Xan Rice in Nairobi
Conservationists have hailed a decision by the Ugandan government to drop plans that would have allowed a private company to grow sugar cane for biofuel production on a protected forest reserve.
The controversial proposal, which would have turned over 17,500 acres of the 74,000-acre Mabira forest to the Indian-owned Mehta Group, had caused alarm in environmental circles and stirred up racial tensions. Protected since 1932, the Mabira reserve acts as a vital catchment area for Lake Victoria, just eight miles south of the forest, and is home to more than 300 species of birds, 200 types of trees and nine different primates.

Besides the biodiversity loss, local and international conservation groups claimed the forest's value in storing carbon dioxide and mitigating global warming far exceeded any commercial gains from sugar cane production.
"This is a tragedy averted," said Paul Buckley, head of the Africa programme at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. "There are plenty of places to grow sugar cane, but not many tracts of virgin forest left in Uganda."

The decision was made quietly by Uganda's minister of finance Ezra Suruma during a trip abroad earlier this month. He said the government was committed to "conserving Mabira forest" and that other land would be found for sugar cane.

The role of the conservation groups, who mounted a vocal campaign to save the forest, played a strong part in changing the government's mind. But there were other significant pressures too.

Uganda is set to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kampala next month, and is keen to avoid any controversy. Domestically, the planned land giveaway had proved unpopular, though often less for environmental reasons than economic and racial ones.

As part of President Yoweri Museveni's plan to fast-track industrialisation, investors have been given large tax breaks and access to public land. The beneficiaries are often ethnic Asians who, having been chased away by Idi Amin, were welcomed back in the 1990s.

Many black Ugandans feel that the government should be doing more for them rather than favouring already wealthy Asian families. In April, during a protest against a local sugar firm owned by Mehta, an Asian man was stoned to death. Police shot dead two of the protesters.

The Mabira decision is the second time this year that the Ugandan government has reversed plans to allow biofuel production on protected land.

Last year, it gave a Kenyan company permission to clear rainforest on the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria to set up a palm oil plantation. The head of Uganda's national forest authority quit in protest. The decision was reversed in May.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uganda/Story/0,,2201035,00.html