Agrofuels are increasingly drawing words of warning, protest and condemnation from such disparate voices as high-level United Nations representatives like FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf and Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler, statesmen like Fidel Castro, and social organizations in both the North and South (see notes 1 and 2). Nevertheless, plantations of crops raised specifically to produce fuel continue to spread.
Bulletin articles
In the first weekend of May, a cyclone ravaged Burma. Cyclone Nagris hit the Irrawaddy delta with winds reaching 190km/h. However, most havoc was played by a sea surge that came with the storm: a wave up to 3.5m high swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages. People couldn’t flee and figures of dead people are estimated at more than 100,000.
Parojnai was his name. He was from the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode indigenous people who inhabit the Chaco forest stretching from Paraguay to Bolivia and Argentina, south of the Amazon basin.
In Africa, agrofuel initiatives are proliferating in many countries including Zambia, where jatropha has been selected as the main crop to produce biodiesel while sugar cane, sweet sorghum and cassava are chosen for bioethanol.
Millions of people throughout the world live in rural areas and to a greater or lesser extent depend on forest ecosystems for their livelihoods. However, forest degradation and deforestation are occurring at alarming rates, thus endangering their lives.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is an international governmental process which looked pretty nice when it was born in 1992, under the UN Earth Summit that took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Once upon a time … the governments of the world got together and agreed that the Earth was facing severe environmental problems and that something needed to be done about it. The historic event was named the Earth Summit and it took place in 1992 in the tropical scenario of Rio de Janeiro.
Everyone was feeling very enthusiastic because governments had committed themselves to a new type of development -which they defined as “sustainable”- which would prevent the negative environmental impacts of the until then prevailing development model.
Today the world – the people’s world – is helplessly witnessing a global crisis due to a steep rise in the price of foodstuffs which, as all disasters, affects the more vulnerable sectors, the more dependent economies, the more impoverished countries, more seriously.
In Brazil there are two conflicting models: that of the large monoculture plantations (ranging from eucalyptus, soy-beans and rice to sugar-cane), on lands held by a few large companies; and that of the peasant, indigenous and landless communities that build collective and diverse productive spaces and demand the historically promised agrarian reform.
The municipality of Puerto Wilches, located in the Central Zone defined by the Agricultural Plan for the Implementation of the Biodiesel Programme, is home to much of the agricultural activity in the department (province) of Santander. According to the Agricultural Plan, there are roughly 21,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the municipality, representing 91.7% of the department’s palm oil output.
The Palmeras del Ecuador Company was established in the Ecuadorian Amazon, in the Province of Sucumbios, Shushufindi Canton, at the end of the seventies.
The former Institute for Agrarian Reform and Settlement (Instituto de Reforma Agraria y Colonización - IERAC) granted a concession to the company of 10,000 hectares of land, considered to be “waste land,” deliberately ignoring that these were ancestral lands of the Indigenous Siona and Secoya peoples and nationalities. This led to their almost complete extermination because of the occupation of their lands.
Carbon trading and offsets distract attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Promoting more effective and empowering approaches to climate change involves moving away from the blinkered reductionism of free-market dogma, the false-economy of supposed quick fixes, the short-term self interest of big business.