The Shawi indigenous people, also known as Chayhuitas, live in the territory made up by the basins of the Paranapuras and Cahuapanas Rivers, located in the provinces of Alto Amazonas (in the region of Loreto) and San Martín (in the region of San Martín). Distributed among 180 communities, the Shawi share a system of social organization and symbolic representation. Traditionally hunters and gatherers, they also practice agriculture, growing crops like cassava, corn, beans, rice, peanuts, bananas, pineapples, papayas, cotton and tobacco.
Bulletin articles
This month, on April 22, Earth Day was celebrated around the world. Earth Day was founded in the 1970s by environmental activists concerned about the effects of pollution and environmental degradation on biodiversity and ultimately the survival of the planet. It is a day aimed at raising public awareness of these issues.
India continues to be one of the ‘hottest’ locations for carbon ‘offset’ projects despite the global carbon market slump: as of now, about 1700 projects claim to have achieved emission-reduction, and hence eligibility to sell carbon credits. Large Indian corporations control most of these projects irrespective of sector and geographical location, and instead of cleaning up the atmosphere the projects almost uniformly pollute people’s lives and the environment.
In Mexico, deforestation is advancing at a rapid rate alongside various megaprojects: the expansion of industrial monoculture plantations of oil palm and jatropha for biofuel production, the building of dams, mining concessions, the creation of resettlement centres of prefabricated housing complexes strategically established in locations of resource extraction and land conversion, large-scale tourism development, and highways to facilitate these projects.
SAY NO to mining in Palawan Province, the home of the best-conserved and most ecologically diverse forest in the Philippines. Sign the on-line signature petition to deliver a strong message to the Philippine and Palawan governments demanding for an immediate stop of ongoing and pending mining activities in Palawan and for the non-endorsement of new mining applications.Here is the link to the petition launched by the Save Palawan Movement: http://www.intellithink.com.ph/wordpress/
The non-recognition of the territorial rights of indigenous and other traditional peoples has been identified as one of the major underlying causes of deforestation. In India, inequalities in land tenure stemming from deep-rooted social structures as well as from disruption brought about by colonialism have resulted in the takeover of forest land by the state.
On April 4, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an organ of the Organization of American States (OAS), officially requested that the Brazilian government immediately suspend the authorization and construction of the Belo Monte Dam Complex in the state of Pará.
According to the IACHR, all of the traditional communities who live in the Xingu river basin and would be affected by the construction of the dam must be consulted through a process that is "free, prior, informed, of good faith and culturally appropriate."
This month a new UN round of climate change negotiations took place in Bangkok - the first session after the Cancun conference last December. Many key pending issues over which there was not agreement in Cancun had to be negotiated in the talks.
In a context where alternatives have gone from bad to worse, women groups have raised their voices to strongly ask for real solutions.
“Forest in exhaustion” stems from a controversial proposal by Brazil under the UNFCCC negotiations in Poznan. The interest of Brazil to amend the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in order to include “Forests in exhaustion” is that it would allow the CDM to award credits under the Kyoto Protocol for reforestation projects on forest land that has been so over-exploited as to become “exhausted”, and without additional money from the carbon credits would not be replanted. However, it’s not about forests but tree plantations, a main economic activity in Brazil and other Southern countries.
At WRM we have been opposed to FAO’s definition of forests for many years. We believe that it actually serves as an indirect cause of deforestation. According to FAO, a forest is merely “land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ” (*), which means that industrial monoculture tree plantations fall under this definition. As a result, industrial tree plantations “disguised” as forests continue to spread throughout the world, often replacing real forests.
Over the last decade, as the effects of climate change have become increasingly visible, there has been a lot of talk from big companies, banks and governments about promoting “clean” energy projects – meaning energy that is not produced from fossil fuels.
As a result, a number of countries have, for example, been developing or expanding nuclear power production.
On a hot May day, a peasant farmer named Bounsouk looks out across the vast expanse of water before him, the 450-square-kilometer reservoir behind the new Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos. At the bottom of the reservoir is the land where he once lived, grew rice, grazed buffalo, and collected forest fruits, berries, and medicinal plants and spices. Now there is just water, water everywhere.