Author: Simone Lovera

While there has been much interest in the use of markets to protect the environment of late, not everyone is convinced that markets are ultimately good for the environment or good for communities. Aware that environmental markets are still controversial, The Ecosystem Marketplace asked Simone Lovera, of Friends of the Earth International, and a prominent critic of markets, to express her views in a Guest Editorial. We see this as a first in a long list of articles discussing the pros and cons of environmental markets. In future issues we will ask other advocates and critics of markets to express their views. Additionally, to keep the overall discussion on markets fluid, we have a created an e-mail discussion list to allow anyone who is interested in this matter to express their views. To join this discussion group visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ecosystemmarketplace/join. If you prefer, you can also send a letter to the editor at rbayon@yahoo.com.

The Quechua, an indigenous people living in a large part of the South American Andes, believe that the Earth is a mother who cares for people as if they were her children. They call this Mother Earth "Pachamama".

In this perspective, the concept of markets for ecological services is a very strange one. According to the concept, the different functions healthy ecosystems provide to local people -- services such as the provision of food, medicines, fuelwood, water, construction materials, and local climate mitigation -- can be translated into monetary terms, turning people who use these "services" into clients; clients that will, one way or another, have to pay for these functions. For the Quechua, such an approach would be like arguing that a family should force its children to pay for the care their parents provide.

The Centre for International Forestry Research has calculated that one hundred million people depend on forests to supply key elements needed for their survival: goods, services, and incomes. At least one third of the world's rural population, they say, depends on forests for their firewood, medicinal plants, food, and compost for agriculture. And the women of the world have a special relationship with the environment: In many communities, they are the ones who are responsible for fetching water, fodder and fuelwood, as well as gathering medicinal and edible plants. Because they have less money, it is of crucial importance to them that these resources are available, that they are of good quality, and that they can be obtained for free.

When forest values are privatized and commoditized as part of the process to create a market in ecosystem services, the access of nearby communities to the forest tends to be blocked, leaving women without access to the energy, fodder and medicines that make their lifestyles possible. They therefore find themselves forced to buy these products on the market. However, women form the overwhelming majority of the world's monetary poor, largely due to the fact that they spend a great deal of their time on economic activities that are not remunerated in monetary terms. Childcare, parental care, caring for domestic animals and the vegetable garden, cleaning the house and homestead, and cooking; these are all very important economic activities, that ensure household survival and the reproduction of the workforce, but are not recognized in official accounts as contributing to a country's national product. They are particularly important for the monetary poor; families who cannot afford to pay for professional child or parental care, domestic help, or commercially purchased eggs, milk and vegetables.

Women in developing countries work 60 to 90 hours a week. They provide 75% of healthcare services and over 75% of the food consumed throughout Africa. Yet, women seldom get paid for all this work. As they spend so much time on unpaid activities, their income in monetary terms is, by definition, much lower than that of men. Moreover, women worldwide are paid 30 to 40% less than men for comparable work. Even in the UK, the average full-time weekly earnings of women are 72% that of men.

In other words, the money that would be needed to pay for the resources and environmental services that women previously accessed for free from the forest would therefore likely be earned by their husbands, who spend more time on activities that are remunerated in monetary terms, and who earn more cash per hour. The market in environmental services could therefore lead to a greater dependence of women on men.

In this way, blocking free access to medicinal plants, fuelwood, clean water and other resources that are vital for people's livelihoods not only leads to the economic impoverishment and social marginalization of women and other poor sectors of society, it also leads to a cultural and spiritual impoverishment. After all, nature not only provides communities with vital resources, it also provides them with beauty, inspiration and joy.

Regretfully, there is an increasing trend towards blocking the free access to vital livelihood resources like water, fuelwood and traditional medicinal plants. Neo-liberal market theories have stimulated or forced politicians to incorporate these goods, and the carbon sequestration functions of forests, into so-called "markets in environmental goods and services". As demonstrated by the Mbaracayu carbon sequestration project in Paraguay , the privatization and commoditization of forests, and the privatization and commoditization of the carbon sequestration and other services they provide tend to go hand in hand, as the companies or conservation NGOs that acquire the rights to the carbon sequestration usually demand secure rights over the forest itself. After all, the carbon sequestration services are valueless without full control over the forest itself. Privatization, commoditization and the creation of markets for environmental goods and services are thus all inter-related aspects of one and the same trend: to privatize what used to be communal property through market-based conservation mechanisms.

