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Relevant examples of how REDD could intensify exploitation of people and result in carbon slave-like conditions include: the Rio+20 model N’hambita REDD project in Mozambique whose contract binds peasants into multi- generational carbon slavery; the model World Bank Ibi-bateke Carbon Plantation where Batwa Pigmy may suffer servitude; and the evictions in Uganda that turned successful farmers into peons in their own land for the New Forests Company timber plantation. The extreme exploitation and inhumanity of these projects are not mistakes or exceptions but rather seem to be an integral and central part of the REDD strategy. As early as 2000, the International Forum of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change in its first plenary statement to the United Nations prophetically vowed that “we do not want to be slaves of the carbon trade!”95
The tendency to maximize profits characterizes capitalism. Profits maximization often includes maximization of exploitation. This may shape the kind of labor required for REDD in Africa and the plantations of trees, agrofuels and crops. The carbon slavery and servitude of existing model REDD-type projects (i.e. N’hambita and Ibi-Bateke) indicate that carbon slavery may be a generalized feature of REDD in Africa.
The tendency of REDD to convert farmers and/or indigenous peoples into peons on their own land has already played out in the New Forest Company plantation in Uganda. Evicted successful farmers were reduced to becoming poorly paid plantation peons on the land they were evicted from. “Homeless and hopeless, Mr. Tushabe said he took a job with the company that pushed him out. He was promised more than $100 each month, he said, but received only about $30.”96
The exploitation of the labor of local communities is facilitated by the extremely disadvantageous situations of evicted, homeless and dispossessed peoples with little or no recourse to legal support. This lack of recourse is compounded by the lack of interest of some in the international human rights community to denounce carbon trading. Except in a few isolated cases of human rights violations, most human rights NGOs limit themselves to seeking reform of the Clean Development Mechanism or to promoting safeguards.
With regard to changes in production, Landscape REDD and Climate Smart Agriculture pervert the task of growing food into growing carbon and may constitute a counter-agrarian reform. Much analysis remains to be done about how REDD in forest and water ecosystems changes production and affects labor. But one thing is clear: REDD is part of a new chapter in capitalism that could generate new forms of surplus value from nature and totally transform farmers’ and forest dwellers’ production systems, forms of work and exploitation, as well as relations of power associated with work.
