Gmelina boom, farmers’ doom: Tree growers’ risks, coping strategies and options

A strong belief by Clavaria farmers that there is ‘gold in Gmelina growing’ turned out to be a huge frustration among tree out growers in southern Philippines in the late 1990s. The lack of a market study and appropriate government support system to address farmers’ tree growing risks resulted in a great loss, not only financially but also in terms of local people’s confidence in tree growing in the area. A large number of tree growers returned to subsistence farming while others opted to have their land rented out to multi-nationals for high value crops production (including bananas and pineapples). However, the majority shifted to fruit bearing trees. Ten farmers were interviewed using Problem in Context analysis, and they made various recommendations for government to improve the financial performance and regulatory environment for tree farming. These recommendations included the removal of the cutting permit requirements for timber grown in private woodlots, setting the wood price regulatory system to safeguard the interest of small tree growers, providing wood market information and strategic networks for tree growers to find alternative markets or use for their timber produce, and encouraging the private sector to establish small wood processing plants in every municipality in order to provide ready markets for timber produce. It was also suggested that government initiate contract tree growing between the private sector and farmers’ groups, provide more planting area for interested tree growers, and assist small tree farmers to form or strengthen local cooperatives

Market Share Liability Beyond DES Cases: The Solution to the Causation Dilemma in Lead Paint Litigation?

Over 300,000 young children in America—disproportionately poor and children of color—suffer from childhood lead poisoning. This disease ordinarily is caused by the deterioration of lead paint into flakes, chips, and dust that children ingest or inhale. Victims of childhood lead poisoning have tried to sue manufacturers of lead paint or lead pigment, but they face a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Traditional tort law requires a plaintiff to prove that a specific tortfeasor caused the harm. This is almost impossible in the lead paint context because the paint that caused the harm usually consists of many layers, applied over the course of as long as a century, now covered up by non-leaded paint. To overcome this obstacle, victims of childhood lead poisoning have invoked the theory of “market share liability.” Market share liability originally was devised in the 1980s to allow recovery by the victims of the generic miscarriage preventative diethylstilbestrol (DES). DES was taken by women whose daughters later developed certain cancers. But the DES daughters could not identify the specific manufacturer whose drug their mothers consumed. The California Supreme Court, in Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories, granted them relief by apportioning liability among DES manufacturers according to each one’s share of the market. Victims of other defective products then urged courts to extend market share liability beyond the DES context. With a few exceptions, such efforts failed because the other products were not “fungible,” i.e., they were not as interchangeable as the generic drug DES. Additionally, DES was taken during a nine-month period, making it relatively easy for courts to determine the market shares of each manufacturer with a reasonable degree of accuracy—not so with other products. Thus, for some twenty years, market share liability lay dormant. In 2004, Allen Rostron published an article that challenged the implicit assumption in market share liability that fungibility meant chemical identity. Indeed, he identified three definitions of fungibility: (1) functional interchangeability, (2) physical indistinguishability, and (3) uniformity of risk. Almost immediately thereafter, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in Thomas v. Mallett, employed portions of Rostron’s analysis to allow a victim of childhood lead poisoning to proceed to trial under Wisconsin’s variant of market share liability. The extension of market share liability to the lead paint context is problematic. Lead paints, or paints with lead pigment, do not pose a uniform risk of harm because paints with higher concentrations of lead are more harmful than those with less. Additionally, it is impossible, as a practical matter, to determine the market shares of the manufacturers of lead paint and lead pigment given the hundred-year period in which manufacturers have entered, exited, and re-entered the market to be segmented. If market share liability is to apply beyond the DES context, this expansion must be consistent with the policies that gave rise to the theory. We thus propose that application of market share liability be predicated on three requirements: (1) uniform products must pose risk in a uniform manner and to a uniform degree; (2) it must be impossible, as a practical matter, for a victim to trace the harm-causing product back to its specific manufacturer; and (3) courts must be able to ascertain each manufacturer’s market share with a reasonable degree of accuracy

Tree Growing on Different Grounds

Universiteit Leiden, CMLEnvironment and Developmen

More than just trees: Assessing reforestation success in tropical developing countries

Rural communities in many parts of the tropics are dependent of forests for their livelihoods and for environmental services. Forest resources in the tropics have declined rapidly over the past century and therefore many developing countries in the tropics have reforestation programs. Although reforestation is a long-term process with long-term benefits, existing evaluations of the success of these programs tends to focus on short-term establishment success indicators. This paper presents a review of reforestation assessment that highlights the need to not only consider short-term establishment success, but also longer-term growth and maturation success, environmental success and socio-economic success. In addition, we argue that reforestation assessment should not be based on success indicators alone, but should incorporate the drivers of success, which encompasses an array of biophysical, socio-economic, institutional and project characteristics. This is needed in order to understand the reasons why reforestation projects succeed or fail and therefore to design more successful projects in future. The paper presents a conceptual model for reforestation success assessment that links key groups of success indicators and drivers. This conceptual model provides the basis for a more comprehensive evaluation of reforestation success and the basis for the development of predictive systems-based assessment models. These models will be needed to better guide reforestation project planning and policy design and therefore assist rural communities in tropical developing countries to alleviate poverty and achieve a better quality of life