The WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, is the most powerful environmental organization in the world and campaigns internationally on issues such as saving tigers and rain forests. The WWF, whose international headquarters are located in Gland, Switzerland, is seen as the world's most powerful conservation organization. It is active in more than 100 countries, where it enjoys close connections to the rich and the powerful. The WWF, with an income of about €500 million a year, has certainly had some important achievements. But a closer look at its work leads to a sobering conclusion: Many of its activities benefit industry more than the environment or endangered species. Governments with grants and funds and the public through its charitable contributions have entrusted a lot of money to the organization. The WWF, with the giant panda as its trademark emblem, has promised to do a lot of good things with the money, like spending it on forests, gorillas, water, the climate, animal and environmental protection. But can the WWF truly protect nature against human beings? Or do the organization's attractive posters merely offer the illusion of help? Fifty years after the organization was founded, there are growing doubts as to the independence of the WWF and its business model, which involves partnering with industry to protect nature. In Sumatra, members of a tribal group reported how troops hired by WWF partner Wilmar had destroyed their houses, because they had stood in the way of unfettered palm oil production.
To create a conservation zone for wild animals people were displaced and resettled to achieve this in what has been labelled "fortress conservation". Experts estimate that in Africa alone, conservation efforts have created 14 million "conservation refugees" since the colonial era. To protect the tiger in India 300,000 families had to leave their homes. Some lucky enough, cAN work as park wardens, taking affluent eco-tourists on tours of the parks and, and preventing their relatives from entering the protected zones, ensuring the area is off-limits for the locals with anti-poaching units to make sure that they stay out.
The Tesso Nilo National Park in Sumatra is one of those typical conservation zones promoted by the WWF. Feri, an environmental activist, calls this form of conservation "racist and neocolonial," and notes: "There has never been forest without people here." According to Feri, thousands of small farms were driven out of the Tesso Nilo, and yet the number of wild animals has actually declined since the conservationists arrived.
"The WWF is in charge here, and that's a problem," says Bahri, who lives in a village near the entrance to the park. No one knows where the borders are, he says. "We used to have small fields of rubber trees, and suddenly we were no longer allowed to go there."
Nowadays, multinational companies and conservationists work hand-in-hand. "The WWF is involved in the transformation of our world into plantations, monoculture and national parks," says Feri, who supports the Indonesian environmental protection organization Walhi. On Sumatra, the world's sixth-largest island, enough wood to cover 88 soccer fields is cut down every hour -- mostly to make way for palm oil plantations. Indonesia is thriving as a result of a boom in palm oil and accounts for 48 percent of global production. The multifunctional oil is used in biodiesel, food products like Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread, shampoo and skin lotion. But the heavy use of pesticides on the monocultures is polluting rivers and ground water. Slash-and-burn agriculture has turned Indonesia into one of the world's largest emitters of CO2. A concession costs about $30,000 in bribes or campaign contributions, reports a former WWF employee who worked in Indonesia for a long time. "Sustainable palm oil, as the WWF promises with its RSPO certificates, is really nonexistent," he says.
Henkel, a Düsseldorf-based company claims, it is making "a contribution to protect the rainforest" and that it supports "the sustainable production of palm and palm kernel oil, together with the WWF." Unilever processes 1.3 million tons of palm oil a year, making it one of the world's largest palm oil processors. Another company involved is Wilmar, one of the world's major palm oil producers.
