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.
Bulletin articles
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.
Two years ago, 5.3 million hectares across Indonesia were engulfed in flames in the worst fire season since 1997/98. Haze blanketed large parts of South-east Asia, hiding additional peat and forest fires in Malaysia. Over 75,000 fires burnt across Sumatra and Borneo. Peat expert, Professor Florian Siegert helped to analyse details from satellite images and concluded: “Most fires were set to clear land for plantations. Those burns often run out of control because the forests have already been damaged by illegal logging” (1).
In spite of all the scientific evidence existing on the negative impacts of large scale monoculture tree plantations, the Climate Change Convention insists on promoting them under the false argument that plantations can alleviate the effects of climate change, acting as “carbon sinks.”
The economic development model promoted by global power has already clearly shown that it leads to social and environmental disaster, both on a local and on a global scale. Climate change is the clearest example regarding the environment, while increasing food scarcity suffered by millions of people, proves this at the social level.