The inter-meshing of the six economies in the Mekong Basin since the 1990s has been fostered under the Greater Mekong Sub-region economic cooperation programme. This was aimed at increasing the flow of cross-border investment from countries with considerable economic might such as China, Thailand and Vietnam into neighbouring countries such as Laos PDR and Cambodia, which have a ‘doors wide open’ approach calling for foreign companies to come to invest.
Bulletin articles
Just outside the climate change conference in Poznan this morning, Friends of the Earth held a demonstration against the World Bank's funding of coal-fired power plants. World Bank figures on stilts wearing black suits fought against polar bears, throwing pieces of coal at them. "This is a typical example of how European NGOs just don't get it on climate change," someone behind me said. It turned out he worked with the Asian Development Bank in the Bank's climate change unit.
For peoples struggling for their rights in forest areas, climate change appears to be far removed from their immediate concerns. However, whether they know it or not, they are one of the most important and committed actors in protecting the Earth’s climate.
The present development model has been strengthened on the basis of large-scale models – production, marketing, consumption –
and the activities sustaining it are also on a large scale and basically involve intensive land use. They are the causes of the greatest problem presently hanging over an unconcerned humanity: the stepping up of greenhouse effect gas concentrations in the atmosphere, responsible for climate change.
In Colombia the State resorts to criminalizing social and grass-roots organizations as a method of repression aimed at imposing by force the global market’s agribusiness, large scale infrastructure works and the extraction of natural resources involving high human, social and environmental costs.
DRC’s rainforest --the world’s second largest-- is disappearing through logging. According to a report from The Guardian (1), “today a dozen large, mostly European, companies dominate the industry and have vast concessions: Trans-M has Lebanese owners; another group, which controls around 15m acres, is owned by the Portuguese Trinidade brothers; the American Blattner family has more than 2m acres; the German Danzer Group has 5m.
On 17 December 2001, by Resolution # R-578-2001-MINAE and in a totally underhand manner, the Costa Rican Ministry of the Environment and Energy (MINAE) granted a concession for the exploitation of an open-cast goldmine using leaching with cyanide to Industrias Infinito S.A. a branch of the Canadian transnational corporation Vanesa Ventures.
"The Mekong matters to the people who live round it perhaps more than any other river on earth," wrote Fred Pearce in his book about the world's rivers, "When the Rivers Run Dry". Something like two million tons of fish are caught in the Mekong River each year, second only to the Amazon. In Cambodia, 70 per cent of villagers' protein comes from fish. The Mekong is also extremely diverse, with about 1,300 species of fish, again second only to the Amazon.
On 15 October, the President of the Republic, the Economist Rafael Correa Delgado, and four Ministers of State issued Decree 1391 regulating industrial shrimp farming.
Vangujjars, a distinct nomadic tribe with a very rich cultural heritage has been living scattered in the Indian upland forests of the Uttrakhand since the last three centuries. They still maintain nomadic life with their buffaloes and travel between higher reaches of Himalaya in summer to lower Himalaya in winter. They have always received step motherly treatment by all the governments whosoever ruled Uttar Pradesh or Uttrakhand. But from October 2008 the attack on vangujjars has become more intensified and blatant.
The Italo-Argentine mining company TERNIUM is planning to mine for iron minerals in nearly 2,000 hectares of tropical forest in the Municipality of Coahuayana in the State of Michoacán (south-western Mexico). Among other negative impacts, this activity will leave the whole Municipality (15 thousand inhabitants) without water.
Nigeria holds 11,700 square kilometers of mangrove forest: the third largest in the world and the largest in Africa. Most of this mangrove is found in the Niger Delta.
Nigeria is also a major oil producer and most oil extraction takes place in the Niger Delta. There, petroleum or crude oil abounds in rock formations. The complex mixture of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds that make up the flammable liquid fossil fuel is extracted from oil wells found in those oil fields.