Harvard’s Exploitation in Chile
Harvard’s Exploitation in Chile
By Krishna Dasartha and SANDRA Y.L. KORN
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Agrícola Brinzal is a Chilean logging company currently facing lawsuits for felling 189 acres of native forest and then reforesting with foreign tree species. The corporation’s practices, which include growing water-intensive eucalyptus trees, have been accused of harming both the environment and nearby communities. According to a recent university tax filing from 2011, Harvard owns 99.99 percent of Agrícola Brinzal, which generated more than half a million dollars in income for our endowment. As students who benefit from the profits of this company’s business model, we are disturbed that Harvard has stood by as Agrícola Brinzal has been accused of degrading the environment and neglecting local laws.
Like many universities, Harvard funds much of its staff and faculty salaries, student financial aid, operating costs, and research budget with its endowment earnings. Unlike many universities, however, Harvard’s endowment directly owns more than 100 companies, many of them natural resource and timber companies in the developing world. And unlike most universities, Harvard directly owns at least one company that has been implicated in illegal land exploitation practices.
Last month, two investigative reporters in Chile released a report detailing the exploitative logging practices of Chilean companies owned by Harvard. The report, published by the Center of Investigative Journalism of Chile (and later translated into English), quotes a government official explaining that the scale of Agrícola Brinzal’s logging is unprecedented on the island of Chiloé. Harvard’s company has either bought up recently clear-cut land or engaged in the felling of native trees itself, and reforested that land with eucalyptus trees. Recognizing the destructive environmental effects of this deforestation, CONAF, the Ministry of Agriculture’s National Forestry Corporation, has brought multiple lawsuits against Agrícola Brinzal. The lawsuits allege that the company’s logging practices are both illegal and environmentally devastating, wreaking irreversible havoc on Chile’s prized natural forests.
Furthermore, locals have maintained that the company’s actions have been detrimental to local communities. Carlos Muñoz Grandón, president of an organization of residents living near land owned by Agrícola Brinzal, was quoted in the report stating that the company’s reforestation negatively affects local farmers: “It’s a great impact—it’s a huge one—from the fumigations to the growth of eucalyptus, because we will have huge problems with water distribution...That’s going to affect animal and milk production, which is the economic source for people here.”
More:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/29/Harvard-exploitation-in-chile/
