Struggles Against Tree Monocultures
Corporate profit drives land grabs to install industrial tree monocultures. Where industrial plantations take root, communities' territories and lives are violently invaded, their forests destroyed and their water polluted. When communities resist, companies tend to respond with aggression. Despite this extreme violence, communities around the world are resisting, organizing and joining forces to defend their territories. Every September 21 the International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations is celebrated.
Bulletin articles
4 January 2022
We invite you to reflect with an activist who explores resistance processes and the challenges they face, based on her experience with struggles in Brazil. In this reflection, we also invite you to join the collective resistance from your own contexts and spaces of organization. The fight continues and the fight is one!
Other information
15 December 2024
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
Peasant families are threatened with eviction by Brasil Bio Fuels (BBF) oil palm plantation company, with the complicity of the state government. This article shows that the much spoken of ‘bioeconomy’ is not ‘sustainable’ and even less ‘clean’. What it does is destroy communities’ territories, just like fossil fuel-based extractive industries have been doing for a long time.
Bulletin articles
26 February 2024
In the Acará Valley, Pará state, the Tembé and Turiwara indigenous peoples, and quilombola and peasant communities are fighting to take back part of the living spaces they traditionally occupied. It is not just a struggle for territory, but one to reverse a history of oppression and injustice. Today, they are denouncing structural violence and state omission.
Bulletin articles
25 October 2023
Exchanges between activists put the voices of those who fight to defend their territories at the center of the conversation. In September, members of communities from Brazil and Mozambique united their struggles and connected their histories once again, helping to strengthen solidarity in the fight against industrial tree plantations.
Other information
25 October 2023
The network released an open letter in which it denounces the impacts of the plantations and the crimes committed by the companies. At the same time, they demand reparation and reaffirm resistance against tree monocultures.
Other information
16 January 2023
The news portal Metrópoles travelled 5,700 km to denounce how the palm oil production chain affects quilombola communities and Indigenous Peoples in the state of Pará, Brazil—namely through expropriation of traditional communities, environmental impacts, and a labor history analogous to slavery.
Bulletin articles
11 October 2022
The network that brings together movements, organizations and communities in the fight against tree plantations met in the Far South of the State of Bahia. This September 21st, it once again denounced the impacts of this violent and unjust model, which is based on large-scale plantations mostly for pulp export.
Bulletin articles
12 September 2022
The quilombola communities of Sapê do Norte, Brazil, are living a violent process with the expansion of large-scale eucalyptus monoculture. After many hardships, they started a process to take back their water and land. And the struggle to take back what is theirs continues. WRM talked to two quilombola activists to reflect on this difficult but fertile process of resistance.
Bulletin articles
16 June 2022
In Brazil, oil palm plantations are expanding rapidly, mainly in the Amazonian state of Pará. BBF (Brasil BioFuels), the largest oil palm company in Brazil, stands accused of environmental crimes and violence against indigenous, quilombola and peasant communities such as Virgílio Serrão Sacramento, a community linked to the Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA).
Bulletin articles
16 June 2022
Quilombola Communities’ Resistance Against Suzano Company in the Southernmost part of Bahia, Brazil
A conversation with the president of the Volta Miúda Quilombola Association and of the Southernmost part of Bahia Quilombola Cooperative revealed how Suzano, the world’s largest paper and cellulose corporation, continues to operate with serious violations and illegalities. Communities keep fighting to reclaim their lands back.
Other information
16 June 2022
More than 50 organizations, networks and movements from Brazil and around the world denounce the release into the environment and the commercial use of a new transgenic eucalyptus from the Brazilian company Suzano Papel e Celulose.