A new experience

[jim king]

Well it has been a long two weeks since I started this about our Chinese website.  We still do not have it done but are within sight.  We are not able to publish it outside of China so it will only be in Chinese but I will get a copy and can publish some of the more interesting pages here.

It appears we will have the orders for the next few years complete at the end of the month.  They are asking for two 40 foot containers daily and they are issuing revolving letters of credit for every three months with 50% cash in advance and the L/C is payable when the wood leaves on the ship from Peru.

Since this thread started the project has morphed into another phase.  We have put together thru contracts 30 Indian and Mixed blood villages that have about 700,000 plus hectacres with titles and plus our land we are going to try and set up the largest carbon sequestration program in the world and sell the carbon on the European Carbon Exchange.  This will take up to five years to get done and approved and the study and approvals will cost several million dollars which will be financed by the end buyers of the credits once we have the preliminary approval of which we now have about 40 pounds of documentation to back up what we are saying , so that looks reasonable.

The Europeans are now making mandatory carbon taxes to airlines and other major polluters so that market is developing.  I dont believe in the carbon thing but if someone is willing to pay for it why not sell to them.  It took over a month to have the high leaders travel to the villages involved for this initial town meetings as per law to advise the people of the project and get thier written consent.

This will bring in they say billions of dollars to the area which we will split with the communities over the next 25 years and also put each community to work cutting cants on a sustainable basis providing income to several thousand people.  On the 31st we have 91 community leaders coming to town for the final meeting to organize this and will have as witnesses to the whole thing the Police General, the Bishop and  the President of this region of Peru, the head of the Natural Nesources Dept . and others .  We are buying hammocks and mosquito nets for each person so they can stay at the lodge outside of town where we will hold the two day meeting.  We have to feed them , keep them in line etc. so the meeting is a project in its self.

Here is the draft of the preamble to the final contract of 40 plus pages.  We now have our own mapping dept to get the region we are working with in order.  Still chasing the carrot.  Maybe we win , maybe we lose but keeping busy.

Amazon (Forest) Community Sustainable Forest Conservation Project

Preamble:

This agreement has been established for the impoverished forest communities of the Upper Amazon because you cannot tell a hungry mouth or an empty belly not to cut down a tree or kill a wild animal.

More ambitious projects, whether they involve the conservation of biodiversity, or the stopping of illegal logging and drug production cannot be realized until the extreme poverty of these forest communities is addressed.
 
The major areas in which poverty can be reduced are through economic growth based on respectable work and social inclusion. This in turn will strengthen democratic governance and social stability, and allow for better access to basic social services and  infrastructure.

The forest communities want an extension of their community lands so they can plan for their future and the future of their grandchildren in a sustainable commercial manner.  Amazon Holdings does not want their lands. What is more, the company will assist the forest community in securing those extra lands that are rightfully theirs. This process will not happen quickly. It will take time.

The forest communities had a meeting with their elected Federation Leaders and are aware that this not a quick fix to their problems. Votes were taken and the forests communities have given their approval to their Federation to enter in to a long-term Cooperation agreement with Amazon Holding Limited.
 
The forest communities will be involved in the planning of the Project Development Document. Their needs and concerns will be a major part of the consultation process and planning.

The forest communities will be active participants in a sustainable forest management plan which includes environmental services to ensure that it become commercially and financially viable. They will share in the financial rewards this will bring and they will become Stewarts and Custodians of their forests as set out under the guidelines of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
Amazon Holdings Limited has been established in Hong Kong for the express purpose of having direct access to Asian financial institutions, banks, funds mangers, stock exchange, and carbon trading centres and in particularly the booming China market. In addition, Hong Kong people are highly educated and are bi-lingual in (English and Chinese); this is a major advantage when dealing with an international commodity throughout the commercial world. Hong Kong is a major trading centre of Asia and trades daily between the east and western countries around the world.

Hong Kong is also an ideal centre from which to raise capital to facilitate major projects for developments or to facilitate the trading of environmental services.  What is more the regionally near neighbours  New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, y China in addition to Hong Kong itself have all either opened or will be opening emissions trading centers in the near future.

Amazon Holdings has the legal and financial reasonability for the Project and will bring highly skilled consultants together locally and from all over the world for facilitating sustainable forest management and the production and marketing of forestry products including environmental services.

Amazon Holding respect the rights and practices of Indigenous and Forest Communities under the  United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)  and all other human rights instruments including that of  non-discrimination against women and children and indigenous peoples. The Project will endeavour to operate in recognition of these rights and practices.

The people of the forest communities, living as they do amongst one of most biologically diverse and resource-rich regions on the planet, have the right as human beings to be  socially and economically  included in  the booming economic growth that Peru is experiencing. This Project allows them to fulfil that right with the community’s profits from these projects to be spent within the communities themselves as an integrated program of infrastructure development to reduce poverty and improve education, communication, health care, river transport and social and community services. It grants them the opportunity to develop their own environmental resources, in partnership with the private sector as is contemplated in the Law No.27037, Law for the Promotion of Investment in the Amazon, without being subjected to harassment or exploitation from Non-Government Officers (NGOs) and intermediaries.

