Issue 138 – January 2009

During the last weeks, the world became an impotent witness to the horror of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. Although the images transmitted by TV barely reflected a small part of the suffering of the Palestinian people, they were more than enough to understand the dramatic situation they were going through.  Entire families being wiped out by bombs; homes, schools, shops, hospitals and temples reduced to rubble in a matter of seconds; water, sewage and energy systems destroyed; fear, wrath, pain, weariness, hunger and thirst.  

To establish a communal forest may look like a good proposal. However, it may be not, according to many local villagers from the district of Dzeng (Center Province, Department of Nyong and So'o), who have denounced the attempt of the current Dzeng’s mayor to make use of their forest lands for commercial exploitation. Some 25.182 hectares of forest lands would be classified as a "communal forest", an intermediate category between logging concessions and community forests. 

The Inga hydroelectric scheme (Inga 1, Inga 2, Inga 3 and Grand Inga) is located 140 miles southwest of capital city Kinshasa. It lies on the largest waterfall by volume in the world, the Inga falls, where the Congo River drops 96 m (315 ft) over the course of nine miles with an average flow of 42,476 m³/s. The project started in 1920 during Belgian colonial rule. Colonial authorities forced the site’s first inhabitants to leave without any compensation. Inga’s displaced communities haven’t received any compensation till today.

Yasuní National Park stretches along the basins of the Yasuní, Cononaco, Nashiño and Tiputini Rivers. Aside from the fact that these are major rivers in their own right, they are also surrounded by floodplains, wetlands, lagoons and lake systems like the Jatuncocha, Garzacocha and Lagartococha. This area is also the ancestral territory of the Waorani indigenous people and two indigenous tribes living in voluntary isolation, the Tagaeri and Taromenane. Cononaco and Tiputini, like hundreds of other indigenous names, are also the names of oilfields. The oil industry’s practice of using indigenous names for projects that entail the devastation of indigenous territories are just one more means of humiliation of the local communities.

The Ayoreo Indigenous People are one of an estimated 100 uncontacted tribes around the world and the only uncontacted people in South America outside the Amazon basin. The Totobiegosode (‘people from the place of the wild pigs’) are the most isolated sub-group of the Ayoreo and live in the Chaco, a vast expanse of dense, scrubby forest stretching from Paraguay to Bolivia and Argentina. They are extremely vulnerable to any form of contact with outsiders because of their lack of immunity to diseases, warns an emergency submission sent in November 2008 by Survival International to the United Nations. (1)  

More than three years ago, a large vessel arrived without warning at Tañon Strait, one of the richest fishing grounds in Central Philippines and a global center for marine biodiversity. For two months, the M/S Veritas Searcher owned by the Japan Petroleum Exploration Co. Ltd. (Japex) roamed the strait to determine the existence of oil and natural gas deposits using highly sophisticated technology to detect and determine the extent of these deposits.

Once more, the conflict over natural resources has played havoc on humble people. This time the criminal action took place on the settlement of Suluk Bongkal, Beringin, in the district of Bengkali, Riau Province, Sumatra.

This new publication of the WRM Series on Plantations (* ) examines resistances of populations neighboring two of Africa’s largest industrial tree plantations: the rubber monoculture Hévéa-Cameroun (HEVECAM) and the oil palm plantation Société Camerounaise de Palmeraies (SOCAPALM). The report intends to contribute to fill a lack of information on the situation around commercial plantations in Equatorial Africa. 

Did you ever imagine that the tyres of your car may have been produced at the expense of a local community’s livelihood in Nigeria?  Most of the world natural rubber production goes for the manufacturing of tyres for different types of vehicles, ranging from cars, to trucks, airplanes and so on. To have an idea of the huge amount of tyres consumed, let’s take a look at the statistics in 2007 where 1.3 billion tires were produced.

The “Small Holder Agriculture Development Project” (SADP) is a World Bank loan recently granted to the PNG Government. The SADP project, a U$S 27.5 million credit “aims to enhance agricultural incomes in a number of communities in West New Britain and Oro provinces.” According to World Bank’s Country Manager for PNG Benson Ateng this project is “a core element of the new Country Strategy, through its support for poverty alleviation in two oil palm growing provinces. The project aims to increase the revenues of oil palm farmers through a community-based approach to agricultural development.”

Before the current global economic meltdown, the pulp industry had ambitious expansion plans. Although the industry was closing mills in the North, it was expanding dramatically in the South where about five million tons of new capacity was due to start up each year for the next five years. Vast areas of monoculture tree plantations have been established to feed raw material to huge new megamills, particularly in Latin America, southeast Asia and South Africa.

According to a growing, vocal and very well-connected group of scientists, entrepreneurs and lobbyists, the best if not the only way of humanity surviving climate change and solving the food and energy crisis is to plough billions of tonnes of charcoal into the soil every year.