The Penon indigenous peoples of Venezuela are inviting to a meeting which will be held at Kumarakapay (San Francisco de Yuruani), la Gran Sabana, on June 25 - 28. The idea is to bring together all those wishing to defend the ancestral rights of indigenous peoples to their territory, cultural identity and self determination rights, and to protect the environment.
Bulletin articles
The situation in Uruguay, where Parliament unanimously passed a forestry law in 1987 to promote industrial tree plantations with almost no opposition from civil society organizations, has radically changed since then. In spite of almost total governmental and academic support to eucalyptus and pine tree plantations, NGO-led opposition has totally changed the scenario. As informed in Bulletin nr 3, the WRM secretariat facilitated the creation of an NGO coalition (the Guayubira Group), which has since been at the centre of a number of anti-plantation and anti pulp mill activities.
Representatives of the indigenous and local communities present at the meeting room of the Contact Group on Article 8j (*) of the Convention of Biological Diversity at the IV Conference of the Parties, that took place recently in Bratislava, Slovakia, declared their total disapproval with a decision of the Presidency of the Group on May 12th, that excluded them from the negotiation round. After the declaration they left the room.
The Forest Peoples Programme addressed on May 12th the following letter to Mr. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, concerning the forest policy of the Bank:
"Dear Mr . Wolfensohn,
Joining a campaign launched by Global Response, a message was sent on May 27th to the Presidency of the Supreme Court of Justice of Venezuela, requesting the revocation of controversial Decree 1850 that permits mining activities in the area of the Imataca Forest Reserve, in Venezuela. The Decree has been severely questioned by environmental and academic Venezuelan organizations (see WRM Bulletins 4, 6 and 7)
The second meeting of the Conference on Central African Moist-Forest Ecosystems (CEFDHAC) will take place in Bata, Equatorial Guinea from 8 to 10 June 1998. CEFDHAC meets every two years in one of the countries of the sub-region and is the result of the political will expressed by the Central African states in their 1996 Brazzaville meeting.
A group of NGO representatives from many countries of the region met in the Environmental Forum of the Peoples' Summit of the Americas held in Chile and analized the forest issue within the framework of the trade-related integration process being promoted by governments through ALCA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas).
There has been, over the course of the last decades in Thailand, many developments concerning the rights of the tribal peoples found throughout the country, but predominantly in the north. The difficulties faced by the entire country, stemming from bad environmental management, came to rest upon the shoulders of the tribal people as they now inhabit the last remain stretches of forested land. However, is the basic assumption made here valid?
A group of fourty community activists from around Asia and the Pacific have recently held a meeting in Baguio City to review the impact of mining in the Cordillera region in northern Philippines, home of the Igorot indigenous peoples.
The meeting, that concluded on April 21st., was organized by Friends of the Earth-Philippines and the Mineral Policy Institute of Sydney, Australia. The activists agreed to support each others' struggles for social justice in the wake of an explosion of new mining projects throughout the Asia-Pacific.
A large meeting took place last February in Rosita, a village on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, attended by representatives of indigenous communities (Sumus and Miskitos), local and regional authorities, NGOs, community and religious leaders and many others. The reason: the illegal activities of the Korean transnational company Kimyung, which received a concession in 1994 from the Nicaraguan central government -at the time headed by President Violeta Chamorro- to log an area of 62,000 hectares of forest in indigenous territories.
The municipality of San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico is witnessing with great concern how the overdevelopment that has taken place in nearby Puerto Vallarta has attracted the attention of big investing consortia and spurred the ambitions of politicians and senior government officials from this country, resulting in a hoarding of lands, federal zones and mangroves for the purpose of commercial development.
In a press conference during the recent Summit of the Americas held in Santiago, Chile, Mr. James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, admitted that the Bank's support to the Pangue hydroelectric project in the Bio Bio River watershed, in Chile, had been a mistake. Mr. Wolfensohn said that the WB had performed “bad work” during the evaluation of the environmental impact of the project, since the Pehuenche indigenous peoples that inhabit the area had not been consulted.