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.
Bulletin articles
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.
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.
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.