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.
Bulletin articles
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.
We have received the following contribution from Leonardo Acurero, through our Venezuelan friends from AMIGRANSA, related to the actors behind the scenes involved in the recent fires that devastated the Brazilian state of Roraima . A providential rain has extinguished it but the danger of future fires is still looming.
“The fire of development and occupation covers Roraima.
One of the more widely publicized arguments for the promotion of industrial tree plantations says that fast growing plantations help to alleviate the main pressures on native forests and consequently help to preserve them. This argument was been proven false in all cases and Chile is no exception.
In WRM Bulletin No. 10 we included the article "Comments on WWF's 'Forests for life' campaign", as having been produced by Paul Romeijn, Director of Treemail. We have now learned that those comments -which we had received through Paul Romeijn- were actually written by Prof. Julio Cesar Centeno. We apologize to both for the confusion.
Ricardo Carrere was invited to participate in the Environmental Forum of the Peoples' Summit of the Americas, held in Santiago, Chile from 15 to 18 April. In his presentations he emphasized on the underlying causes of deforestation and on the need to implement policies which ensure the conservation of forests and the respect of the rights of peoples that inhabit or depend on them for their survival. He also participated actively in the Forest Group discussions, which resulted in a document aimed at influencing the region's governments (see under Americas)
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