The growing market in "environmental goods and services" has already led to a seemingly unstoppable trend to privatize the provision of drinking water. Despite rapidly growing opposition by social movements and the slowly growing concern of environmental policy-makers, the World Bank and other powerful institutions are still enthusiastically promoting the privatization of water services. In fact, privatization often forms a condition for loans and grants relating to the water sector. And while the privatization of public water services and the privatization of ecological services seem to relate to separate trends, they are both motivated by the same belief in market mechanisms as a panacea for inadequate public management of what is, in the end, a common resource: the water and biodiversity our planet provides.

These institutions are also very much involved in the promotion of other market-based conservation mechanisms, like the sale of protected areas to eco-tourism companies or large conservation NGOs; the sale of genetic resources and associated knowledge to pharmaceutical companies; and the sale of forests to oil companies and other industries that want to offset their carbon emissions and other polluting activities.

As a general trend, these market-based conservation mechanisms tend to block access for those who cannot pay for the environmental "services" nature provides. In part, the movement stems from a belief by many conservation institutions that local communities have a negative impact on natural resources. This belief persists despite the fact that decades of so-called "modern science" and centuries of community experience have shown that indigenous peoples and local communities are perfectly capable of living in harmony with nature. This harmony, however, is only possible as long as their traditional management practices are not devastated by the "blessings" of "modern" industrialization, and as long as their original lands are not taken over by large-scale monocultures, dams and/or mining companies, all of which can force them to move onto fragile lands to which they are not adapted.

Other institutions have accepted the notion that local communities are the key actors in conservation, but they still promote market-based conservation mechanisms, as they argue it would reward communities for the conservation efforts they are making. But experience has shown that communities are seldom -- some would argue never -- competitive in the tough international market for environmental goods and services. The few exceptions are generally the result of pro-active government intervention in the form of development aid or other financial incentives. This fact is clearly demonstrated by the famous case of the Costa Rican environmental payment scheme, which was set up through a major grant by the Dutch government. Fact is, that the Costa Rican scheme for selling carbon credits turned out to be totally uncompetitive as soon as the official development aid dried up.

The trend to privatize biodiversity and watershed services through market-based conservation schemes is also defended with an argument that refers to a very well-known disease: the lack of political will of governments. Just as initiatives like Future Forests are dumping inappropriate trees all over the world to off-set the responsibility of hundreds of "Easyjetters" and other irresponsible oil consumers, water privatization, carbon sinks, and other market-based schemes are off-setting the responsibility of governments to provide affordable, clean water for all, halt climate change, and conserve biodiversity.

As mentioned above, including natural resources in the market for environmental services also makes women more dependent on men. It makes indigenous peoples and local communities who used to manage and collect their own natural resources dependent upon jobs that provide them with a monetary income, thus forcing them to abandon their traditional lifestyles and find employment on large haciendas or in mines. In short, it makes those who do not have money more dependent upon those who do. It makes the poor dependent upon the rich.

The most important Millennium Development Goal governments agreed upon in 2000 is to reduce poverty. Poverty is morally unacceptable in a world that has more than enough resources to provide a decent livelihood for all. Even more unacceptable is the ongoing trend to further impoverish women and other "monetarily disadvantaged" sectors of society through the introduction of neo-liberal market mechanisms that block their access to the resources and services that are vital for their daily survival. Markets for environmental services might be a win-win-win strategy for big industries and large landholders, but for the world's poor they are undoubtedly a lose-lose-lose proposition.

Simone Lovera is coordinator of the Biodiversity Project of Friends of the Earth International, the world's largest federation of environmental grass-roots organizations. She can be reached at lovera1@conexion.com.py. In September 2004 FoEI organized the "Nature for Sale" conference on the impacts of water and biodiversity privatization. See www.foei.org/publications for the report of this conference.