Congo DR

A member of the Congolese environmental and human rights organisation RIAO-RDC was brutally killed by a security guard of the Canadian palm oil company Feronia Inc. on Sunday, July 21, 2019, near the company’s Boteka plantations in Bempumba, Eqauteur Province, DRC.

While the destruction of forest territories continues, more pledges, agreements and programs are being implemented in the name of ‘addressing deforestation and climate change’.

Serious abuses in DRC’s Salonga National Park at the hands of park rangers supported by funding from the WWF and a range of international donors are just the latest to be documented. This is a wider problem on human rights abuses and colonial interventions in forests.

The booklet “Promise, Divide, Intimidate and Coerce: 12 tactics palm oil companies use to grab community land” aims to support communities who want to strengthen their resistance and better prepare themselves to stop corporations from establishing on their lands.

Only available in French.

Nine communities from the DR Congo took a historic step this week by filing a complaint with the complaints mechanism of the German development bank (Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft – DEG)

Interview with Solange Bolembe, from RIAO-RDC, about the many challenges that women face who live in communities affected by vast oil palm plantations managed by Feronia-PHC, a company financed by several European development banks.

In solidarity with the International Day of Peasant Struggle. A day to remember, emphasize and mobilize together against the persecution and violence that peasants suffer on a daily basis around the world.

DRC is following the trend of promoting programmes to ‘integrate’ peasants with agribusinesses, putting people’s control over their lands at risk.

How secrecy and collusion in industrial agriculture spell disaster for the Congo Basin’s rainforests.

Where does all the gold processed in Switzerland come from?

A new Survival International report documents serious instances of widespread and systematic human rights abuses between 1989 and the present day in Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic (CAR) by wildlife guards funded and equipped by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the parent organization of New York’s Bronx zoo. Documented abuses and harassment are likely just a small fraction of the full picture of systematic and on-going violence, beatings, torture and even death.