Cambodia’s biggest national park, Botum Sakor, will now host a 340-km2-infrastructure project led by the real-estate company from northern China, Tianjin Union Development Group. Biodiverse forests will be transformed into a city-sized gambling resort for "extravagant feasting and revelry", and local villagers are already being forced away from their homes.
Bulletin articles
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is pivotal for creating demand and the conditions for widespread privatization in virtually every sector in the Asia Pacific region, from transportation, energy and urban development to agriculture, water and finance. Based on an infrastructure-led ‘growth’, the corporate sector is aggressively pushed in ADB supported projects through public-private partnerships (PPPs), loans, co-financing and another series of financial instruments.
Background
Much has been written about the plunder of biodiversity and other natural resources from Africa, in particular where negative social, economic and environmental impacts have resulted; as with indiscriminate clear-cut logging of forests, ruthless mineral extraction, and the conversion of community land into industrial plantations. But despite substantial political change over the past 100 years, Africa’s unequal economic relationship with the global North remains.
Mozambique is a country where tree plantations dates back to colonial times, when Portugal encouraged the planting of eucalyptus and pine trees. By independence there were 20,000 hectares of tree plantations of exotic species in seven provinces.
Harvard University is the owner, through the Harvard Management Company (HMC), of the world’s largest endowment, which handles 32 billion dollars annually. Of this total, around 15% is devoted to forestry investments around the world.
In the early 1990s, as a result of the Forests Law of 1987, the area covered by tree plantations in Uruguay began to grow rapidly, with rates of expansion sometimes greater than 50,000 hectares annually.
