Amazon arrow attack should be a wake-up call for the Forest Stewardship Council
One Peruvian logger dead and another injured in encounter with indigenous people in "isolation" inside FSC-certified concession
If you buy a piece of furniture, a birthday card, wrapping paper or perhaps some other forest-derived product certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) you don’t expect it to have been sourced from a timber operation that is arguably threatening the survival of indigenous people, or encroaching on their land without permission as well as blocking an attempt to protect it. Right? You don’t expect the loggers themselves to be sometimes working at serious risk from being attacked by those very same indigenous people, and shot at with bows and arrows. Right?
For years Peruvian indigenous federation FENAMAD has been warning about the dangers of logging companies operating in FSC-certified concessions in the country’s Madre de Dios region that include the territories of indigenous people living in “isolation”, most commonly known as the “Mashco-Piro.” Not only might the loggers transmit potentially fatal germs and diseases to the Mashco-Piro if any kind of contact is made, but there is always the possibility of violence too.
And now it has finally happened. Just over a week ago, on Sunday 21 August, loggers from a company called Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT) were on a beach along the River Tahuamanu when the Mashco-Piro appeared and loosed arrows at them. One man, reportedly named Genis Huayaban Padilla, was gravely wounded and rushed to hospital, while another, Jean Marcos del Águila Ángulo, was found dead several days later. The remains of his body were pulled out of the water by a policeman, close to where the attack took place.
“They were fishing near the bridge the company built over the river,” Julio Cusurichi, FENAMAD’s president, tells me. “But that’s the Mashco-Piro’s territory. It’s only natural they’re going to defend it.”
No one - not Peru’s government, the logging company nor the FSC - could convincingly argue they were unable to envisage this happening. The crux of the problem dates back precisely 20 years when the Madre de Dios Reserve for the Mashco-Piro and other indigenous people in “isolation” was established, but it was a mere 34% the size of what FENAMAD had proposed. The very next month, May 2002, the government signed contracts for numerous logging concessions that were immediately to the east of the new reserve and included areas which would have been inside it if FENAMAD’s proposal had been properly heeded. In other words, instead of making that forest off-limits and respecting the rights of some of the most vulnerable indigenous people in the world, it was opened up to industrial-scale logging companies felling mahogany, cedar and other valuable tree species.
Two of those concessions are MCT’s, which, together with a third, form a 130,000 acre area run by an entity calling itself Consolidado Catahua. Despite the FSC’s claims to respect and indeed even “prioritise” indigenous peoples’ rights, including that of free, prior and informed consent, it has certified the company’s operations there for many years, with the most recent renewal coming in late 2020.
This has been made all the more egregious by various factors. One, a proposal to expand the reserve eastwards so that it would include parts of what are now MCT’s concessions was approved in 2016 by the Ministry of Culture (MINCU) and the Peruvian state’s Multi-Sector Commission responsible for establishing and updating reserves for indigenous people in “isolation”, although a Supreme Decree law is still required to make that a reality. This is particularly significant not only because it is an essential step towards making the reserve bigger and thereby more faithfully respecting FENAMAD’s initial proposal, but because it constitutes further acceptance from the state that those areas are indeed part of the Mashco-Piro’s territories.
Two, apparently irrespective of those 2016 decisions by MINCU and the Commission, MCT has not only continued to operate but it has been developing and expanding its infrastructure. According to FENAMAD, between 2017 and 2019 the company cleared at least 50 kilometres of access roads in the parts of its concessions that stand to be included in the expanded reserve, as the map below illustrates.
Three, the threats to the Mashco-Piro et al in Madre de Dios have been acknowledged and highlighted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which 15 years ago issued “precautionary measures” urging Peru to “take all the necessary measures to guarantee their lives and personal integrity.” In addition to that, in 2011 FENAMAD submitted a petition to the Commission asking it to request Peru to immediately “protect the lives, personal integrity, health, way of life, culture and existence” of the indigenous people in “isolation” in that region. A hearing on that petition was held in June this year, although the Commission has still not decided whether it will admit it or not.
Four - and perhaps most uncomfortably, most embarrassingly for the FSC - FENAMAD has previously warned them about MCT. For example, in July 2020 the federation wrote to the FSC-Peru’s president Marco Romero and others about the “imminent risks” posed to the Mashco-Piro et al, following the company’s receipt of special permission from the state to re-start its operations during the Covid-19 pandemic, which for obvious reasons meant that their operations posed even more of a threat to indigenous people in “isolation” than they would have done otherwise.
“We consider it pertinent to reiterate that the concessions which make up the Consolidado CATAHUA and have been certified by the FSC correspond to the ancestral territory of the indigenous Mashco Piro people in isolation,” FENAMAD told FSC-Peru’s Romero. “That has been recognised by the Peruvian state during the process to update the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve to an Indigenous Reserve.”
The response: just a brief letter from an FSC-certifier, NEPCon Peru, part of what is now called Preferred by Nature, saying that in September 2020 an audit for MCT’s certification would be conducted and “third parties” like FENAMAD would be contacted. Somewhat incredibly, MCT’s certification was renewed and is scheduled to run until 2025.
But that was before the recent, tragic events along the River Tahuamanu, one logger’s grisly death and the severe wounding of another. Surely this is now enough for the FSC to accept that that forest should be in an off-limits indigenous reserve, and that for as long as MCT continue to operate there it shouldn’t be certified? Surely it is obvious, if somehow it wasn’t before, that timber coming out of those concessions is not “responsibly sourced”, as certification supposedly requires?
The FSC, based in Germany, didn’t respond to questions.