'Never has there been more information about the importance of the world’s forests’
Interview with environmental, human rights and anti-corruption campaigner Patrick Alley
I first met Patrick Alley when travelling to one of the remotest indigenous villages in the Peruvian Amazon, very close to the border with Brazil. It was a grim undertaking: four men from the village, Alto Tamaya-Saweto, had been brutally murdered six months beforehand, most likely by loggers. Alley was visiting as a representative of Global Witness (GW), the UK-headquartered campaigning NGO which he co-founded in the early 1990s, while I was there to report for The Guardian on the murdered men’s relatives’ search for justice - an encounter that subsequently led to me working as a GW consultant for some years.
Almost a decade later, Alley has now retired from GW and his second book, Terrible Humans: The World’s Most Corrupt Super-Villains and The Fight to Bring Them Down, is due to be published next month. Here, via email, he talks to me about the ongoing struggle to protect the world’s forests:
DH: I'd like to start with what might seem like a horribly broad question, but one I suspect you’re not asked often. You've been concerned, in different ways, with the state of the world's forests for a long time now. How are you currently feeling about things - optimistic, pessimistic?
PA: I am pessimistic. Not because I think we can’t halt the destruction of the world’s forests: never has there been more information about their importance, the threats they face, the amazing people who are fighting for them and the implications for all of us if they’re destroyed. But the almost total lack of global political leadership on this issue, combined with rapacious agribusiness and the notoriously corrupt logging business, has resulted, over decades, in ever-escalating levels of deforestation. I once stood on the escarpment of Preah Vihear in north-eastern Thailand, looking out over the Cambodian border at the vast expanse of rainforest stretching seemingly into infinity. Three decades on, this forest has effectively ceased to exist. It’s one of the hardest truths I have experienced or could imagine.
DH: What do you think explains the lack of political leadership?
PA: Probably politicians’ near universal and fatal - for humanity -belief that the presiding economic dogma - the GDP growth model - is compatible with ecological limits - i.e unlimited growth in a finite world. It’s another way of saying that everything can be sacrificed for money. Add to that most politicians are in corporate pockets and that leads to one inescapable outcome.
DH: You mentioned the importance of forests - for biodiversity and wildlife, for the people who live in them, for all of us, for the planet. Did you have a kind of “aha” moment when you realised that, or was it more of a gradual thing over time?
PA: I think I always felt it instinctively, but other than what I read in the press I knew nothing about forests. My first forays into these issues were investigating the Thai-Khmer Rouge timber trade in the mid-1990s, and what I saw were forests being treated as a conflict commodity. When peace came, Cambodia, like many other rainforest countries, began to sell off industrial forest concessions, all of which were fraught with illegality, and I saw the economists of the likes of the World Bank and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) seeing forests as a major economic driver, but in reality the only people who benefitted were corrupt officials, politicians and rapacious logging companies, whilst local forest dependent populations got poorer, lost their traditional way of life and the natural environment they depended on was devastated. By 2000 I had seen many more forests, in south-east Asia and west and central Africa, being screwed by this mythical economic paradigm and I was convinced that old growth and primary forests shouldn’t be commodified. It was more “fuck that” than aha.
DH: Earlier you mentioned “the amazing people who are fighting” for forests, which reminded me of when we visited Saweto in Peru. I’d love to know who you’re thinking of. Who, over the years, have you been most impressed by, or thought particularly effective campaigners and activists?
PA: The most important people fighting to protect forests are the indigenous peoples and other communities that live in them and depend on them for their way of life. Whether in Africa, Asia or Latin America, or tropical or temperate, these people have taken on and been persecuted by corrupt companies, politicians and officials. It requires real courage, determination and skill to take on powers such as these. One person who stands out is Chut Wutty, who used to work for Global Witness in Cambodia and went on to become the country’s most iconic forest activist. He was murdered by military police in 2012 and was the inspiration for Global Witness’s campaign to highlight the work of - and risks to - land and environmental defenders. A personal favourite of mine, though, is when we began documenting Liberian dictator Charles Taylor’s selling off of the country’s forests, mainly via Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven’s Oriental Timber Company (OTC), to fund his civil war. In league with extraordinarily courageous local activists who infiltrated the company, we collaborated with Greenpeace - phone calls at all hours - as we tracked the timber ships to European ports where the Rainbow Warrior ship blockaded them and the Greenpeace crews boarded them. It was high adrenaline stuff that made headline news. Kouwenhoven was subsequently convicted for aiding and abetting war crimes and is still on the run.