But how exactly is the forest being protected if it has to be cut down first? The WWF argues that some areas are "degraded" terrain, that is, second-class forest and wasteland. It insists that plantation monocultures and conservation are not contradictory ideas. The WWF calls this approach "market transformation." Andrew Murphy, a young Harvard graduate with African experience in the US Peace Corps, works in the WWF's "Market Transformation" team. He represents the new generation of conservationists. He sees the members of his team as "agents of change," who can "turn" an entire market. Murphy has plenty of these slogans up his sleeve. He says he wants to make the largest producers of and dealers in commodities like soybeans, milk, palm oil, wood and meat more sustainable. And are there successes? Yes, he says, noting that companies now want to see where the commodities come from. Monitoring systems have been set up, he adds. Murphy is referring to standards like the Round Table on Responsible Soy Association (RTRS). The organization invited industry to the RTRS in 2004. Wholesalers like Cargill and companies like Monsanto, which has donated $100,000 to the WWF over the years, had a strong presence at the meeting. "It quickly became clear that this was greenwashing for the genetically modified soybean marketers," says one attendee, referring to the practice of deceptively marketing a product as environmentally friendly. When a few Europeans wanted to talk about the dangers of the herbicide glyphosate, they were quickly silenced. "The Americans' killer argument was that they were 'technologically neutral.'" Undermining its own standards seems to be a specialty of the WWF. In fact, it is this flexibility that brings the organization millions in donations from industry. In the case of soybeans, the group attending the round table meeting negotiated and re-negotiated. It softened some standards and made some concessions, and then, finally, the first 85,000 tons of RTRS soybeans arrived in Rotterdam last June. "It was a success," says biologist Fleckenstein, noting that the WWF had examined the soybeans carefully. "We were especially pleased that this product was genetically unmodified."
The soybeans had come from two giant farms owned by the Brazilian Maggi family. The family conglomerate is considered the world's largest soybean producer, with plantations covering large parts of the state of Mato Grosso in west central Brazil. The Maggis moved there from southern Brazil in the 1980s, bringing their workers with them. They cleared a large swath of the savannah rainforest and planted soybeans. Blairo Maggi became the governor of the state, and in 2005 Greenpeace presented him with its "Golden Chainsaw" award. In no other Brazilian state was as much virgin forest cut down as in Maggi's soybean republic. The areas now occupied by his RTRS model farms were cleared only a few years ago. According to RTRS, the two farms are the only suppliers of the 85,000 tons of certified soybeans that arrived in Rotterdam in June. The only problem is that nothing on the Maggi farms is genetically unmodified.
The indigenous people with the Batin Sembilan tribe live in the middle of Wilmar's Asiatic Persada plantation of 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) On Aug. 10 of last year, the notorious Brimob police brigade destroyed their houses. "They arrested 18 people early in the morning, and some they beat up," reports Roni, the village elder. "Wilmar managers collaborated with Brimob. Then they started shooting, and we took the women and children and ran into the forest." The villagers see the forest as their forest. "We have been living here since the days of our ancestors," Many of the indigenous families fled from the Brimob thugs to nearby PT Reki, one of the last semi-intact forests in the region. But they were not allowed to stay there either, because the area is the site of a reforestation project funded by Germany's KfW development bank and the German environmental organization Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU).
The WWF headquarters seems solidly green and respectable. Silver plaques there commemorate the people to whom the organization owes a great debt: the "Members of The 1001." This elite group of undisclosed financiers was created in 1971 to provide financial backing for the organization. To this day, the WWF does not like to disclose the names of the donors, probably because some of those appearing on the club's list would not exactly help their image -- people like arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and former Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Then-WWF President Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was able to recruit oil multinational Shell as his first major sponsor. In 1967, thousands of birds died after a tanker accident off the coast of France, and yet the WWF forbade all criticism. That could "jeopardize" future efforts to secure donations from certain industrial sectors, WWF officials said during a board meeting. In the late 1980s, alleged poachers turned up in certain African national parks, which had been set up by whites during the colonial period. The WWF decided to fight back. The organization paid for helicopters to be used by the national park administration of Zimbabwe to hunt down poachers. Dozens of people were killed during the missions. In a secret operation, big game hunter Prince Bernhard and John Hanks, the WWF's Africa director, hired mercenaries.
Hunting is now permitted in the massive new parks. Spanish King Juan Carlos, for example, was recently in the news after he broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana. Juan Carlos is the honorary president of WWF Spain, which many find outrageous. In Namibia alone, the WWF has permitted trophy hunting in 38 conservation areas. Rich Europeans or Americans are allowed to behave as if the colonial period had never ended. They are allowed to shoot elephants, buffalo, leopards, lions, giraffes and zebras, and they can even smear the blood of the dead animals onto their faces, in accordance with an old custom. A WWF spokesman defends this practice, saying that quotas have been established, and that the proceeds from this "regulated hunting" can contribute to conservation.
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