Oceania (general)

In December 2015, the Paris Agreement was celebrated with great fanfare. This agreement, part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), establishes new measures to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which are responsible for global warming.

Skilful selection and nurturing of the seeds best suited to a particular location are at the heart of peasant farming and agroforestry systems. The resulting agrobiodiversity of hundreds of thousands of crop varieties and animal races found in peasants' fields around the globe provides the corner stone of the world’s food system. Peasant farmers and the local varieties that they developed are still feeding the majority of us.

 

**This article is based on a conversation between Winnie Overbeek, the international coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement, and GRAIN on September 2014, which was published by GRAIN at “Planet palm oil”. The information has been updated for this article.

  As the UN climate negotiations in December approach, there's only one major intergovernmental initiative on climate and agriculture, and it is controlled by the world's largest fertiliser companies. The Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture, launched in 2014 at the UN Summit on Climate Change in New York, is the result of several years of efforts by the fertiliser lobby to block meaningful action on agriculture and climate change.

  The climate talks in Paris in December this year are viewed as a last chance for the world’s governments to commit to binding targets that might halt our march towards climate chaos. But in the countdown to Paris, many of these same governments have signed or are pushing a raft of ambitious trade and investment deals that would pre-empt measures needed to deal with climate change.

Conceived in 2012 by a group of individuals, organisations and networks, the “Yes to Life, No to Mining” movement is committed to take action against the increasingly devastating impact of the mining industry. They seek to connect communities saying NO to mining across the planet in order to collaborate through solidarity and support one another to stand firm. Through the website, they share useful materials and provide a space through which they share stories of resistance, success and struggle.

This last World Rainforest Movement bulletin of the year 2014 focuses on an issue that is somehow present in all of the local struggles and related issues that this bulletin informs you about every month. Although it is not specifically about a forest or tree plantation-related issue, it is about something that involves forest-dependent communities and that we feel is very important to dedicate an entire WRM bulletin to: the complex debate about alternatives.