Bulletin issue 236 - March 2018

This bulletin, on International Women's Day, is a call for direct and radical solidarity with those women who suffer, resist, organize and mobilize against the daily violence and abuse that industrial plantations cause.

From rapes, forced body searches and searches of private spaces, to the risk of losing their lives: this article calls on us not to be accomplices to the violence women living around tree plantations in Cameroon suffer.

The expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has turned women into landless food buyers and cheap labour, with no adequate safety and health protection, for the plantation companies. (Available in Indonesian).

Contamination of water sources, deplorable working conditions, and sexual blackmail in exchange for work, are some of the kinds of violence against women living in and around oil palm plantations in Guatemala and Colombia.

A woman from the village of Mbonjo 1, Cameroon, which has witnessed the impact of industrial palm oil plantations and the constant presence of the military, calls for international solidarity and protection of right to life and freedom.

India’s programme to compensate for the destruction of forests for development projects is routinely setting up monoculture tree plantations on community commons. Women, who are mostly affected, are at the centre of its resistance.

The voices and stories of forest-dependent women are often rejected, unheard or silenced, which makes it easier for companies to grab community land. But what happens when they start to raise their voices?

The organization and sexual division of labor and job insecurity in single crop activities affect the health of female workers and territorial changes derived from this model of production directly affect women.

Women suffer many types of violence committed by oil palm plantations companies’ employers, security forces, police and military, which subsequently reinforce patriarchy and their roles and relations within society in general. (Available in Indonesian).

Plantations are increasingly surrounding and engulfing communities. Women must walk through company-occupied lands in order to seek their livelihoods. This, among other things, can cost them their lives.

On the 8th of March2018, International Women’s Day, we from the World March of Women, diverse women from all peoples, races and ages, come together once again to reaffirm that we will keep marching until we are all free from all the oppression from the patriarchal, capitalist and colonial system; we will continue to use our feminism as a way of life, and the streets as the space to amplify our demands. We denounce and resist the political worldwide context marked by the growing economic, social, political, climatic and ideological crises, in short, we denounce the total war environment where we, women, are the most affected!

The sixth and latest issue of the magazine “Trait d’Union“, a trimestral magazine and liaison of the associations of populations surrounded by oil palm plantations from SOCAPALM, workers’ unions and oil palm planters, was released. The magazine shares over 15 relevant articles highlighting different aspects of the struggles surrounding these oil palm plantations in Cameroon. This time, we want to emphasize two articles:

An audiovisual production made in indigenous Shiwiar territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon exposes the reality and resistance of peoples against the extraction of common goods, and in particular the struggle of women as givers of life and defenders of the land and water. Watch the video in Spanish at: http://www.radiotemblor.org/?p=10579

The Transnational Institute’s State of Power 2018 report highlights three interviews with women activists who have displayed incredible courage, determination and creativity to confront corporate power and state violence. From Honduras, South Africa and India, the interviews attest to the instrumental role women have played in their respective struggles, the ways communities have refused to be cowed by the politics of terror, and the importance of movements to remain autonomous, rooted in communities and intelligent and holistic in their strategies and tactics.

The Movement of Dam-Affected peoples in Brazil (MAB, by its Portuguese acronym) warns that the construction of dams affects women more intensely, and that it is women whose rights are more brutally violated. A well-known tragedy is the incentive for prostitution and trafficking of women—problems which take place with companies' complicity. Earlier this year, the police dismantled a brothel on the highway that accesses one of the Belo Monte project construction sites, where there were women—including minors—living in conditions of slavery and private imprisonment. In spaces where dams are built, women are a mere commodity to entertain workers.

A video from the Center for International Forestry Research shows a day of Magdalena Pandan, a 35-year-old oil palm plantation worker in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, who rises before dawn every day to carry out her duties toward her job, her family and her crop lands. See video here: