?
Challenges of the Minority ‘Rule’ of Extractivism for the Majority World: Fighting Climate Change Glocally in Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia
Extractivism as the vertebrae of the current global political economy is a concept embracing non-unlimited in scale and scope activities that remove large volumes of resources of any kind, mainly for export. Those resources, both social and natural, are typically situated in the so-called majority world—countries previously identified as ‘developing’—to cover the demand in the ‘minority’ world. In this chapter, we analyze deforestation and connected problems such as unsustainable logging and illegal timber trade issues and corresponding national development policies, laws and regulation with the help of case studies of Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. Our analysis shows that, while all the three countries have made some steps to bring their development plans into conformity with climate change fight and realities, many of their measures are either piecemeal or going in the opposite directions, or both. In Brazil, it is local deforestation that causes climate change, both in the country and globally, because of the crucial importance of Amazon rainforest as the Earth’s biggest ‘lungs’. Contrariwise, in Kyrgyzstan it is global climate change that causes irreversible local deforestation problems. As to Russia, due to its size and its considerable forestry area, the country’s contribution to the global biodiversity and clean air is comparable to that of Brazil. However, both legislative mismatch and—especially—flawed real-life practices of combating unsustainable logging and illegal timber trade are also comparable between Brazil and Russia. Therefore, an analytical grid that we apply to relevant Russian regulatory framework, including the conservation and protection of biodiversity, to logging practices and timber exports revealing the actual illegality of timber ‘legally’ imported to the minority world, is also applicable to similar issues in other global timber exporting countries, including Brazil.
In book
