Bulletin 276 - october 2025

This bulletin shows that the fight against monoculture tree plantations and the model they represent is very strong in the Global South, especially among women. Whether it is in Indonesia, Thailand, Liberia, Brazil or Colombia, communities continue to resist and make progress.

We are peasants from Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil. In recent decades, we have witnessed the spread of oil palm monocultures in our territory, an expansion driven by multinational companies with government support. False promises led us to accept plantation partnership schemes that put us at risk of losing our land. What was once forest and traditional crops have been replaced by monocultures that have left us with food shortages, debt, and the threat of floods. For this reason, we organized ourselves to end this exploitation and restore our traditional way of life. And here we share the story of our struggle.

This is the story of how we, a group of indigenous peoples and peasants in Colombia, have come together under the name Cajibío Interethnic and Intercultural Territory of Life (TEVIIC, by its Spanish acronym), to face one of the world's largest multinational paper and cardboard manufacturers: Smurfit Westrock. Our goal is to achieve Agrarian Reform through autonomy and concrete actions.

Whether they are in Brazil, amidst eucalyptus plantations, or in Thailand, surrounded by oil palm plantations, women suffer specific impacts from these monocultures. Women are on the frontlines of the resistance to these projects, which exploit and devastate the land in pursuit of profit. This is what two peasant activists fighting to defend the land – one from Brazil and one from Thailand – tell us.

Two Joghban leaders who have been active in the fight against Equatorial Palm Oil's (EPO) invasion of their ancestral lands talk about their victorious resistance process. Their resistance culminated in 2018 with official state recognition of part of their territory. However, they stress that this long-term struggle is ongoing. “We are going to resist; we will always resist, because land matters to us and to our future generations”, says Isaac Banwon, one of the leaders.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) will be launched at the 30th United Nations Climate Conference (COP30), which will take place from November 10th to 21st in Belém, Brazil. This initiative claims to be a "new hope" for tropical forests worldwide. However, this is far from the case.

The article we recommend shares the story of Uma Bai Netam, a woman from the Gond tribe in India. It helps us understand how women from traditional communities are particularly affected by commercial tree monocultures – which are allegedly used to offset the destruction of forest areas caused by extractive or infrastructure projects. Uma and other Indian women have won some partial victories, such as the legal right to the land where they have lived and worked for decades. But due to government policies aimed at establishing tree plantations, this win comes with the condition that they cede a significant part of that area. The article highlights the perverse contradictions of this policy, which is yet another example of green capitalism.

The new report from GRAIN shows how IT corporations like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are turning to carbon markets to hide their ballooning greenhouse gas emissions, caused in large part by the industry’s push for increasing use of energy-heavy AI and cloud computing. GRAIN’s research looks at how in particular Amazon and the USD 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund set up by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos don’t stop at just buying carbon credits. Both are involved in creating the infrastructure to produce carbon credits. Amazon has established its own carbon credit certification standard for tree planting projects, and carbon credit trading platform where its suppliers can buy Amazon-certified carbon credits.

Since the Paris Agreement, tree plantations have proliferated as purported carbon sinks and generators of carbon credits. This is a lucrative business that is also used to clean up the image of large companies. A recent article by Climate Tracker reveals some of the dirty ways companies use tree plantations to ironically promote themselves as clean. The cases come from Paraguay and Colombia. In the former, Apple uses monocultures that it presents as “forests,” in which it uses agrochemicals that are banned or restricted in other countries. Its activities violate laws and put populations at risk, especially children.

The Norwegian government through its state Pension Fund, has been a key investor in REDD-type projects, including monoculture tree plantations. Norway joined back in 2000 the World Bank´s Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) that helped the Plantar company in Brazil to expand its eucalyptus plantations to profit from selling carbon credits.

The Nyéléni Global Forum is one of the largest and most diverse gatherings of grassroots movements in the world, bringing together organizations of peasants, indigenous peoples, traditional fisherfolk, rural workers, and feminist and environmental movements, among others. Its main goal is to strengthen the global movement for food sovereignty. The third edition of the Nyéléni Global Forum was held in Kandy, Sri Lanka, from September 6-13, 2025, and it brought together almost 700 delegates from more than 100 countries. The purpose of the forum was to build a unified grassroots-led political vision and action plan to address the interconnected global crises of our time.