Rainforest Rescue has started a campaign to demand Deutsche Bank to dissociate itself from the Malaysian palm oil giant FELDA Global Ventures Holding, which wants to raise three billion dollars on the stock market to establish new oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Africa. Rainforest areas are going to be bought, destroyed and turned into huge monocultures.
The Deutsche Bank, one of Germany's largest banks, which pretends to be ecologically and socially harmless, is helping FELDA to search for investors.
Bulletin articles
In Chile, the onslaught of big forestry business groups backed by the state means more than 3 million hectares covered with industrial monocultures of pines and eucalyptus.
Some of the world’s most disreputable corporations – like Rio Tinto, Dow and BP – are providing sponsorship to the Olympics Games, using it as a smokescreen for environmental and human rights abuses the world over.
This edition of the WRM bulletin is being released as the Rio+20 People’s Summit is beginning in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In May, during a meeting of the International Coordination Group of the People’s Summit (*) – of which WRM forms part –an international call was launched. We would like to share with all of our bulletin readers this message for the unity and mobilization of the peoples in defence of life and the commons, for social and environmental justice, and against the commodification of nature and the “green economy”:
In just a few days, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, will begin in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio+20 is taking place in the same city, 20 years later, as the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit. Considered the first international mega summit, this 1992 meeting was attended by 8,000 officially registered delegates and 108 heads of state and government. A parallel civil society forum drew more than 5,000 participants.
Sustainable Energy for All (SEFA) is an initiative launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October 2011 and which has been gaining political momentum in the run-up to Rio+20. Ban Ki-moon has made it clear that he sees SEFA as centre-stage to the Rio+20 process and that it will proceed regardless of the outcome of UN negotiations.
SEFA's official goals for 2030 are to a) double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency, b) double the share of renewable energy and c) ensure universal access to modern energy services.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is hosting a Rio+20 side event on June 18, called “Forests: The heart of a green economy”. FAO states that sustainable forest-based enterprises can offer a pathway for the transition toward a low-carbon economy, and announces that this event “will highlight the role of forests and industry in fostering local livelihoods.” It adds that “climate-smart” management of forests is increasingly seen as “a collaborative effort between the public custodians of forests, private enterprises and local communities.” (1)
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.
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)