World Rainforest Movement
Land grabbing is the process, affecting especially Southern countries, by which transnational corporations, foreign governments, pension funds, wealthy individuals, etc., are getting concessions over or buying huge tracts of lands including forests to make way for industrial agriculture, mining, oil extraction, etc, but also for financial speculation. This process became known as such because of its alarming rates in recent years and after the food price crisis in 2008. In Africa for example, 60 million hectares of land were traded in 2009.
Due to the UN climate negotiations -COP20- and the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change, held in Lima, Peru, in December 2014, over 100 organizations and social movements made a Call to Action to strongly and collectively reject REDD+...
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Dear friends, our friends from Liberia are requesting our support. The Jogbahn Clan in Liberia is fighting to keep their home. A British palm oil company wants to clear their land without their permission. Add your voice to a petition...
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Dear friends, your support in needed! The Sengwer people – an indigenous hunter-gatherer community in the Cherangany hills in Kenya- is being forcibly evicted from its territory. Many of us have been following closely the story, as...
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Open letter to the European Parliament, the European Commission, the governments and citizens of the European Union Sawit Watch. Bogor, 26 January 2007 Hereby Sawit Watch expresses before the European Parliament, the European Commission,...
read morePeasant communities and those dependent on the forests united in struggle
No to ProSAVANA and MATOPIBA. Solidarity with people in Mozambique and Brazil!
India: Plantations uproot women from their customary forests
What goes behind the idea of biodiversity offsetting: The case of Nam Ngiep Dam in Lao PDR
SOCFIN’s plantations in Africa: many places of violence and destruction
Myanmar: New policy promoting indigenous rights under threat
Indonesia: Protests on Java against forest destruction by the expanding cement industry
Ibi Bateke tree planting project in DRC: Sold as the success it never was
Gabon: Plans to market carbon, biodiversity, ecosystems and community “capital”
Environmental offsets in Panama: A strategy that opens up protected areas to mining
Destroy here and destroy there: The double exploitation of biodiversity offsets
Crisis and oil depletion in Venezuela: Mega-mining and new frontiers of extraction
An umbrella for non-compliance: “Air Quality Offsets” in South Africa
Trade deals threaten peasant farmer’s stewardship of seed biodiversity
From Biodiversity Offsets to Ecosystem Engineering: New Threats to Communities and Territories
Environmental regulation in the Green Economy: Changed to facilitate destruction
Endogenous knowledge, an effective weapon to combat land grabs in Africa
Two bright shining lies teaming up: Certification roundtables and REDD+
The role of “artisanal” mining for transnational mining companies
The Farce of “Smart Forestry”. The Cases of Green Resources in Mozambique and Suzano in Brazil
Territories being seized in Cambodia: protecting corporate profits
REDD Alert! How REDD+ projects undermine peasant farming and real solutions to climate change
ProSavana Plan in Mozambique is out and threatening peasants’ land
Philippines: Resisting Land Grabbing and Corporate Oil Palm Plantations
Mining activity kills Indonesia’s peasants and fisher people
Logging concessions; basis of an industry, or political control?
Honduras’ Garifuna communities resist eviction and theft of land
Ghana’s Mining Sector Regime: A Bad Deal for Affected Local Communities
Deforestation funds more plantations: The new Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill in India
Biodiversity offsets facilitate continuation of business-as-usual destruction by mining companies
African resistance to land grabs by plantation companies Bolloré and Socfin
“Blue Carbon” and “Blue REDD”: Transforming coastal ecosystems into merchandise
Why are women fighting against extractivism and climate change?
