The existing Indonesian pulp and paper industry is currently generating a tremendous strain on forests. In that context, a new $1.2 Billion huge pulp and wood chip mill is planned to be built in the province of South Kalimantan.
The project is owned by the company “United Fiber System (UFS)” which is owned, among others, by Swedish capital investors. The new pulp mill would worsen the current depletion of forests in Indonesia, and the national and local problems connected to it.
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The Penan in Sarawak have been struggling for their rights to land and forests for more than twenty years, not only by setting up logging road blockades, but also by legally claiming their Native Customary Rights (NCR) in court. In spite of their ongoing resistance against logging and plantations on their native land, the Sarawak government and its concessionaries --logging and plantation companies-- continue to disrespect the Penan's rights on their land.
The Wanniyala-Aetto ("forest beings") are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka, gentle hunter-gatherers who have lived in a sustainable relationship to their tropical forest environment for the past eighteen thousand years.
Having survived 2,500 years of settlement of their island, first by Sinhalese and later by Tamil migrants from India, five centuries of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisation, and two world wars, the Wanniyala-Aetto were evicted from what was left of their ancestral forests by the Government of Sri Lanka.
In a recent outburst of “environmental enthusiasm” stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked "paper parks," few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map.
During the present month of November, the Guarani People of Itika Guasu, who inhabit the Province of O’Connor in the Department of Tarija, the location of the Margarita mega gas field, gathered in Assembly.
Wherever the pulp and paper industry operates, it brings with it the promise of jobs. Unfortunately, for the people living in the area that the industry takes over, these promises rarely bring work. In a recent report for World Rainforest Movement, Alacri De'Nadai, Winfridus Overbeek and Luiz Alberto Soares, record how Aracruz Celulose, the world's largest producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp, has failed to provide work for local people.
The forests of the Colombian Pacific, the Pacific Region Territory, one of the areas of greatest biodiversity in the world, have been inhabited for many years now by Afro-descendent riparian communities. Their members were the last Colombian citizens to gain recognition of their right to the ownership of the territories that they possessed and used for centuries.
The project for the installation of two pulp-mills in Uruguay on the river of the same name, has given rise to firm opposition, both in the country and among civil society in the neighbouring Argentine province of Entre Rios, across the river a few kilometres from the location where the pulp mills are to be installed by the Spanish company Ence and the Finnish company, Botnia.
Climate change is already happening. The recent hurricanes in the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico and southern US –and their terrible death toll- are not normal natural events: they are human-made disasters resulting from well-known causes. Unless those causes are seriously addressed, millions of people will continue to suffer from climate change impacts, ranging from extreme droughts to extreme flooding and storms.
To outsiders, the Bagyeli may appear very poor. They have next to nothing in the way of material possessions, little or no money, and are still often without a permanent house. Yet one of the most important indicators of wealth for these peoples is the access they enjoy to the forest and its resources and the amount to which they are able to participate in decision-making processes relative to their livelihoods.
Mining giant Rio Tinto, the world's second largest diversified miner, has been given permission to open up an enormous mine on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar that will involve digging up some of the world's most unique forest on Indigenous territory.
The $775 million titanium dioxide mining projected to be carried out in the Fort Dauphin region of the island is being developed by QIT Madagascar Minerals, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, with 20 per cent owned by the government and support from the World Bank.
The privatisation mania has gripped us like an unpreventable plague. The privatisation list is being expanded inexorably. Whether we admit it or not, and whatever the language we may use to rationalise it, the fact remains that privatisation is thrust down the throats of African governments by the BWIs (Bretton Woods Institutions) and the dominant Western powers. Even the so-called debt relief by the G8 is predicated on privatisation as one of the conditionalities. And the BWIs have a peculiar way of arguing.