Issue 149 – December 2009

What is elegantly termed as “climate change” is in reality one of the most gross violations of human rights ever committed in history. It is a crime to Humanity as a whole.

Colombia: oil-palm plantations, violation of human rights and Afro-descendent communities’ quest for true dignity When you talk about the violation of human rights, you must talk about Colombia. When you talk about the huge expansion of oil-palm plantations, you must talk about Colombia. Both issues go hand in hand in that country

The Italian oil company Eni is one of the top ten energy companies in the world and now the biggest in Africa. The company is also currently ranked as the world’s most “sustainable” oil and gas company. In September, at the UN Leadership Forum on Climate Change in New York, the head of Eni, Paolo Scaroni announced: “Gone are the days when we could afford to think about oil as a cheap input to economic and social growth, discounting the impact on the environment and on generations to come” .

Food Sovereignty: A positive approach to climate change While the planet is already suffering the effects of climate change, civil society groups try to raise the alarm on the fact that the present system of production, trade and consumption is at the root of the problem.

Before the plantations came, villagers in Teluk Kabung in Riau province in Sumatra, grew coconuts. A few years ago, thousands of hectares of forest surrounding the village were clearcut and replaced by acacia monocultures to supply Asia Pulp and Paper's massive operations. “As soon as they cut down the trees in the forest, the pests swarmed in, and ate our coconut trees,” a villager told Mitra Taj, a radio journalist from Living on Earth. Dozens of dead coconut trees lie on the ground near the village. Many of those still standing are just trunks, with no palm fronds and no coconuts.

The Mau Complex – the largest forest of Kenya – has been the ancestral home of the Ogiek Community. Although extremely important in terms of water catchment, micro-climate regulation and biological diversity, the Mau forest has been regularly cleared for settlement and private agriculture supported by official policies. Destruction of the forest has undermined Ogiek’s rights to  livelihood, culture and even a future. 

Hydropower is often portrayed as “clean” or “green” energy and as part of the solution for preventing fossil fuel-related climate change. However, government-sponsored and corporate-promoted hydropower implies building huge dams that result in environmental destruction and widespread violation of human rights, ranging from loss of livelihoods to forced evictions and related cases of repression.

A full 41% of the Sierra Madre region in the Mexican state of Chiapas – 227,000 square kilometres of land, equivalent to one half of the whole of Central America – has been turned over to Mexican and foreign corporations through mining concessions. Mining companies from Canada, the United States and Australia extract gold and silver from this mineral-rich region with the consent and protection of governments and the backing of free trade agreements.

In November 2009, 117 Nigerian organisations signed on to a statement to the government with a challenging message: leave oil in the ground. They expressed they were “united in our opposition to new oil blocs and call on all progressive-minded peoples and organizations to support our call that new oil finds be left in the ground and bitumen left in the soil.” In the last fifty years Nigeria became the largest producer of crude oil. It has based its economy on oil extraction mainly by foreign big corporations in the Niger Delta. However, the crucial question is: has the country seen any positive impacts from it?

The situation of the Ayoreo people of the Chaco region of Paraguay serves as an excellent illustration of the fact that forest conservation is a human rights issue. It also very clearly demonstrates that the protection of forests should be placed in the hands of those who have the greatest stake in their preservation: the indigenous peoples who depend on them for their survival.

The UN Climate Change Convention in Copenhagen presents itself to the world as if it were truly tackling the major global crisis of climate change, with thousands of government delegates and even a hundred or so presidents and heads of state joining the meeting.