Much of the world’s population –especially males– will spend the coming weeks glued to the TV as the FIFA World Cup unfolds. While many are fully aware that this is no longer a mere sporting event, but rather a massive globalized business in which the players are little more than disposable gladiators at the service of big corporations, they are still drawn to keep watching, celebrating the victories and suffering the defeats as if they were their own.
Bulletin articles
A leaked World Bank Inspection Panel [1] report heavily criticises the Bank’s own forest management project in Cambodia for breaking internal safeguards, ignoring local communities and failing to reduce poverty, says Global Witness, a non-partisan international non-governmental organisation --co-nominated for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in uncovering how diamonds have funded civil wars across Africa-- focused on the links between the exploitation of natural resources and the funding of conflict and corruption.
As evidence of climate change becomes ever more compelling, the battle over who gets to frame its causes, effects and solutions will intensify. In popular as well as policy venues, whose voices get heard and whose don't will become a key political issue of our time. Today, at the international policy level, gender is conspicuous by its absence in climate change debates. In fact, the words "women" and "gender" are missing in the two main international global warming agreements, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.
Since 1990, a lot of noise has been made about the forests of the Congo Basin, both good and bad. Now a new environmental wave is descending on the Democratic Republic of Congo, of a scope very similar to that of the “Zaire boom” in the seventies. However, the question is: are the Central African forestry administrations -generally subject to insidious sociological factors- aligned with the aspirations and needs regarding welfare of the region’s inhabitants?
A computer. That is what the US citizen Paul Lambert, representative of the Tortuga Landing company offered the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) as compensation for having built a 105 metre long and 4 metres wide road and for having eliminated natural regeneration in a forest in the terrestrial maritime area of Quepos, a Central Pacific locality. This occurred during a “conciliation” hearing which took place on 17 February at the Environmental Administrative Tribunal (file No. 184-05-3-TAA).
In the early 1900s Gambia was covered by dense and almost impenetrable forests. Today there are only some few remnants of primary forest left, with 78% of the remaining forest area classified as “degraded tree and shrub savannah vegetation.” The main cause of this forest degradation process can be traced back to the introduction of groundnut (peanut), which became the main export-oriented cash crop, mostly aimed at supplying the French market with industrial and cooking oil.
The National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) welcomes the report submitted by the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the draft Forest Rights Bill and is hopeful that the Central Cabinet will approve it and will send it to the Parliament. NFFPFW further acknowledges the role played by the Chairman and members of the JPC, and contribution of all other social movements, struggle groups of forest people and movements in shaping this Bill through their suggestions, and submissions before the JPC.
Many letters have been sent from abroad to the Government of Ecuador in the framework of the campaign to support Ecuadorian social and indigenous organizations that are endeavouring to avoid the adoption in that country of a legislation that will imply the expansion of large scale monoculture tree plantations (see the article on Ecuador in this bulletin).
The experts at the service of transnational corporations have proved to have an unlimited inventive capacity to better serve those who are paying them. Among their most recent achievements is having managed to put up for sale nature itself under the guise of so-called “environmental services.” Expressions such as “oxygen sale” and “sale of carbon sinks” are now common currency, in particular in the countries of the South.
The vast rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo --the second largest on Earth after the Amazon-- have been seen by the World Bank as a target area.
The political instabilities in Nigeria during Abacha's regime in 1993/94, which was an aftermath of the annulment of June 12, 1992 presidential election won by the late business mogul -Chief M.K.O. Abiola- created an acute scarcity of kerosene that was seriously felt in different parts of the country. The kerosene scarcity led to the invention of “Abacha Coal-Pot” – a locally made cooking stove that uses charcoal.
Eucalyptus were first introduced into China in about 1890 and were originally planted as ornamentals and roadside shade trees. The primary high tide of Eucalyptus plantations mainly for timber production in China came after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. It was not until the 1950s that extensive areas of plantations were established by state forest farms for the purposes of supplying mining timbers (pitwood), poles for construction and fuel wood. Government-sponsored planting programs during the 1970s and 1980s increased the plantation estate to about 600,000 ha.