The Government of Laos (GoL) has halted the Forest Management and Conservation Programme (FOMACOP) after the first five-year phase because of difficulties between the GoL and external actors including the World Bank over the management of logging revenues from the programme.
Bulletin articles
Nowadays only about 10,000 Penans remain in Sarawak and very few of them are still able to carry out their nomadic lifestyles. As well as other Dayak people, they have been and still are the victims of all kinds of abuses by the State police and the timber companies themselves. That of the Penans indigenous people in Sarawak is a paradigmatic example of a long and unsolved conflict involving territorial rights.
Bruno Manser is still missing. The Swiss Ambassador to Malaysia officially requested now the Government of Malaysia to assist in the search and rescue of Bruno Manser, the indigenous peoples rights activist and special envoy in the struggle of the Penan People, who went missing in Sarawak over six months ago and whose presence in Sarawak was denied earlier by the Malaysian authorities.
The traditional Penan people of Sarawak, whom Bruno Manser supported for so many years, have now written a letter to the international community. Please read it and distribute their message widely.
Thailand’s main logging agency, the state-owned Forestry Industry Organisation (FIO), is looking to certification of its tree plantations and ecotourism as a way out of its financial troubles as well as to cover-up its infamous past.
The Vietnamese government is currently negotiating with a range of bilateral and multilateral "aid" agencies to raise funds for its five million hectare reforestation programme. So far, little of the estimated US$4.5 billion needed has been formally committed, but in December, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced a US$287,000 project "to promote the programme in Vietnam". On 7 December, Nguyen Van Dang, Vietnam's Rural Development Minister and Fernanda Guerrieri, FAO's representative in Vietnam, signed the agreement for the FAO project.
After nine months of denouncing the destruction of wetlands at "El Carey", Marcovia, Choluteca; after several months after members of CODDEFFAGOLF (a local environmental organization) and the Environment Attorney were driven out with threats from that site; after several months of requesting international solidarity for this case; two months after the visit of a RAMSAR representative, and a few days after announcing the mobilization of fishermen and farmers to Choluteca, near the coast of the Gulf of Fonseca, CODDEFFAGOLF launched a Peoples' Peaceful Demostration, which has already achieved
Mexico was urged in an international declaration released on 27 November in Wellington, New Zealand, immediately to release tortured farmer environmentalists, Rodolfo Montiel Flores and Teodoro Cabrera Garcia who have been imprisoned after conviction on trumped up charges following their peaceful opposition to logging in the Mexican state of Guerrero (see WRM bulletins 26, 35 and 38).
In the last issue of the WRM bulletin we included an article --"Argentina: A shady carbon sink project"-- detailing an absurd and destructive tree plantation project in that country. Now we are pleased to inform you that the struggle against it has been successful. The Argentinian justice has prohibited the company to "carry out all the works related to the forestry project", which involved the clearcutting of 4400 hectares of native forest to be substituted with Oregon pine.
More than a year ago, the Pataxó indigenous peoples re-took an important part of their traditional territory located in the state of Bahia (see WRM Special Bulletin May 2000). Since then, they have been struggling to have their rights recognized by the government, with little support from environmental organizations, many of whom seem to deny them their capacity to manage the forest that rightly belongs to them.
In order to revamp its deteriorated image, the Chilean forestry sector launched in August the multimillion-dollar campaign “Forests for Chile”, consisting of propaganda in mass media aimed at convincing public opinion about the benefits of what it calls "forests" and which are in fact monoculture tree plantations (see WRM Bulletin 39).
For more than 10 years Uruguay has been implementing an unsustainable forestry model, substituting its natural prairie ecosystems with large-scale eucalyptus and pine tree plantations.
A coalition of non-government organisations is calling on the Government to make some fundamental changes in the forest industry. They are calling for the continuation of the current moratorium on new logging concessions until reforms are in place to deal with the many problems in the sector.