. And the most prized item on the menu is gorilla or chimpanzee. It is illegal, but there is no policeman in sight.
The Limits of TV
So where does this leave the producer of this kind of programme? In a bind, that's where.
The first concern must always be to protect the people you leave behind. At least Chico Mendes was very much aware of the risks he ran.
This is the era of global TV you get out to millions of homes (267 million in the case of the BBC). And they are watched by potentially-litigious businesses and the decision-makers. Boutros Ghali once famously referred to CNN as the 16th member of the Security Council.
Another is the 8pm watershed (on 24 hour global broadcasters, it is always 8pm somewhere!). You can't show the pictures that reveal the shocking truth. For example, scenes of indigenous peoples in the Philippines being shot and bleeding to death for attempting to use GPS to map their surviving fragment of forest.
The biggest headache for any producer reporting the fate of the forests, is coping with complexity. It is too simple to 'blame' the timber companies. Some try to act responsibly. But they can't get the logs out without building roads, and that allows in the poachers and landless squatters - often desperately poor and forced to eke a living on fragile forest soil.
You can identify the timber barons such as the notorious Bob Hassan and name the companies. But as we showed in Palm Oil, Primates and Pyromania on the Asian forest fires, who buys the palm oil grown on the land that was once jungle? Predominantly companies catering to consumers in the West.
Later this year in Chico's Dream, we will try to explain why deforestation has speeded up by 40% in the Amazon. Nowadays most clearance is for soya cultivation. But who's buying it? Europeans and Americans, that's who.
There are well meaning buyers of timber and other forest products. But despite laudable efforts such as the Forest Stewardship Council's sustainable forestry certificates, there are dozens of ways - as ABC showed in Timber Mafia - to launder illegal timber. That's how it can end up in London furniture shops and as barriers to the sea in UK resorts.
But in the West there is at least some consumer awareness. Increasingly wherever we film from Pacific Russia to Surinam, we are finding that it is ruthless Asian, predominantly Malaysian and Chinese companies, which are at work. Domestically, they are under no pressure at all from a concerned public.
Razing the Ratings
The received wisdom is that serving up a diet of bad news is the surest way to get your programme the axe.
In a way Earth Report faces the same dilemma as the established conservation groups. They feel they have to open a dialogue with the governments and the timber concerns, and give out some good news. For different reasons we also give all sides a chance to express their point of view.
In our recent You Woodn't Know we profiled five stories from the tropics where business and local communities are taking positive steps to safeguard the forests. But this is finger in the dyke stuff.
Take Brazil. Marina Silva, the new environment minister is a disciple of Chico Mendes. Her father was a rubber tapper. Marina Silva was appointed by a sympathetic new President and even has the governors of most Amazonian states on her side. But that did not stop the more powerful ministries of finance, energy and employment overcoming her conservation plans for the rainforest. The new government was elected on a promise of jobs for the poor and landless. So in these ministries' view, turning the forest in southern Brazil into soya, is part and parcel of that policy.
Pushed by a world population still increasing annually by the size of Germany every year, the forces of globalisation and short-termism appear overwhelming. And the tragedy of it all is that you have to look no further than World Bank figures almost everywhere to know that precious little of the income from taxes from timber exports ever get into government coffers to promote 'development'.
Into the End Game
The point is that as the world's hardwoods are removed from the fast dwindling forests, they become more and more valuable. For a minority, extinction is profitable. A Dutch businessman told me that hardwoods are being stored offshore in Japan - a sure sign that business knows a good investment.
And really that is the flaw in the catch all title 'sustainable development'. Hardwoods can take hundreds of years to grow to a commercially valuable girth. It would take even longer to see the original ecosystem come back. The chief forester in Tasmania told us that if we came back in 400 years the forest would look the same.'
The wildlife photographer, Karl Amman, who has been on a one-man campaign to draw the world's attention to the plight of the pygmies and primates of the Congo Basin, simply does not believe conservation can work in countries which lack any semblance of a civil society: "With dysfunctional governments you do not get sustainable logging operations or conservation projects", says Amman.
Bambang Setiono, a senior researcher with the Centre for International Forestry Research is calling for Indonesian companies to be brought to trial. His boss, David Kalmowitz co-authored an article in the Jakarta Post stating that unless strong measures are taken "..the forestry industry will practically cease to exist within 10 to 15 years". He warns of unemployment and social unrest. "Surely", he concludes, "no-one wants to see this happen."
The problem is that there are a handful of ruthless businessmen who don't care. Timber poachers and corrupt officials make a fast buck and invest their ill-gotten gains. For them that is sustainable.
Keeping afforested watersheds intact to keep water flowing to fields and favellas; harvesting forests for 'non-timber' products such as medicines and food; preserving biodiversity for future generations; getting income from nature tourists. These are the kind of 'ecosystem services' that may contribute as much as US$30 trillion each year to the global economy. But if you are a hard-pressed minister outside an environment and wildlife department, these services don't create enough new jobs and tax revenues. Immediate conversion to palm oil or soya seems a better bet.
Our brief at Earth Report is to report on the health of the planet. There are many forces at work that are accounting for the unfolding catastrophe. We shall continue to cover them. We shall continue to get the films shown in the developing nations such as China. But after 20 years of covering the issue, I cannot help but notice how much greater is the despair felt by those who have been working so long and so hard to warn the world about the gravity of the crisis that is now upon us.
For more information on some of TVE's forest films, see the relevant programme pages:
Blood Timber
You Woodn't Know
Wealth and Wilderness
No Hiding Place
Tiger Taiga
Paper Tiger
Timber Mafia
Indonesia: Palm Oil, Primates and Pyromania
Decade of Destruction
Also watch for Chico's Dream starting the week of December 22.
tve is a collective name for Television for the Environment and Television Trust for the Environment. Television for the Environment is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales (registered office 21 Elizabeth Street, London SW1W 9RP, company number 1811236)and a registered charity (charity number 326585). Television Trust for the Environment is a registered charity (charity number 326539).