Jordan Ryan, the head of the United Nations Development Programme in Vietnam, is keen on sustainable development. In May 2002, at the launch of a partnership between aid agencies, NGOs and government ministries to protect Vietnam’s environment, Ryan announced, “If we succeed, one day it will be said of this new partnership: ‘It made sustainable development a reality in Vietnam.’”
A few weeks later, this time at the signing of a $2 million project called Vietnam Agenda 21, Ryan said, “The challenge is to make sustainable development a reality in Vietnam.”
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Two tiny moths are at the centre of a social and environmental confrontation in New Zealand. In West Auckland, people and the environment are being subjected to aerial spraying with dangerous chemicals to protect pine plantations against the attack of the painted apple moth (Teia anartoides). In South Auckland, eucalyptus plantations are under attack from the gum-leaf skeletoniser (Uraba lugens) and it is yet unknown if chemical control will be used there.
It sometimes takes many little pieces to recognize the full picture. In the case of the continued debate about the benefits or otherwise of carbon sinks projects linked to the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), many still like to envisage it as the long-sought-for funding source for community-driven, small scale forest restoration projects.
What's wrong with a company pursuing a green seal for 'sustainable forest management' and a climate-friendly credit for planting trees that help soak up carbon from the atmosphere? Potentially a lot, especially when both of these claims are rather dubious, as the WRM Bulletin coverage on the Brazilian company Plantar S/A indicates. And even more problematic if a company, when faced with criticism about its carbon sinks project, resorts to such tactics as the distortion of facts to discredit its critics.
The colonial period of South African history has left a mindset that encourages the exploitation of anything that can be dug out of the ground and shipped off to feed the rapacious appetites of first world industries and consumers. This is what drove the colonial imperative of England, Portugal, France and Spain in centuries gone by, and although there has been political transformation in previously colonised African countries, the economic forces remain largely unchanged.
In August 1996 the Tanzanian government authorities in collaboration with a Canadian-owned company called Kahama Mining Corporation Ltd. (KMCL), forcibly removed over 400,000 artisanal miners, peasant farmers, small traders and their families from their land in an area called Bulyanhulu in Shinyanga Region, central-western Tanzania. KMCL was then a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sutton Resources, based in Vancouver, Canada.
Mining is one of Indonesia's biggest revenue-earners, but it is also destroying the natural resources on which tens of millions of rural and urban Indonesians depend for their livelihoods and health. These resources include the archipelago's once vast forests which are now being destroyed faster than ever before.
The problems of mining and forest destruction cannot help but be closely intertwined in Indonesia since so much of the country's land surface is (or used to be) forest, and so much of the rock underneath contains commercially valuable minerals.
Lead mines are killing ethnic communities and contaminating water sources in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary complex, a World Heritage site, in eastern Thailand.
Vietnam's karst landscapes are world renowned. Perhaps the country's most famous limestone scenery is at Ha Long Bay, which has been declared a World Heritage Site. In 1962, the karst landscape at Cuc Phuong in northern Vietnam became the country's first national park.
As well as producing spectacular scenery, limestone is the main raw material for cement manufacture and many karst landscapes are under threat. Vietnam is no exception.
The sun sets on the Siria Valley; the temperature is over 38 degrees centigrade. It was always hot here, it is a valley, but never before had the heat reached the levels it does nowadays. The rivers and streams are only a memory, now they look like tracks, deserted and dusty because of deforestation and the extraction of thousands of metres of sand.
The struggle of the people of the town of Esquel, in the Argentine Patagonia, against the intentions of the Canadian mining company, Meridian Gold Inc. to exploit a gold mine in Cerro 21, have been going on for over seven months now. Ranging from mobilizations to "escraches" (mass demonstrations outside the homes of those responsible for the mine), from a plebiscite and legal action to the symbolic closing down of the access to the camp, from the graffitti and murals to the parliaments of the Mapuche People and the "No! Forum".
Presently, the Chilean Patagonia is threatened by a mega-project to be carried out by the Canadian transnational company Noranda Inc., a long-standing mining company that proposes to build one of the largest aluminium reducing plants in the world in the pristine region of Aysen.
To give an idea of the dimensions of the damage that the construction of this aluminium plant (known as "Alumysa") will cause, the zone where it is to be installed together with the related works, need to be described.