At the end of this month the world's nations, businesses and civil society will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development. They accept the seemingly impossible task to come up with solutions for the environmental challenges we are facing. Deforestation, desertification, depletion of the oceans, pollution of the rivers and the air, loss of biodiversity and global warming are a real threat for all life on earth.
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According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), an estimated 160 million people suffer from work-related diseases, 270 million are involved in work-related accidents annually, and two million workers die from work-related diseases and accidents every year. ILO Director-General Juan Somavia has stated that the “green economy” – promoted by the UN itself and the central theme of the Rio+20 conference next month – should work towards greater protection of the health and safety of workers across the world.
In Asia, as in many other parts of the world, forest areas have been inhabited by successive generations of indigenous communities. For these peoples, the forest has come to play a central role in their socio-cultural identity and their survival as a community. But today, many of these forests are being cleared and replaced by industrial oil palm plantations – in many cases, on lands granted to companies by the state on the pretext that they were vacant or idle lands!
Over the past several decades, large-scale monoculture oil palm plantations have spread throughout the tropical regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
We spoke with Giorgio Trucchi, a correspondent for the Latin American regional branch of the International Union of Food Workers (Rel-UITA, its acronym in Spanish) in Central America. Rel-UITA has been involved in numerous cases of denunciations of human rights violations and union conflicts connected to oil palm plantations.
Nothing likes eucalyptus. If you let cattle loose among the eucalyptus, they start grazing around the outside, which is supposed to be a reserve. The cattle don't like it, neither do the birds, or the wasps. The hardest thing about a place like that is the wasps, but not even the wasps like to be where the eucalyptus is. (Video interview with Manuelzão, a character from the novel "Corpo de Bailes" by João Guimarães Rosa)
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is the UN agency that oversees labour issues, shaping policies and programmes mainly related to labour standards for the protection of workers.
On April 17, 1996, 19 landless rural workers were brutally murdered by the police during a peaceful demonstration for agrarian reform in the state of Pará, in Brazil's Amazon region. If you visit the site of the massacre today, you will find a circle of 19 burnt Brazil nut tree trunks, which form a small forest. As well as serving as a memorial to the workers who lost their lives and the violence unleashed against them, the burnt trunks also symbolize the people's resistance and struggle against the violation of their rights, as well as the rainforest's resistance against deforestation.
There is a great deal of talk about the crises facing the planet: the climate crisis, energy crisis, food crisis, financial crisis, loss of biodiversity, and so on. Without a doubt, these are dramatic situations whose worst repercussions will be suffered by the most vulnerable and dispossessed sectors of the population.
What kind of development is this? If the government cares about development, they should take the people along so that we can own the development and what comes out of it. But in this type of development, people lose everything.
(From a discussion with village residents affected by the Pheapimex concession in Krakor district in Pursat, Cambodia. March, 2010)
How far would you go to protect your forest?
Villagers from Pollo community in South Central Timor regency in Indonesia have set a remarkable example, weathering years of bureaucratic indifference, enduring violence from thugs and embarking on an odyssey across their country's archipelago in search of support for their defence of local trees and land.
The interest of foreign investors in natural resources, and especially land, has grown significantly in recent years throughout Africa, and Mozambique is no exception. It is in the northern region of the country that foreign investment projects have come to occupy the largest areas of land in Mozambique, primarily for the establishment of monoculture plantations of eucalyptus, pine, jatropha and sugarcane.
Throughout history, rural areas have been occupied two different ways in Brazil. One of them is the colonial, capitalist and entrepreneurial way, which is nothing new, but has recently gained new momentum and adopted new methods. The other way of occupying rural land, which dates back to before the capitalist production model, is that of peasant agriculture, based on the way of life of indigenous peoples and traditional communities