The training element of the Project will be of the utmost importance. It brings an element of gender equality to the Project, to ensure that men and women both, as well as disadvantaged and landless inhabitants, will benefit from the Project. Keeping the people on their ancestral lands by giving them an alternative source of sustainable income also removes the need for them to migrate to urban centres already struggling to provide the necessary infrastructure for ballooning populations, given their under-funded municipal resources.
 
The Communities understand that this capacity building is required, given their long-term commitment to the Project. What is more, the Community understands that accountancy and transparency are very important ingredients to success, and as such, the Project will be annually audited by an internationally recognised entity. What is more, each Community will present a business plan yearly as to how they are going to invest their income for the betterment of their Community; this plan must be complied with and shall be part of that Annual Audit.

Working in unison between the private sector and a diverse range of communities, the Project will permit the decentralisation of industries and create jobs through the formation of a new infrastructure that is more efficient, more cost-effective, and more insulated against internal and external corruption.

Put simply, this development represents the largest and most ambitious project of its type and the premier example of forest management and carbon sequestration in the tropical world and will allow every child, woman and man of the Communities involved to prosper and participate in the burgeoning economic growth the rest of Peru is experiencing and eliminate the need for people to produce cocaine or operate at the margin of the law to merely subsist in what is one of the most resource rich regions in the world.





 

[doctorb]

Jim-  a galant effort. 

[Left Coast Chris]

Jim,  thanks so much for your efforts here.  Very interesting.  In the 80's I worked for a sawmill on the Alaskan panhandle that sold cants of spruce and hemlock to the Japanese for instruments.  The marketing part was interesting then as it is very interesting in your working with China.

[Sprucegum]

My hat is off to you Jim, you are doing a great work!

[jim king]

Yesterday we took another step to being the largest carbon sequestration / sustainable forestry project in the tropical world .  We brought to town the directors of over thirty villages for the final signing ceramony in the Govoners office auditorium.

This was after weeks of traveling by river by our people explaining the program to the communities in public assemblies in each community and each taking a vote and signing on to the project giving power of signature to the regional representative.  A long legal process.

After the meeting the Govenment representative came to the house for a bit of rum and ask if we would be interested in taking over one third of Peru and putting it in the program.  That sounds like a big bite but today we are going to seriously discuss it over coffee to try to see how and if it could be done.

We finally got a general map of the region finished which is below after months of work.  The next step will be the mapping of the dozens of villages in this 3,000,000 hectare square.  Most villages here are not mapped yet even tho the local people know and are in agreement as to what tree or river is the border with thier neighbors.  The Amazon is just starting to be mapped and we will take responsibility for that in the project working with the government mapping dept.  What is happening is that we are moving government out of the equation of developement and initiating a system of work between communities and private enterprise which has never been done here.

We did have one small problem in that a Non Profit Organization from the US has been collecting millions of dollars from corporate donars for supposedly protecting a large reserve in this area and using the money for the advancement of the local communities.  As with the majority of these do gooder groups they simply steal the money and the communities sent them out of the meeting when they starting making a fuss.  I suppose I will be sued by them in the next few days for shutting off thier money faucett but that wont be a problem.  One more step forward.

If I could only live another 500 years I might see this project finished.



This is the 3,000,000 hectaria area we are now working in and the first map ever of the area.

 
I put on a red shirt my jeans as I thought Tom would have enjoyed this.


Part of the group at the assembly.


The official signing.

[jim king]

I spent Monday and yesterday in Lima meeting with some government people about the project we are trying to get off the ground.

Here are some photos of Lima that might surprise some.  It is a booming city with construction everywhere.  Gas costs $6.75 US a gallon there.  There are bad parts of town also that one would think of a developing country.

We took the government people to lunch at Tony Romas and I stuffed myself on ribs.  Everywhere you look are companies from Japan , Korea and China but I did not see one American company except Tony Romas, McDonalds , Dunkin Donuts and KFC.  Even the Hotel we stayed in was Chinese.  Sad.

[jim king]

Well the project is dead.  After jumping thru hoops and getting everything signed and sealed the Australian person got home to Australia with all in order to find that his enemy here had taken photos of him with his live in blanket with ears and sent them to his Chinese wife.

That did not go over to well with the wife.  He is now confined to Australia and if he went to China her family  would probably send him back as a capon.

We now have this monster project up and ready and dead in the water.  Quite an embarassing situation for us who put it together.  I guess it is time to start emailing Chinese investment bankers to see if anyone would like to take it forward.

[Kansas]

If its a lucrative business proposal could be the wife will cool down in a few weeks. More than once money makes a wife look past a transgression.

[isawlogs]

 That really sucks.....