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SISTER SITES |
Robin Harper MSP (1999)
Contents
Shortly after I was elected in May 1999, I was approached by Survival International asking if I would be interested in meeting Davi Yanomami, a shaman and leader from the Brazilian rainforest. I have been aware for many years that the Yanomami people were severely threatened by pressure to exploit the mineral wealth of their homelands and by transnational corporations wishing to harvest the forest and create grassland for cattle.
Davi had heard of our new Parliament and of the Scottish Executive’s desire to offer a Land Reform Bill as part of its first tranche of legislation. He wondered if he could learn anything from our experience. I was gob-smacked. Here was a highly intelligent and cultured representative of a people under the genuine threat of total extinction, seeming to think he could learn from Scotland, one of the richest countries in the world, making relatively minor adjustments to the way land is held. Nevertheless, I agreed more because I was both curious and excited to at last meet with a flesh and bone representative of what until then had been a relatively theoretical concern, than because I felt I had anything to offer. My team and I did as much as we could to help Survival International with advance publicity and on the day we did extremely well, with a host of photographers and journalists keen to hear what essentially the first foreign delegation to the Parliament had to say. Davi spoke no English but good Portuguese, so two Portuguese interpreters translated for a series of interviews in Committee Room 5.
I have two enduring memories. One is that I felt as if I was communicating with Davi directly for the whole of that day. The second was that he was an extremely intelligent personality with extraordinary warmth and understanding. His story was, and is essentially, that the Brazilian government after many years of negotiations, eventually guaranteed the Yanomami security of tenure over enough forest on the Brazilian/Venezuelan border to support their people comfortably. However, the greed of mining and international forestry and farming companies has been attracted to the huge natural resources of this area, and it looks like the Brazilian government is going to go back on its word and allow partial exploitation of the land that was supposed to have been granted to the Yanomami in perpetuity. At the meeting, I told Davi I would do what I could. Since then, we got a lot of publicity here and have written a letter to the President of Brazil, which has yet received no answer. What might Davi have learnt from what is happening in Scotland that may have been of use? Well, apart from the abolishing of feudal tenure, which is in a sense the system operated in Brazil but through the government, and the proposed community right to buy, not a lot. The Yanomami are not in the position to buy their land, although I received a charming letter from Primary 6 pupils at Corstorphine Primary School at the beginning of November asking me to raise money to buy rainforest for the animals that live in it to which I sadly replied, there is rather a lot of it and I don’t have very much money!
The community right to buy in Scotland is no revolution. We probably won’t see any marked effects within the next 100 years, because transfer of land is so slow. It could possibly help native peoples in Brazil as a concept, of course. What we need in Scotland is a combination of land value taxation and a through review of the planning system if we are to achieve environmentally sustainable land reform that upholds principles of justice, equity and ecology.
Land value taxation is both simple and complex. At its simplest, it can be thought of as a way of making sure that land is always used for the good of the community and is never subject to speculation and hoarding for profit. In cities gap sites identified for housing would pay the appropriate tax rate from the moment of designation, thus encouraging owners to build on it as soon as possible. In rural areas, land can be designated for organic farming, housing, community use, sport, etc and taxed in such a way as to encourage the use for which it was designated or even to encourage an owner to apply for change of use as designated by the local community. In such a way, governments throughout the world, including Brazil and Scotland, could devolve power to local communities, particularly in the north of Brazil and the Highland and Islands of Scotland, to control every aspect of land use in their area. In northern Brazil the Yanomami could prevent exploitation and destruction of their forest economy, culture and way of life, and the people of the Outer Isles of Scotland could control absolutely the exploitation of their own natural resources. They could also, if they so wished, encourage new developments but control every detail of the application to serve their own interests.
There are times when, as a lone Green in the Scottish Parliament, I feel particularly powerless. However, having the letters MSP (member of the Scottish Parliament) after my name did at least allow Davi a burst of publicity. I am very conscious that if an opportunity to do something comes my way, it is not enough to say, "Ah, but there are lots of peoples in the world like this, there is very little we can do". Davi Yanomami, standing outside the Assembly Halls where the Parliament meets, caressed the stonework and said to me, "Where do these stones come from?" "They dig them out of the ground," I answered. "What do they do with the holes left behind?" queried Davi. I gave an embarrassed cough. "Um, well, they fill them full of the rubbish that we create in the city." Davi looked very thoughtful.
We do get many things wrong in our grossly consumerist society and I am appealing in this final edition of SEAD News for this millennium, for readers to get hold of Survival International and ask what they can do to help.
Survival International, now called Survival, can be contacted at:
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