What The Washington Post missed about an 'uncontacted tribe'
US newspaper failed to mention the Forest Stewardship Council in a logging v indigenous rights battle
In many ways it was encouraging that The Washington Post recently published an article about a group of indigenous people - the “Mashco Piro” - living in “isolation” in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon. After all, such “uncontacted tribes”, as they’re sometimes dubbed, receive scant attention from mainstream media, despite the comparatively huge, biodiversity-rich and/or carbon-rich areas they usually live in and the severity of the threats facing many of them.
The article’s focus was how a logging company called “Canales Tahuamanu” - actually Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT) - owns a concession - in reality, two adjacent concessions - that includes part of Mashco-Piro territory. MCT has been operating there for years. This is despite the dangers posed to the Mashco-Piro and the company’s own workers, the fact that it means destroying the forest the Mashco-Piro depend on to survive, and the way such operations obviously violate Peruvian and international laws, as well as certain human rights standards.
However, the Post failed to do at least two very important things. One, it didn’t make clear that the initial proposal for the Madre de Dios Reserve for the Mashco-Piro and other indigenous people in “isolation” had included the entirety of what are now MCT’s concessions, but that when the reserve was established, in 2002, that area was excluded. Instead, it was included in two concessions for which MCT signed the contracts the following month. In other words, it was known that forest was part of the Mashco-Piro’s territory, but the government gave it to the logging industry.
In this sense, then, the Post arguably got it backwards when it reported: “The government has granted logging concessions even in areas known to be inhabited by tribes in isolation. Catahua’s [MCT’s] concession dates to 2002. The same year, authorities declared a reserve for the Mashco Piro right next to it.” In fact, it would have been more accurate to say the concession was established right next to the reserve, given that the reserve came first, albeit by only a month.
In this sense, too, the Post’s title - “Loggers encroach on an uncontacted tribe, and the government shrugs” - was fundamentally misleading. The government hasn’t just shrugged! First, it explicitly refused to include that area in a reserve for the Mashco-Piro, then it permitted loggers to operate there by establishing concessions and contracting MCT, and then for years since it has refused to backtrack or u-turn by re-drawing or re-locating the concession and expanding the reserve, despite plenty of lobbying that it should do so.
Somehow the Post also failed to mention that for many years MCT’s concessions have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) - the “world’s largest ethical label”, according to some - despite the fact it claims to respect and even “prioritise” indigenous people’s rights, and therefore won’t certify any concession where such rights are being violated. Really? In a statement sent to me last December the FSC appeared to accept that MCT’s concessions include Mashco-Piro territory, and prior to that, in an in-depth interview with me specifically about MCT, FSC’s International Director General Kim Carstensen admitted that the 2022 killing of two MCT workers by the Mashco-Piro was a “strong indication something has gone seriously wrong” with their certification process in this instance.
To this day, though, MCT is still certified. Presumably the FSC breathed a sigh of relief that the Post didn’t mention them and thereby further call into question the integrity of their label.