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.
Publications
10 September 2024
This briefing provides an overview of the expansion of tree plantations aimed at carbon markets. Where are these plantations located, who is profiting from them, what have been the impacts for communities living on the lands these projects occupy, and what international initiatives are taking place to boost tree plantations for carbon offsetting.
Action alerts
5 September 2024
National and international organizations sent an letter to Brazilian authorities to demand urgent protection for the Turiwara indigenous people of the upper Acará River, in Pará, who are suffering violence and serious threats from Agropalma company.
Action alerts
23 August 2024
Publications
20 August 2024
This is a summary edition of the booklet “Promise, Divide, Intimidate and Coerce: 12 tactics palm oil companies use to grab community land”, launched in 2019 by the Informal Alliance Against Industrial Oil Palm Plantations in West and Central Africa. In this edition, you will find one tactic per page, together with an illustration.
Action alerts
13 August 2024
Press release. SOCAPALM, a subsidiary of Socfin, must immediately cease replanting operations at Edea 1, in Cameroon.
Action alerts
6 May 2024
Oil palm plantations are spreading like wildfire across the eastern Brazilian Amazon. But local communities are standing up to the palm oil industry’s brutality and sweeping land grabs, demanding the return of their ancestral lands and calling on the authorities to protect them from encroachment and violence.
Publications
21 March 2024
On 21 March, which has been promoted by the FAO as the International Day of Forests, WRM is releasing a briefing about the importance of the words we use. The briefing explores how concepts like “forests,” which have been historically imposed and adopted without considering a diversity of viewpoints (in particular those of forest-dependent Peoples) contribute to the creation of policies that neither recognize this diversity nor halt deforestation.
Action alerts
28 February 2024
We call on organizations to sign this petition in support of the Mayan Q’eqchi community Santa Elena in the northern region of Guatemala. The community is asking for international and national support in the face of recent threats and growing criminalization by Industria Chiquibul, a palm company that supplies palm oil to transnational corporations such as Nestle and Unilever. Read and sign the letter below.
Action alerts
28 November 2023
Sign this petition against the replanting of oil palm by Socapalm (Socfin/ Bolloré) in the vicinity of the homes and tombs of the neighbouring village Apouh à Ngog, in Edea-Cameroon.
Action alerts
20 November 2023
Collective statement, 20 November 2023
Action alerts
1 November 2023
Llamamos a organizaciones a firmar esta carta para exigir a las autoridades de la provincia de Misiones, Argentina, la entrega urgente de 434 hectáreas que le corresponden por ley a la cooperativa Productores Independientes de Piray (PIP-UTT). Las tierras están ocupadas por plantaciones forestales de la multinacional Arauco.
Action alerts
21 September 2023
Sign the letter in support of Indigenous and local communities devastated by the social and ecological impacts of industrial tree plantations, and threatened by the planned future use of GMO tree plantations.