Among at least 400 modern "community forest" systems in the hilly upper Northern region of Thailand is that of Mae Khong Saai village in Chiang Dao district of Chiang Mai province. The system features 57 hectares of agricultural fields in which at least 10 different types of paddy rice are grown in stepped fields in the valley bottoms. Some 10 varieties of dryland rice are also cultivated in hill fields, which rotate on a cycle of 3-5 years.
Bulletin articles
A new type of forest conservation initiative is being implemented in Guatemala since 1995. According to its promoters, it attempts to couple community-based sustainable development with the protection of the Petén forests in the multiple use zone of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected area in Central America.
While government representatives were discussing at the Hague the supposed benefits of including forests and plantations in the so-called Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol of the Climate Change Convention, an unusual project in Argentina was giving reason to those opposing such inclusion.
For almost a decade, Aracruz Cellulose has been spending much time and money to portray itself as an example of a socially and environmentally responsible corporation. It has consistently denied the negative impacts of its operations in the Brazilian states of Espirito Santo and Bahia and has gone as far as to state that it has never carried out deforestation operations. A recent information proves the contrary.
For decades small and medium scale peasants of the Itata Valley have developed economic activities based on wine production. Wines produced in the area have recently obtained a high quality export product certification. As a result of their hard work during years, the population of the region has been able to generate an activity having enornous economic and social potential.
Dr Conor Wilson Boyd --president of Weyerhaeuser Forestlands International, a company owning a total of 28 million acres of forest in North America and established in 32 countries-- made a presentation during a meeting organized by the Iwokrama International Rainforest Centre for Rainforest Conservation and Development last October in Georgetown.
In 1997 the Australian federal government issued a regulation for Tasmanian forests, abolishing export woodchip quotas. Consequently North Limited --the biggest woodchip exporter in the country-- announced plans to raise woodchip production from Tasmanian native forests, that currently reaches around 3,4 million tonnes annually. Tasmanian environmental NGOs expressed their concern that this measure would open the gate for the destruction of old-growth eucalyptus forests in the island, which constitute part of the Australian National Heritage (see WRM Bulletin 7).
The recent publication in the USA of a book, detailing a conspiracy between government, industry, and various public relations firms to discredit environmentalists in New Zealand, has produced surprise among environmental and official circles in that country.
The sixth Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Climate Change will take place in November in The Hague, The Netherlands. The public at large, increasingly concerned over the present and future effects of climate change, may well expect as a matter of course that their governments will have the good sense to take constructive action to solve the problem. Among those of us who have been participating in this international process, however, expectations are somewhat different.
Our intrinsic relation with Mother Earth obliges us to oppose the inclusion of sinks in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) because it reduces our sacred land and territories to mere carbon sequestration which is contrary to our cosmovision and philosophy of life. Sinks in the CDM would constitute a worldwide strategy for expropriating our lands and territories and violating our fundamental rights that would culminate in a new form of colonialism.
Foreign investment in mining, gas exploitation and dam megaprojects --identified with "development"-- in fact constitute a direct cause for human rights abuses and a threat to environmental sustainability in Burma. The country is governed by a military dictatorship since 1962, which has imposed a regime characterised by state terrorism.
In early 1999, the Phnom Penh Municipal Authority moved 99 families from a squat behind the Russian embassy in Phnom Penh to Monorom 1, a newly constructed village 150 kilometres away. With the promise of work on an oil palm plantation, new houses and two hectares of palm plantation each many of the squatters were willing to move. A billboard put up by the Phnom Penh authorities announcing that part of the squatters' area was to be made into a park further encouraged people to move.