Issue 176 - March 2012

All around the world there are women struggling every day of the year. Since the 20th century, however, International Women's Day has become a date on which their struggle is commemorated and highlighted. Women on every continent, urban, rural, indigenous, black, lesbian, among so many others, mark this date on the streets, raising their banners, which are countless, against gender inequalities that are manifested at the local and global levels.

Men and women peasant farmers in the Bajo Aguán valley in Honduras are suffering violent repression after organizing and taking action to regain control of their land, which had been granted to them as part of a thwarted agrarian reform process dating back to the early 1970s. The Agrarian Reform Law passed in 1972 gave rise to the settlement of a region that until that time had not been devoted to agricultural production: Bajo Aguán. It paved the way for the expansion of monoculture plantations of oil palm in the region, initially geared to the cosmetics and food industries, and currently promoted for the production of agrofuels as well.

Business as usual dressed up in green Humanity is moving along old paths in new clothes. The current civilization model, which is portrayed as hegemonic but actually corresponds to a small minority of the planet, is dragging it towards its limits, exposing it to multiple crises.

The article: “Environmental services and the promotion of the commodification and financialization of nature: Forests, tree plantations and the green economy” published in last WRM bulletin Nº 175, raised a complaint from the NGO Forest Trends. The complaint concerned the information given in such article on the lack of public input for the approval of a law promoting trade in environmental services in Acre, Brazil.

March 14 is the International Day of Action For Rivers and Against Dams, when several voices raise against destructive water development projects including dams, reclaiming the health of watersheds, and demanding the equitable and sustainable management of rivers. International Rivers Network (IRN) has been fostering global action in this struggle. This year IRN shared the more than 120 actions planned in at least 45 countries ranging “from festivals, press conferences, kayaking events, river clean-ups, protests, religious gatherings, the launching of campaigns against hydroelectric dams, and more”. A map of these actions can be visited at IRN's website:http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/7094

Several social organizations from different parts of the world have signed and published the briefing “Carbon markets will not deliver for Southern governments, forests and people

A broad coalition of organizations from around the world released the first global civil society declaration to outline principles that must be adopted to protect public health and the environment from the risks posed by synthetic biology and to address its economic, social and ethical challenges. Until these governance principles are in place, the coalition is calling for a moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms and products on the grounds of the dangers posed by this “extreme genetic engineering” which writes genetic code to create new genes, genetic traits and possibly entire life forms from scratch.