The Green Party is concerned at the reported aggressive comments of US company, which outline its plans to grow genetically engineered (GE) redwood trees in New Zealand.
The timber company, Soper-Wheeler, has said it intends to start planting genetically engineered seedlings from the US in its South Island plantation in August. This is despite New Zealand's moratorium on commercial release of GE not being due to be lifted till October. The company says the harvested logs would be sent to mills in the US.
Bulletin articles
A National Workshop on the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Samoa was held on 17 - 21 December, 2002, in the Village of Aopo, Island of Savaii, organised by Ole Siosiomaga Society Inc. (OLSSI) and hosted by the Global Forest Coalition.
Here follows a Call to Action by the International Rivers Network:
We invite you to participate in the 6th Annual International Day of Action Against Dams and for Rivers, Water and Life on March 14th, 2003. This is a time to act in solidarity to celebrate our rivers, protest destructive development, and enjoy the successes of last year.
The environment department at Skanska, one of the world's largest construction firms, has announced that it is to pull out of dam-building. On 4 February 2003, Skanska's vice President Sustainability, Axel Wenblad revealed that after a strategic review at the company, "We will not be involved in new hydropower projects in the future."
Predominating ideology has tended to divorce social issues from environmental issues and even to make them antagonistic. Such is the case with the question of forests, where while governments recognise their environmental values, they frequently present them as an obstacle to "development", and "poverty" is used as an excuse to carry out deforestation of increasingly wider areas of forests, with the alleged objective of improving people's living conditions.
The Ministerial meeting in the Africa Forest Law Enforcement and Governance process is scheduled to take place in Brazzaville, Congo April 1-4th, 2003. Government delegates as well as representatives from the timber industry, multilateral and bilateral organisations, and civil society are expected to take part in the meeting where a Ministerial declaration will be drafted. The following briefly introduces the FLEG process, then moves on to discuss civil society participation in the up-coming Ministerial.
The Chad/Cameroon Oil & Pipeline project (see WRM Bulletins 45, 41, 35, 14 and 2) is reaching critical milestones. Most construction activities are scheduled to be completed by July 2003 and initial oil sales could take place as early as November 2003. As a result, completion of construction is more than a year ahead of schedule which had initially been planned to be finalised by the end of 2004.
Kenya's new elected president, Mwai Kibaki, has named Dr Newton Kulundu as Environment Minister and well known environmentalist Prof Wangari Mathai as assistant minister. The newly appointed minister has already made a number of public statements related to forests which seem to imply that things might be changing --at last-- in the right direction. However, his statements leave some crucial issues in the shade.
Madagascar's historic problem of deforestation can be linked to the detrimental policies of the colonial state in terms of land use and agriculture. The deforestation problem in Madagascar began when it was annexed as a French colony in 1896. An uncertain political climate and famine followed this annexation, and many of the Malagasy fled to the woods for survival. These farmers started practicing the method of shifting cultivation as a means of survival.
The SBCP Watch Group is an environmental group of four local NGOs --Actionaid Bangladesh, Rupantar, JJS and Lokaj-- established in 2000 with the purpose of monitoring the activities carried out by the so-called Sunderban Biodiversity Conservation Project (SBCP). This 77.5 million dollar project is funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Nordic Development Fund (see WRM Bulletin 44), allegedly to restore the original ecosystem of the largest single block of mangroves that exists in the world today (see WRM Bulletin 44).
During a recent visit to Rajasthan state in India, Patrick McCully from International Rivers Network, had the opportunity to see first hand just how profoundly the work of a local organization called "Tarun Bharat Sangh" (TBS) has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. He was astounded to learn that this social and environmental transformation has been achieved at a tiny fraction of the economic --not to mention human and ecological-- cost of providing water services with big dams. Below some fragments of his experience:
Indonesia ranks among one of the countries with the highest tropical forest loss rate in the world. Average annual deforestation recorded up to one million hectares in the 1980s, 1.7 million hectares in the first part of the 1990s, and between 2.0 and 2.4 million hectares at present according to statistics of the State Ministry of Environment.