Asia (general)

A problem peasant women face is invisibility in the feminist and women’s movements. A second problem is the weakness with which the food sovereignty concept has dealt with the challenges of feminism. Food sovereignty is based on the conviction that each people has the right to make decisions about its own food systems: about its own eating habits; about its production, marketing, distribution, exchange, and sharing; and about keeping food and seeds in the public sphere.

A Friends of the Earth report looks at specific case studies which demonstrate that REDD projects can facilitate rather than prevent the continued use of fossil fuels; exacerbate tensions over land and resource rights; have significant negative impacts on forest-dependent Indigenous Peoples and local communities; threaten food security; and even endanger forests. Some REDD projects have also faced significant financial difficulties, wasting considerable amounts of public funding.

Through a series of articles, this report, from the organization Focus on the Global South, denounces how land, forests and water are being captured and enclosed for a range of purposes: industrial agriculture, tree plantations, hydropower, extractive industry, tourism, physical infrastructure, real estate development, Special Economic Zones and, quite simply, for financial profit through the construction of new markets.

Dismantle the power of transnational plantation corporations! There is no “smart monoculture”: Support the People’s Climate March!

Genetic engineering allows scientists to modify trees by inserting genetic material from another tree of the same species, from another tree species or from another species altogether. The attempts by research and plantation companies in the US, Brazil and other countries to commercialize engineered trees are posing an enormous risk to the world’s forests.

Producing cheap palm oil comes at a high price: destruction of rainforests, labour exploitation, and brutal land grabbing. With lands in Indonesia and Malaysia becoming more difficult for palm oil companies to acquire, attention is shifting to Africa as a new frontier for low cost palm oil production for export.

   

   

Continuing with the communications for September 21st, this time we would like to share with all of you a collection of videos that we have prepared together with GRAIN, on the impacts of large scale industrial oil palm plantations. The videos have been produced by several partners from around the world working against expansion of industrial oil palm plantations and they describe the impacts that local communities suffer when the expansion takes place on their territories.