Pesticides negatively impact the health and lives of millions of agricultural pesticide users, their communities and consumers worldwide –they also cause great damage to biodiversity and the environment. The pesticides used in oil palm plantations have adverse impacts on human health and the environment. Agricultural workers in oil palm plantations are heavily exposed to pesticides and suffer a range of dangerous acute and chronic health effects, though many remain tragically ignorant of the causes.
Bulletin articles
In this increasingly privatized world, to talk about water is almost synonymous with talking about its appropriation by some company to turn it into merchandise and source of profit. The seriousness of the situation has been understood by many people and has led to major struggles – sometimes pacific, sometimes violent – to avoid it passing into the hands of transnational corporations.
The relationship between forests and water has long pre-existed the appearance of humans on the planet. Wherever water comes down from the skies with certain frequency, there is a forest. For scientists, forests are ecosystems hosting much biological diversity, both regarding different species and also regarding genes within the same species. They are places dominated by trees, but nevertheless composed also of plants of different species, sizes, ages and forms of life.
In the symbiosis between water and forest referred to in the previous article, another component should also be considered: climate change. Climate is a determining factor of the forest, of its flora and fauna. Climate makes a forest boreal or humid-tropical and consequently its diversity will be of one type or another. In turn, forests have been crucial in the development of the world climate because of their role in trapping carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
“The surface of the earth had not appeared. There was only the calm sea and the great expanse of the sky. There was nothing brought together, nothing which could make a noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble, or could make noise in the sky. There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. … Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, existed in the water surrounded by clarity.” (Fragments from Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya, explaining the origin of the world).
Together with the arrival of large-scale monoculture tree plantations is the departure of water. This affects the whole village community, but for women, the effects are particularly differentiated. They tell us about with their own words.
International Women’s day is around the corner and we would like to pay homage to the countless women struggling for their rights by sharing parts of a recent research (1) carried out by two women in Brazil which, on the one hand, provides a broad account of women’s struggles against plantations in that country and on the other hand provides testimonies from local women on how those plantations have impacted on their lives and livelihoods.
In her article “Peoples hidden in the forest: the right to live in their own Amazon? (*), the Argentine writer, Elina Malamud explores with great sensitivity the conditions that have led numerous forest peoples to voluntarily choose isolation. The author quotes the words of Sydney Possuelo, a Brazilian champion of the struggle in defence of the rights of indigenous groups to continue living their way of life: “If we were more decent, there would be no peoples in isolation, but our behaviour has led them to seek protection from us. Their isolation is not voluntary, it is forced by us.”
Late last year, the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), a life sciences research institution applied for permission to establish a field trial of genetically modified poplar trees in Belgium. The GM trees would have modified lignin content, aimed at making production of ethanol easier.
From the Amazon to Finland, New Zealand and Chile, from Indigenous Peoples to European NGOs, from women to youth groups, in just a week nearly 140 people got connected and became involved in the gathering of signatures for an Open Letter demanding a ban on the release of genetically engineered (GE) trees.
On 28 March 2006, in the midst of strong pressure from the Government and the timber industry, Law 1021 was adopted in Colombia, better known as the “Forestry Law” (see WRM Bulletin No. 105), enabling major timber investors to have easy and privileged access to the country’s forests, thus compromising the future of these forests, both public and those belonging to Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
Born to independence in 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo has lived since then amid fighting. Its former colonial ruler Belgium, as well as the US, the EU and international financial institutions such as the World Bank have been key hidden actors and interested parties in a scenario where ethnic rivalry has caught the world attention, while hiding economic struggles over the riches of a country which was the world’s largest cobalt exporter, the fourth biggest diamond exporter and ranked among the top ten world producers of uranium, copper, manganese and tin.