Residents south of the Matsapha Industrial Estate, where the nation's manufacturing sector is based, recently complained of ailments resulting from the consumption of "poison" water from the Lusushwana river. The river is clean when it flows out of Mantenga Nature Reserve, but then it passes through the Matsapha industries where its colour changes, according to residents who depend on the river for their water needs. "It is brown one day, grey the next," said Thab'sile Dlamini, who lives in an informal settlement that has sprung up along the riverbank.
Bulletin articles
Recently, a joint venture company between Heritage Oil & Gas --a subsidiary of the Canadian-based Heritage Oil Corp-- and South Africa's Energy Africa have announced the preliminary results from trial drilling. The exploration for oil has been going on for some time now near the country's western border and the results point to billions of barrels' worth of oil deposits along the western arm of the East African Rift Valley in the Semliki.
The Great Leap Forward in 1958 and the Cultural Revolution had thwarted in China the establishment of high yield timber plantations put forward in the late 1950s by the Chinese Ministry of Forestry. However, since 1980s, along with the implementation of the reform and open-door policy (namely China's entry to the global market arena), the existing imbalance between wood demand and supply was altered. This seems to be not very different from the process undergone by other countries which end up engulfed by the global commerce and its packaging demand.
A longstanding land conflict by the Adivasi indigenous people gave rise in January this year to a toll of some 15-20 (unconfirmed) Adivasis killed and some 32 injured by armed police. The attack was allegedly a response to armed action by Adivasis on wildlife officials with traditional weapons such as bows and arrows. The authorities say they have cleared a wildlife sanctuary which was illegally occupied.
Late last year, some 40 ethnic Hmong men from Ban Phou Khao Khouay marched to the Nam Mang 3 dam site armed with sticks and guns, and demanded to speak with project officials. The villagers were infuriated that they might be evicted from their lands for the project and yet had received no information about where they would be relocated, when they would be moved, or what compensation they would receive. They threatened the foreign contractors, telling them "to pack up and go home" if they failed to answer their questions about resettlement.
Advance Agro, one of Thailand's largest pulp and paper companies, markets its "Double A" brand paper as environmentally friendly. The company's advertising explains that the raw material comes from plantations and thus relieves pressure on remaining forest areas.
Thousands of hectares of forest were razed by the flames in a series of forest fires, which during March and April swept uncontrollably through the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the north of Guatemala. The fires reached the Tikal National Park, declared World Heritage site by UNESCO although they were controlled before seriously affecting the area. However, the national parks of Sierra del Lacandón and Laguna del Tigre were razed by the flames, while in the central part of the reserve, the uncontrolled flames advanced in the virgin forest.
On 13, 14 and 15 April, coinciding with the celebration of the First Centenary of the Republic of Panama, the Kuna People feel that their ancestral rights have not yet been accepted nor contemplated by a major part of Panamanian society. They gathered and made the following statement:
Genetically engineered trees represent a global threat to native forests and biodiversity as a whole. Traits such as herbicide resistance, insecticide production, rapid growth and reduced lignin content coupled with the inability to maintain sterility virtually assure devastation of forest ecosystems. The purpose of Action for Social and Ecological Justice (ASEJ)'s campaign against GE trees (see WRM Bulletin Nº 69) is to achieve an international ban on the release of genetically engineered trees into the environment including test sites and commercial applications.
A letter with over 50 signatures from Brazilian NGOs, churches, movements and trade unions was sent to investors of the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) on 26 March 2003, urging them not to buy carbon credits from the controversial Plantar project in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The letter (available at www.sinkswatch.org, also see WRM Bulletin 65) states that Plantar is neither clean nor sustainable development, that the company has continuously violated labour laws, and does not possess an EIA, though required according to the law.
In these times of increasingly fast processes linked to technological development, we are also witnessing an equally vertiginous loss of natural resources due to over-exploitation enabling a way of production, consumption and lifestyle that closes a vicious circle.
The Choco region (an area of 75,000 km2 on the Colombian Pacific coast) is a strategic ecosystem due to its natural and cultural diversity and shows the greatest concentration of biodiversity in the world as regards the number of species per hectare (see WRM Bulletin 44). Of the original area of heterogeneous forests, only 44% are still standing, mainly because of colonisation, expansion of the agricultural frontier, cattle-raising and commercial logging.