Large-Scale Tree Plantations

A broad coalition of organisations has launched an international call to request that the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety implement binding regulations to stop the spread of genetically engineered organisms into the environment.

The people of Collingwood Bay in Papua New Guinea have won back their land from Malaysian loggers and oil palm companies after a hard fought battle.

Mozambique is a country where tree plantations dates back to colonial times, when Portugal encouraged the planting of eucalyptus and pine trees. By independence there were 20,000 hectares of tree plantations of exotic species in seven provinces.

Harvard University is the owner, through the Harvard Management Company (HMC), of the world’s largest endowment, which handles 32 billion dollars annually. Of this total, around 15% is devoted to forestry investments around the world.

In the early 1990s, as a result of the Forests Law of 1987, the area covered by tree plantations in Uruguay began to grow rapidly, with rates of expansion sometimes greater than 50,000 hectares annually.

A report by Greenpeace that reveals how the oil palm plantation being developed by the US based Herakles Farms in the southwest region of Cameroon – an area of great biodiversity surrounded by five protected areas – pose a serious threat to forests and forest dependent communities.

(Sign on before 15 June!) Dear friends, FuturaGene, a biotechnology firm owned by Brazilian pulp and paper company Suzano, has requested authorization from the Brazilian Biosafety Commission (CTNBio) for the commercial release of its genetically engineered eucalyptus trees in Brazil.

To: Brazilian National Technical Biosafety Commission (CTNBio) We, the undersigned, have been informed that FuturaGene, a biotechnology firm wholly owned by the pulp and paper company Suzano, has submitted a request for commercial planting of its yield enhanced genetically modified eucalyptus trees. Suzano/FuturaGene, as well as other companies like Fibria (ex-Aracruz) and ArborGen, have been conducting research and field experiments on GM Trees for years.

Dear friends, our friends from Liberia are requesting our support. The Jogbahn Clan in Liberia is fighting to keep their home. A British palm oil company wants to clear their land without their permission. Add your voice to a petition to tell the palm oil company and its major shareholders that the world is watching. NO means NO!

In late 2013, a group of representatives of African, Indonesian and international NGOs met with members of La Via Campesina and the African Biodiversity Network in Calabar, Nigeria, to address the massive expansion of industrial oil palm plantations on the African continent and discuss, in particular, the situation in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cameroon, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon.