Protecting forests or entrenching inequality?

Deforestation is one of the most avoidable and meaningless sources of carbon emissions in the world. The productivity is appaulingly low. However, some of the frameworks being looked at to solve this problem have been labelled neo-colonial.

The worry is that in much of South America where much of the worlds great forests are to be found, the land ownership is amongst the most unequal in the globe. An artifact of Spannish colonialism the last thing we should be doing is supporting this system by paying for forrest preservation. The real solutions arent simple but land reform is virtually always a part of any realistic social and environmental plan. From past experiance we can make one prediction, if forest owners are paid to keep there forests pristine without a social solution then the local landless class will also be jobless. This will lead to huge numbers of disenfranchised people either moving to the cities or finding themselves on the wrong side of the law in illegal clearings.

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