World Rainforest Movement
The articles in this Bulletin are written by the following organizations and individuals: Activists from Brazil, Gabon, India, Mexico and Mozambique; GRAIN; The Oakland Institute, US; RIAO-RDC, Republic Democratic of Congo; the Latin American Network of Women Defenders of Social and Environmental Rights; and members of the WRM international secretariat.
This bulletin seeks to warn about the strategies used by those imposing themselves on territories with the development flag. They increasingly work in alliance with financial capital—which they see as a partner, and which they reinforce with public resources.
WRM spoke with close allies from Brazil, Gabon, India, Mexico and Mozambique, to hear from them and learn about their understandings of development.
Why haven’t Africa’s post-colonial governments dismantled the colonial plantation model of exploitation and extraction, returned the lands to their people and emboldened a resurgence of Africa’s diverse, local food and farming systems?
The development narrative continues to be revived despite its role in driving the current crisis and the millions of livelihoods it has destroyed through displacement and dispossession.
How does REDD+ fit into the development agenda in Indonesia? What are the actors involved in promoting REDD+ and with which interests?
European development banks have financed a plantation company in DRC that is built on injustice and violence dating back to a colonial-era land grab. When the company went bankrupt in 2020, the banks chose to uphold the plantation model.
In June 2019, a report from the AfDB and WWF Kenya made a call to development-funding agencies, mainly from Europe, and the World Bank, to provide aid money to a new Fund for financing 100,000 hectares of (new) industrial tree plantations, to support the potential development of 500,000 hectares, in Eastern and Southern Africa.
This article is about how so-called ‘development cooperation’ hides, and grants legitimacy to, an agenda of dispossession and capitalist expansion; and how this ‘cooperation’ actually co-opts the political agenda of (Read More)
Development discourse is intertwined with an array of concepts. It is impossible to talk about development without thinking about other ideas, such as growth or poverty. However development, being a (Read More)
A sign-on statement denounces public development banks for financing companies and private projects that heavily impact communities, their food sovereignty and territories. From 9-12 November 2020, 450 finance institutions gathered (Read More)
The organization, Independent Producers of Piray, in Argentina, organized to stop the Alto Paraná company and the monoculture of pine trees. The Alto Paraná company was acquired in 1996 by (Read More)
The last bulletin related to the global pandemic from the organization Focus on the Global South encompasses seven articles that pose the question on how and if strategic economic transformations (Read More)
Members of MOVUS (Movement for a Sustainable Uruguay) denounced before the courts that UPM pulp company failed to comply the environmental conditions under which the installation of its new pulp (Read More)
This 1992 book, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, compiles more than 15 key concepts that served as a basis for, and a way to expand, destructive discourse about “development.” Each of (Read More)