In support of indigenous organizations in Peru, the Indigenous Missionary Council of Brazil (CIMI) expresses great concern for and stands in defense of the lives of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation, who live on the border of Brazil (Acre) and Peru (Madre de Dios). These peoples are currently threatened by the project to build a highway on the Peruvian side, which would connect Puerto Esperanza with Iñapari.
Bulletin articles
The Odisha government gave more than 800 hectares of land to the South Korean steel giant POSCO for building a power plant, jeopardizing around 4000 families. The project has since the very beginning faced firm resistance from local communities as well as serious question marks from human rights and environmental groups on its social and environmental impacts. After POSCO pulled out of the project earlier this year, Odisha’s Industry Minister announced that the land would be transferred to the Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO), a state agency.
Since 2013, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) has demanded the withdrawal of the banks—FMO (Netherlands), Finn Fund (Finland) and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE)—from the "Agua Zarca" project on the sacred Gaulcarque River, due to the project's connection to eviction and death in the Río Blanco community. To date, none of the three banks has withdrawn from the project, despite the fact that FMO and Finn Fund have been announcing they will do so since May 2016.
After years of efforts to limit the scale of logging and increase the amount of protected areas in the Białowieża Forest, Poland, the Polish Government has begun intensive logging using the outbreak of the spruce bark beetle as an excuse. In the first four months of 2017, over 10 thousand trees have been cut in parts of the forest with the oldest trees, over 100 years old. The recently imposed legal ban on entering major parts of this UNESCO’s World Heritage Site serves to prevent citizen control of the intensified logging.
Women leaders from several national, regional and international organizations called for truth about what’s happening in Marawi and Mindanao, Philippines, to come out and for perpetrators of violence to be pursued. Around 130 persons have been killed, thousands trapped and tens of thousands more displaced following a botched military operation to capture Abu Sayyaf’s leader, Isnilon Hapilon. Martial Law was declared all over Mindanao.
We already know that excessive levels of individual consumption, resulting from the capitalist economic system, involve massive destruction of territories, water sources, forests and the livelihoods of millions of people—mainly in the global South. In many people's minds, individual consumerism is what fuels this major destruction. However, in this bulletin we do not focus on individual consumerism, though it is surely important. Rather, we probe into what is behind industrial production processes.
About fifty years ago, Aracruz Celulose, now called Fibria, replaced original Atlantic Forest with the first fast-growing eucalyptus plantations in the northern part of Espírito Santo State, Brazil (1). Forty years ago, an industrial pulp complex— now owned by Fibria — was installed in the main Tupiniquim indigenous village (Macacos), in Barra do Riacho, Aracruz district. Now in 2017, drought punishes the remaining villages and families in resistance, and contamination serves as a political weapon to expropriate their territories.
In Indonesia, the world’s biggest palm oil producer, oil palm plantations expanded ten-fold between 1985 and 2005/06, to 6.4 million hectares, an area which has since doubled to 13.5 million hectares, and which is growing by half a million hectares every year. Globally, oil palm plantations now cover an area larger than New Zealand [1], with major expansions underway across the tropics, including in the Philippines, Cameroon, DR Congo, the Republic of Congo, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Meat consumption is soaring in many places of the world. If current trends continue global meat consumption will grow a further 76 per cent by 2050 according to the latest studies. Doctors and scientists have been warning us that eating too much meat is bad for out health and is linked to several types of cancer, heart diseases and other problems. This is also bad news for the environment with commercial cattle raising responsible for a large share of deforestation across the world. And it’s hurting the climate as well.
In 2013, with 3.1 million cubic meters of tropical wood exported, primarily to China, Papua New Guinea (PNG) became in recent years the world’s largest exporter of tropical wood, surpassing Malaysia, which had held the top spot for the past decades.
How do major oil palm companies manage to get their palm oil sold as a “green”, “sustainable” and “climate-friendly” product when it is none of that? How does this green image help corporations to expand even further, as is happening now in Africa? This article looks into the case of OLAM International, which in February 2017 published its Draft Global Policy on Forests (1). OLAM's promising words are merely a smokescreen around what is still its main objective: increasing profits.
Have oil palm companies changed?
