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!
Bulletin articles
This bulletin shows that the fight against monoculture tree plantations and the model they represent is very strong in the Global South, especially among women. Whether it is in Indonesia, Thailand, Liberia, Brazil or Colombia, communities continue to resist and make progress.
We are peasants from Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil. In recent decades, we have witnessed the spread of oil palm monocultures in our territory, an expansion driven by multinational companies with government support. False promises led us to accept plantation partnership schemes that put us at risk of losing our land. What was once forest and traditional crops have been replaced by monocultures that have left us with food shortages, debt, and the threat of floods. For this reason, we organized ourselves to end this exploitation and restore our traditional way of life. And here we share the story of our struggle.
This is the story of how we, a group of indigenous peoples and peasants in Colombia, have come together under the name Cajibío Interethnic and Intercultural Territory of Life (TEVIIC, by its Spanish acronym), to face one of the world's largest multinational paper and cardboard manufacturers: Smurfit Westrock. Our goal is to achieve Agrarian Reform through autonomy and concrete actions.
Whether they are in Brazil, amidst eucalyptus plantations, or in Thailand, surrounded by oil palm plantations, women suffer specific impacts from these monocultures. Women are on the frontlines of the resistance to these projects, which exploit and devastate the land in pursuit of profit. This is what two peasant activists fighting to defend the land – one from Brazil and one from Thailand – tell us.
Two Joghban leaders who have been active in the fight against Equatorial Palm Oil's (EPO) invasion of their ancestral lands talk about their victorious resistance process. Their resistance culminated in 2018 with official state recognition of part of their territory. However, they stress that this long-term struggle is ongoing. “We are going to resist; we will always resist, because land matters to us and to our future generations”, says Isaac Banwon, one of the leaders.
The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) will be launched at the 30th United Nations Climate Conference (COP30), which will take place from November 10th to 21st in Belém, Brazil. This initiative claims to be a "new hope" for tropical forests worldwide. However, this is far from the case.
The article we recommend shares the story of Uma Bai Netam, a woman from the Gond tribe in India. It helps us understand how women from traditional communities are particularly affected by commercial tree monocultures – which are allegedly used to offset the destruction of forest areas caused by extractive or infrastructure projects. Uma and other Indian women have won some partial victories, such as the legal right to the land where they have lived and worked for decades.
In recent years, 'energy' has taken center stage at important debates around solutions to the impending climate collapse towards which the world is heading. This debate encompasses everything from the 'energy transition' and 'clean energies,' to structural critiques that question why and for whom energy is produced. However, it is necessary to take a step back and reflect on the very idea of 'energy.' This edition of the WRM bulletin aims to contribute to that reflection.
The root of the climate crisis we are experiencing does not lie in the sources of energy we use but in the very logic of what we mean by 'energy.' While it is hard to imagine this today, the notion of energy has not always existed. It was created for a very specific purpose: capital accumulation. As long as we continue to normalize 'energy' as an essential resource for human life, we will never see the true causes of the climate collapse we are experiencing: a social system designed to concentrate wealth.
The following excerpts are from conversations we had with people who, despite living on different continents, have made the same choice: to live without electricity. Whether they live in the Indonesian archipelago or the Brazilian Amazon, their testimonies show that electricity is not an essential resource for human life. On the contrary, for these people, it is essential to do without it.
Food sovereignty cannot be achieved in isolation from energy sovereignty. Our vision on energy is one that honors the rhythms of nature, values the wisdom of elders and restores the balance between humans and the Earth. Because in traditional African cosmologies, energy was not separate from life. The fossil-fuel era broke this balance, severing energy from ethics, and turning it into a commodity to be bought and sold.