Forests at the World Social Forum
Predominating ideology has tended to divorce social issues from environmental issues and even to make them antagonistic. Such is the case with the question of forests, where while governments recognise (Read More)
Bulletin Issue 66 – January 2003
OUR VIEWPOINT
LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS
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Chad/Cameroon: Promises and realities of a World Bank funded oil project
The Chad/Cameroon Oil & Pipeline project (see WRM Bulletins 45, 41, 35, 14 and 2) is reaching critical milestones. Most construction activities are scheduled to be completed by July 2003 (Read More)
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Honduras: Shrimp farmer as “offical delegate” to Ramsar
On 23 November, 2002, at the Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Ramsar Convention for the conservation of wetlands, held in Valencia, Spain, the Honduran environmental organisation, Committee for (Read More)
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Africa: Civil Society Participation in the Forest Law Enforcement and Governance process
The Ministerial meeting in the Africa Forest Law Enforcement and Governance process is scheduled to take place in Brazzaville, Congo April 1-4th, 2003. Government delegates as well as representatives from (Read More)
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Kenya: Lights and shadows in new government’s approach to forests
Kenya’s new elected president, Mwai Kibaki, has named Dr Newton Kulundu as Environment Minister and well known environmentalist Prof Wangari Mathai as assistant minister. The newly appointed minister has already (Read More)
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Madagascar: Colonialism as the historical root cause of deforestation
Madagascar’s historic problem of deforestation can be linked to the detrimental policies of the colonial state in terms of land use and agriculture. The deforestation problem in Madagascar began when (Read More)
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Bangladesh: Sunderban Biodiversity Conservation Project questioned
The SBCP Watch Group is an environmental group of four local NGOs –Actionaid Bangladesh, Rupantar, JJS and Lokaj– established in 2000 with the purpose of monitoring the activities carried out (Read More)
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India: Rainwater harvesters and forest protectors of the Aravalli hills
During a recent visit to Rajasthan state in India, Patrick McCully from International Rivers Network, had the opportunity to see first hand just how profoundly the work of a local (Read More)
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Indonesia: WWF report links oil palm plantations to widespread deforestation
Indonesia ranks among one of the countries with the highest tropical forest loss rate in the world. Average annual deforestation recorded up to one million hectares in the 1980s, 1.7 (Read More)
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Indonesia: Report on paper industry’s abuses on human rights
“Indonesian police and company security forces are responsible for persistent human rights abuses against indigenous communities involved in the massive pulp and paper industry in Sumatra”, Human Rights Watch said (Read More)
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Vietnam: Construction of Kontum pulp and paper mill suspended
On 24 October 2002, provincial authorities announced the suspension of construction of the new 130,000 tons a year pulp and paper mill at Dac To in Kontum province, in Vietnam’s (Read More)
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Puerto Rico: Poetry that saved a forest
Many years before there was scientific evidence of the destruction of the environment, the major artists and poets had noted the phenomenon in their essays, songs and poetry. In Puerto (Read More)
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Argentina: The “forests of silence” or the pine plantations at the Yungas
The phyto-geographical region of the Yungas, or cloud forest, is a humid forest occurring in mountainous sectors linked to the cordillera of the Andes. It extends in a discontinuous way (Read More)
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Brazil: Hope is born for peoples and forests
In 2002, hope overcame fear. In 2003, hope may result in a political agreement between the middle class voters who, devastated by unemployment and impoverished by the economic policy, lost (Read More)
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Chile: Environmental organisation questions FSC standards for plantations
According to information available in FSC’s web page, seven companies in Chile have certified “forests” covering a total area of 262,168 hectares. However, only one of these companies (Las Cruces (Read More)
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Ecuador: Oil palm and forestry companies in the Choco bio-region
In Ecuador, the Esmeraldas forests are part of the relict tropical forests on the Pacific coast of America. These forests are part of the Choco bio-geographical region, one of the (Read More)
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Papua New Guinea: Small-scale sawmilling a good way forward
The richness of PNG’s forests is well known, and so is their level of destruction due to industrial logging. This unsustainable activity –in most cases related to high levels of (Read More)