Uruguay: Transnationals lead land grabs in industrial tree plantation sector
The forests not seen on picture post-cards: looking beyond the tropical belt
The expansion of industrial oil palm plantations in Africa: A call for greater solidarity and action
Thailand’s New ‘Forestry Master Plan’: Same old strategy dressed up in new clothes
Insisting on REDD is playing a game already lost for the climate and peoples
Indonesia: Struggle against land grabbing of oil palm company PT Hardaya
Vietnamese land grabs in Cambodia and Laos for rubber plantations: secrecy, destruction and violence
South Africa: Pulp Industry expansion – land-grabbing disguised as community development
Sierra Leone: large scale land acquisition for oil palm business in Pujehun district
River in Guatemala “grabbed” by oil palm and sugar cane plantation owners
OIL – Land grab for oil: The crude reality of oil drilling in the Niger Delta
MONOCULTURE TREE PLANTATIONS – Land grabbing for oil palm in the Philippines
The invisible resistance of women against the commodification of life
Phillipines: Oil palm company A. Brown grabs Higaonon indigenous people’s lands
Philippines: The increasing menace of oil palm plantations in Palawan
Oil palm plantation workers in Central America: The experience of Rel-UITA
Mozambique: Monoculture tree plantation projects foster land grabbing, threaten food security
Looking ahead for agrarian reform and the defense of land and territory
Indonesia: Oil palm plantations erode the right to work on communal land
Growing speculation: From the appropriation and commodification to the financialization of nature
Gabon: Resisting Olam land grabbing for oil palm plantations
Earth grabbing: The ongoing concentration and privatisation of land, water, air
Burma/Myanmar: Letter of Global Solidarity against land grabs
False solutions to climate change enabling land grabbing in Africa
Declaration of the Third Special Conference for Food Sovereignty, Rights and Life
Call for the creation of an international alliance against land grabbing
Panama: Land dispute and violation of the Naso people’s Human Rights
Mozambique: Pine and eucalyptus companies are advancing on peasant land in the north of the country
Indonesia: Government proposes 21 million hectares of plantations to meet climate targets
Uruguay: A new land redistribution…in favour of forestry companies
Papua New Guinea: World Bank promoting oil palm and pushing people into poverty
Destroying with one hand, taking with the other: Biomass, REDD and forests
Charcoal disguised as “biochar” sold as another profitable climate tech-fix
This study looks at how Compensatory Afforestation is accelerating both, the destruction of forests in India by big corporations and the appropriation of community land for the supposed compensation.
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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.
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A compilation of articles from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin on the occasion of the 14th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), to be held 17 – 29 November, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
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This report aims at strengthening the struggles of all those who are opposing large-scale oil palm plantations in the global South. After expanding in Indonesia and Malaysia for decades, large expansions have more recently been occurring...
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A field report by WRM and Re:Common Also available in Malagasy In recent years mining companies have become actively engaged in promoting ‘biodiversity offsetting’ as a way of ‘greening’ the mining sector. One offset project in...
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A new joint publication by GRAIN and the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) looks at the dangers for peasant communities from one of the main carbon market mechanisms on the table at the upcoming UN summit on climate change in...
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REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies presents summaries of reports from 24 REDD projects or programmes with a common characteristic: they all show a number of structural characteristics that undermine forest...
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Only available in Spanish and Portuguese. Download here the full document in pdf format in Spanish or in Portuguese Documento informativo del Movimiento Mundial por los Bosques Tropicales (WRM) Desde la década de 1960 está en curso el...
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The main goal of this booklet is to inform communities about the serious problems that a REDD project can cause for the people involved. WRM has visited a number of these communities over the past few years. All of them,...
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After many years of supporting local struggles and disseminating information from different countries on tree monocultures and its impacts, WRM presents a new report to all those involved in these struggle (1). No better time than the...
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This report, released on January 29th 2019, was made by human rights defenders in Sierra Leone, concerned for the detention of activists and the death of two people who sustained gunshots from allegedly the state security personnel acting to protect SOCFIN on January 21th 2019
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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)
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The report “Portucel – the Process of acquiring access to land and the rights of local communities” was published by Justiça Ambiental/Friends of the Earth Mozambique in 2016, in partnership with the World Rainforest Movement...
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The Paris Agreement enshrined the principle of compensation in dealing with the climate crisis. This means that emissions actually do not have to decrease but that emissions and absorption of carbon in vegetation and soil can cancel each...
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Representatives from the world’s most notorious mining companies are meeting at the ‘Responsible Extractives Summit’ in London, England, on 21 and 22 June. The World Rainforest Movement and Re:Common are joining London...
read more On the occasion of the Rio Tinto AGM on 14 April 2016 in London, Re:Common and the World Rainforest Movement, in collaboration with Collectif TANY are releasing the report Rio Tinto’s biodiversity offset in Madagascar. Double landgrab in...
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A report by the NGO GRAIN shows how governments throughout Asia are quietly enacting a host of legislative changes that eliminate the few protections that farmers have traditionally enjoyed, exposing them to appropriation of their lands...
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By Friends of the Earth US, Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria. Wilmar International1 is one of the world’s largest palm oil plantation owners, traders, and processing companies. Wilmar is a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable...
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de EU Latin America. This video explains how a trade relationship – mainly based on the extraction of raw materials – is contributing to depletion of non-renewable natural resources, global warming and social...
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Food cannot be grown without water. In Africa, one in three people endure water scarcity and climate change makes things worse. Africa’s sophisticated indigenous water systems are being destroyed by large-scale land grabs amidst claims...
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The report is authored by GRAIN and RIAO-RDC in collaboration with Fundación Mundubat, War on Want, Association Française d’Amitié et de Solidarité avec les Peuples d’Afrique, World Rainforest Movement, Food First,...
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Booming global demand for palm oil and limited room for the industry’s expansion in Asia have led large palm oil producers to look towards Africa. Companies are also betting on an explosion in demand from the European Union for palm oil...
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Fact-finding and advocacy mission preliminary report, by Cristiane Faustino y Fabrina Furtado Download the preliminary report as pdf...
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The Silence of the Pandas became a German bestseller in 2012. A series of injunctions and court cases launched by WWF delayed publication of the investigative report into English. A revised English edition, renamed Pandaleaks, has...
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Local communities affected by the oil palm plantations from the Société des Palmeraies du Cameroun (SOCAPALM) are waging an all-out battle to defend their rights, which are being trampled on with impunity. This giant agro-industrial...
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In Thailand, both the army and civilian governments define forests as “wilderness free of inhabitants”, neglecting that tropical forests have always been home to indigenous and peasant communities. Laws have marked local people as...
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Small farmers and indigenous organizations around the world are confronting a deep reduction of the world’s farmland and the processes of displacement from the fields. Even though a significant amount of experts keep claiming that the...
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A case study of the “Fair Forest Carbon compensation” project of French company Pur Projet, in the region of San Martin, Peru, which aims to generate carbon credits destined, initially, for the voluntary carbon market. In Peru...
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The Journal of Peasant Studies is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2013-14. Part of their series of initiatives to commemorate the anniversary of JPS is the publication of virtual special issues, starting with the 40 Classics in Peasant...
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February 25, 2014 Download here the full letter in pdf format with the final list of sign-ons We, the No REDD in Africa Network (NRAN) together with the undersigned organizations and individuals, strongly condemn the massive evictions...
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Only available in Spanish. The Alianza Biodiversidad, Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC) and World Rainforest Movement (WRM) have jointly published a new special edition (in Spanish) of the magazine...
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Tuesday, 29th October 2013 at 7pm. Speakers from Brazil and the US will present first-hand experience of the impacts of the UK’s biomass policies on forests and people in their countries. This includes a presentation about the first ever...
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“Land grabbing for biofuels must stop”, a new report from GRAIN athttp://www.grain.org/e/4653
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by Winfridus Overbeek The forest known as the Mata Atlantica (Atlantic Forest) in Brazil is one of the richest biomes in the planet in terms of biodiversity. It used to cover most of the coast of the country. But the process of brutal...
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ACTION ALERT – THE PHILIPPINES The indigenous peoples (Higaonons) and peasants of Opol in Misamis Oriental in Southern Philippines are currently struggling against land grabbing resulting from a monoculture oil palm plantation,...
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ACTION ALERT – GABON As many countries in Africa, Gabon is facing an alarming rate of expansion of oil palm and rubber plantations. The government has given the Singapore based company Olam 300,000 hectares of land to establish...
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Released on the eve of the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington DC, April 23-26, 2012, two new films reveal widespread violations of people’s rights and environmental destruction from land grabbing...
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By Bakari Nyari, Vice Chairman of Regional Advisory and Information Network Systems (RAINS), Ghana and African Biodiversity Network Steering Committee member This is the story of how a Norwegian biofuel company took advantage...
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Position Paper of the Global South on Food Sovereignty, Energy Sovereignty and the transition towards a post-oil society. Quito, September 2007 A first meeting of groups from the South was held in Ecuador-0 latitude 27th June-1st July...
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Fiske Menuco (General Roca), (see footnote)* The organisations and individuals who attended the First Patagonian Conference on Biofuels are aware of the true social, economic and ecological consequences suffered throughout the country by...
read more Miguel A Altieri, Professor of Agroecology, University of California, Berkeley Elizabeth Bravo, Red por una América Latina Libre de Transgenicos, Quito, Ecuador The nations of the OECD—the Organization for Economic Cooperation and...
read more Only available in Spanish – Por Raúl Zibechi Desde que el proyecto del ALCA fracasó en la Cumbre de Mar del Plata, en noviembre de 2005, el viaje de George W. Bush a Brasil y Uruguay, como parte de una gira que lo lleva también...
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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...
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