Doesn’t Germany’s development bank care about indigenous peoples’ rights?
Millions set to be disbursed for Peruvian "sustainable" logging program but KfW has ignored human rights concerns
Germany’s KfW Development Bank is currently poised to start disbursing the first of 60 million euros to Peru’s national forests agency in an apparent attempt to promote a more “sustainable” timber industry, yet at the very same time that agency, the Servicio Nacional Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre (SERFOR), is ignoring calls to annul almost 50 illegally-established logging concessions extending for some 300,000 hectares across the remote Amazon. Doesn’t KfW, owned by the German state, see the irony? In an ostensible effort to support “sustainable” operations, which is effectively impossible anyway, it is about to finance an institution that is sanctioning - or at least turning a blind eye to - illegal practices on a potentially massive scale.
In fact, it’s worse than that. Some of the German funds - 54 million in loans, 6 million simply a “financial contribution” - is set to be disbursed in turn by SERFOR to a number of Peru’s regional governments, including that of Loreto (GOREL), which not only has a long, notorious history of facilitating and fomenting illegal logging but established the almost 50 offending concessions which SERFOR has been refusing to abolish.
In other words, KfW is also about to finance an institution that is one of the biggest promoters of illegal - and by definition unsustainable - logging in the country.
The reason the concessions are illegal is because they include the territories of indigenous people in “isolation”, living so remotely in the depths of the Amazon, mostly along the border with Brazil, that they have no regular contact with anyone else. Several of the concessions overlap the supposedly off-limits Yavari Tapiche Reserve, which was created in 2021 after an almost 20 year struggle, while the majority include vast swathes of the proposed Yavari Mirim Reserve. Establishing those concessions not only violated Peru’s legally-binding international obligations, but explicitly contravened the country’s forest law and regulations dating from 2011 and 2015.
To date, SERFOR has consistently ignored calls by national indigenous federation AIDESEP to annul the concessions, as it has the explicit power to do under a 2017 law, even though the institution’s own top brass appear to fail to understand that.
Likewise, GOREL has ignored AIDESEP’s pleas to abolish the concessions too.
Similarly, KfW has blanked AIDESEP as well. A letter from the Lima-based federation to the Germans last March went unanswered, while a follow-up sent earlier this month has merited no response yet either.
“We’re writing to you, formally and reiteratively, to express our deep concern about the serious impacts on the rights of our brothers living in isolation in Loreto as a result of the actions and failures to act of Loreto’s regional government and SERFOR, both of which are institutions set to benefit from the “Program for the Promotion and Sustainable Management of Forest Production in Peru”,” AIDESEP wrote to KfW on 5 January, before urging the bank to “adopt the corresponding actions to lobby these institutions in order to guarantee the isolated peoples’ rights” and stating that allowing logging in their territories constitutes a “serious and imminent risk to their lives, health and integrity.”
AIDESEP claims to represent more than 50 indigenous peoples in Peru, more than 2400 indigenous communities and almost 120 indigenous organisations, 96 of which are listed on the lefthand side of every page of their letter to KfW. Can you imagine receiving a letter like that - particularly if you’re a publicly-owned entity claiming to be “committed to responsibility” and touting your contributions to “climate and environmental protection”, as KfW does - but failing to reply?
No one at KfW should underestimate the potentially catastrophic impacts of permitting loggers to operate in areas inhabited by indigenous people in “isolation”: forest essential to their survival invaded and partially destroyed, game and other wildlife driven away by chainsaws and other machinery, possible encounters, conflict, the transmission of germs and diseases, and fatal epidemics, to name just a few. When it’s logging happening in these kinds of regions, sustainability should be the least of anyone’s concerns.
“Implementation of the Project is currently being prepared. We take AIDESEP’s concerns serious [sic] and will address them with [SERFOR] as soon as the operative phase of the project in Loreto starts,” a KfW spokesperson tells me after I asked if they will take any action in response to AIDESEP. “A response to AIDESEP is currently being coordinated.”