Only 3% of the dense rainforests that once existed in The Philippines is still standing and less than 1% of the former forest is still in a pristine state (see WRM Bulletin 27). The Province of Aurora, which comprises a strip of land between the Sierra Madre mountains and the Pacific Ocean, is an exception, because unlike most of the country, it still maintains over 50% of its original forest cover, even some as primary forests. Along the coastline there are 430 hectares of mangroves.
Bulletin articles
Forests are trees. Forests are biodiversity. Forests are wildlife. Forests are lands. Moreover, forests are politics. Development is clearing of forests. Conservation means more and more consultancies. Protection means a wider and wider gap between the forest and the communities. Regarding the forest issue, the context in Sri Lanka is not much different from this reality.
In the Region Huetar Norte of Costa Rica, the forest area has been reduced to the lowlands of the San Juan River on the border with Nicaragua. What used to be a vast tropical forest that occupied more than 200,000 hectares has been reduced to a mere 30,000 hectares of fragmented forests, most of which severely logged. Unlike what happens in other regions of the country, in Huetar Norte there are no protected areas, all the remaining forests are categorized as wood production forests, and the region's biodiversity is in the hands of forestry management plans.
Bolivian social organizations, trade unions, IPOs and environmental NGOs have strongly condemned and taken actions to face a recent governmental decree, which in fact guarantees the activities of illegal logging performed by depredatory companies to the detriment of the country's forests and their people.
Nearly fifty years after their traditional lands were taken over and much of their population decimated by military forces, the Pataxó indigenous people decided to recover them and took over Monte Pascoal National Park last August (see WRM Bulletin 28).
As everybody knows, Brazil is one of the richests countries in the world regarding forests. Additionally to the Amazon, whose major area is located in the Brazilian territory, there are in Brazil other valuable forest ecosystems, such as the mata atlantica and the cerrado, or ecosystems with an important presence of trees, as the pantanal and the caatinga. In spite of that, as everybody also knows, forest biodiversity in that country is seriously menaced by a seemingly uncontrollable process of plundering and destruction.
In a new chapter of their seemingly endless struggle to defend their land rights, a group of two hundred U'wa indigenous people -including women, children and tribal elders- established on November 14 a permanent settlement at the site of Occidental Petroleum's planned oil well Gibraltar 1. Their aim is to block the drilling planned to begin operating in the near future, thus avoiding that their Mother Earth be profaned. Hundreds of more U'wa and other supporters are expected to continue arriving to the settlement in upcoming days to reinforce this action.
The Urra hydroelectric dam megaproject on the Sinu River, at the Cordoba Department in the Atlantic region of Colombia has provoked concern and resistance since its very start in 1977. The Embera Katio indigenous people, ancestral dwellers of the affected area, who live on fishing and hunting, and whose livelihoods and existence are severely menaced by this project are fighting an unequal battle against both the company Urra and the Colombian government which openly supports it.
The "success" of the Chilean forestry model -based on pine and eucalyptus monocultures- was based on a combination of the appropriation of the Mapuche indigenous people's lands and ruthless repression. Now, when the old dictator is under arrest in England, his shadow is still present in the democratically-elected government, which seems unable -or unwilling- to repair the injustices committed during the dictatorship years.
Mache-Chindul rainforests and mangroves, located in the Province of Esmeraldas in the Ecuadorian Pacific region hold high levels of biodiversity. Additionally, this province is a multicultural complex formed by different ethnic groups -indigenous, black and "mestizos", as the Chachi, the Emperas, the Awa, Afro-Esmeraldian population and landless peasants who arrived there as colonists expelled from other regions of the country.
Papua New Guinea still contains one of the major tropical rainforests in the world, hosting high levels of biodiversity. Together with the government's policy regarding forests -which considers them as a mere source of roundwood to be exported- and its collusion with powerful forestry companies (see WRM Bulletin 22), the activities of foreign logging companies constitute a threat to these rich ecosystems and to the people that inhabit them.
The World Bank is currently undertaking its Forest Policy Implementation Review and Strategy Development (FPIRS) and will carry out a number of consultation meetings throughout the world to feed this process. Within this framework, it seems important that the Bank takes seriously on board recent events in India, when more than 300 Adivasis (indigenous people) from the Indian state of Madya Pradesh, representing all mass-based Adivasi movements, jumped over the fence of the World Bank building on the 24th of November.