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.
Bulletin articles
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.
Like other countries invaded by monoculture tree plantations (or the “green cancer”, as some South Africans call them), South Africa shows that those schemes have not been aimed at ameliorating local peoples’ quality of life. On the contrary.
Adding to the information delivered by the report on the impacts of outsourcing on forestry (see WRM Bulletin Nº 96), shocking statistics came out of the first forestry sector empowerment charter workshop held in East London on September 12.
India’s forests, the foundation of the nation’s ecological security, are being lost to a plethora of commercial enterprises at an alarming rate. The latest statistics released by the Forest Survey of India shows that the country has lost over 26,000 sq. km of its dense forests during the period 2001-2003. With over 3000 species of flowering plants and about 200 species of animals of the country having been already categorized as being threatened, this massive loss of forest is surely to have added to the decimation of biodiversity.
Local conversations about the classification of the Mount Merapi forest area into a national park often end up questioning why it was established as a park at all.
Mount Merapi forest ecosystem is located at 600 to 2968 meter above sea level, in Yogyakarta Province, Republic of Indonesia. With an area of 8,655 hectares, it is mostly covered by mountain tropical forest which is the source of living of a million people in four districts.
A massive restructuring of Lao society is currently taking place. Over the last decade, the Lao government has moved tens of thousands of Indigenous Peoples from their remote upland homes to lowland areas and near roads. While the government's programmes are aimed at "poverty alleviation" and "development", the impacts on the resettled communities' livelihoods, food security and environment have often been devastating.
In an ironic twist, Thailand’s Community Forest Bill intended as a formal framework to define rights of communities to co-manage forest areas now threatens to resettle rural communities especially ethnic peoples living in the uplands and conservation forest areas.