DH: That brings us nicely onto the next question I was going to ask. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the strategies of NGOs in the UK and other wealthy countries which have been trying to stop deforestation over the last few decades. Is it possible to generalise about how those strategies have changed or evolved?
PA: In the mid 1990s the status quo, pushed by the likes of the World Bank and FAO, was that tropical forests should be monetised so developing countries could create wealth and alleviate poverty. In those relatively early days of forest campaigning many international NGOs inherited this status quo and tried to work within it - for example, promoting certification schemes like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Global Witness never promoted certification, but we did try to reform the logging sector before we and others saw the light and realised that forest-dependent peoples were the key stakeholders and were ignored, that what is ecologically sustainable logging is economically unsustainable, and that consequently the whole business model was a red herring at best, a fraud at worst, exacerbated by what is one of the most corrupt industries on the planet. At that point organisations like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, GW etc placed much more emphasis on working with local partners and in challenging the status quo. However, the “BINGOs” - the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society etc - largely persisted in the outdated strategy of “fortress conservation”, as well as working hand-in-glove with - and sometimes funded by - the very industries at the heart of the problem.
DH: I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I’ve written a few articles recently about how the FSC has been certifying a company operating in remote Peru - not where we went, somewhere else! - that is clearly violating the rights of - and posing a severe threat to - indigenous people living in “isolation.” Quite extraordinary. So many products here in the UK have the FSC’s stamp on them, and so many people seem to speak highly of the organisation, despite who-knows-how-many exposés. Shooting from the hip, what do you think of the FSC?
PA: I’ve carried out undercover investigations in Cambodia and Vietnam exposing illegal logging by companies buying from Cambodian army units at the behest of Cambodia’s prime minister Hun Sen, and then we carried out stings in UK shops where that timber was being sold as certified, sustainably logged timber. Added to that, GW is just one amongst many organisations that has complained to FSC about the operations of their certified suppliers. Most of our complaints were accepted, but the penalties were meaningless. The bottom line is I don’t trust voluntary certification schemes for any product, especially timber. Not only does certification not work, it misleads the public and consequently exacerbates the problem of illegal and unsustainable logging - so these schemes are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Legislation is the only thing that can work and even then it’s hard.
DH: Just a few more things before we finish. You said at the beginning that in general you were pessimistic about the state of the world’s forests - but are there any particular things you’re optimistic about?
PA: A reason for optimism is that indigenous people and forest dependent communities have gained far more prominence than when we started. They are finding their power and are communicating the truth that they are central to the preservation of the forests. There’s a long way to go but they’re regularly on the world stage and policy makers know that they cannot be ignored, even if they still try to do it. Also, new laws like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, whilst weaker than they should be, are pretty groundbreaking.
DH: Your second book, Terrible Humans, is out soon. Have you enjoyed becoming a published author?
PA: I have loved becoming a published author, and also very surprised. I have long felt that some of the issues we’ve worked on are like something out of a [John] Le Carré or [Frederick] Forsyth novel and that many people don’t realise that the real world is closer to the Machiavellian nastiness we’ve investigated. Also, the book, as a dramatic non-fiction, reaches an audience that NGO reports rarely do. It was also lovely to get to talk to former colleagues and to relive old glories, and also reflect on the tough times.
DH: Last question. Just over 20 years ago GW was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, for its work on “blood diamonds.” Did, at any point, you think you might have a chance of winning?
PA: Well, as we were nominated for the Nobel there was a chance of winning and the blood diamond campaign had dealt a blow to some of the nastiest civil wars in Africa. But as a group of around five people then, no, winning was too good to be true. It’s a pity because one Nobel Laureate told me the hotel mini-bar is free for the winners.
DH: Patrick, thank you very much.