Struggles for the Forests
When corporations destroy forests, or restrict or even prohibit access to forest peoples' territories, they place communities' ways of life and their very existence at risk. WRM supports forest peoples' struggles to defend their territories, and their right to decide how to live, and how to use the forests they depend on.
Back in 2004, conservation NGOs and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry pioneered with a model called Ecosystem Restoration Concessions. This article takes a closer look at this model in the context of new and old threats to forests, and the global push for “forest restoration”. (Available in Indonesian).
Oil multinational Shell claims that it is possible that consumers drive “carbon neutral”, simply by paying extra for offsetting their emissions - planting trees or investing in existing forest areas elsewhere. But what is happening in those areas elsewhere? (Available in Indonesian).
“If our land, water sources, air and livelihoods are being destroyed by geothermal exploration and exploitation, how can this energy be called “clean”? “Clean” for whom?”
Before, conservation organizations were focused on raising money to create protected areas in forests supposedly threatened with destruction; today, they constitute a bona fide transnational “industry” that manages and controls areas that go far beyond forests.
In Africa’s Congo Basin the many promises of rights-based and participatory conservation have miserably failed to materialise. For communities living in and around protected areas, the reality continues to be one of dispossession, impoverishment and widespread human rights abuses.
Despite that most forest fires in Indonesia started within expanding oil palm plantation concession areas, companies are not being persecuted. (Available in Indonesian).
In solidarity with the International Day of Peasant Struggle. A day to remember, emphasize and mobilize together against the persecution and violence that peasants suffer on a daily basis around the world.
