The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a free trade and investment agreement being negotiated between the governments of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean -except Cuba. It is modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between North America, Canada and Mexico. The goal of the FTAA is to create a free trade and investment zone that extends from northern Canada to the southern tip of Chile.
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On 30th October, the World Bank's Board of Executive Directors approved a new Forests Policy. After one of the longest and most controversial consultation processes the Bank has ever carried out, the revised policy was pushed through in two days of unprecedentedly strong debates, despite objections from some governments. Although the final text of the policy has yet to be officially released, the main elements are already clear.
A press release from the FSC UK recently claimed that the FSC label on timber and timber products gives the public an "assurance that the timber used comes from forests managed to the highest environmental, social and economic standards" and that "anyone buying FSC certified products is helping to ensure a safer future for the earth's forests and the people and wildlife that depend on them".
The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands was signed in the city of Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 and entered into force in 1975. Ramsar is the only environmental convention that addresses a specific ecosystem, that of the wetlands. Wetlands, as recognised by the Ramsar Convention, fulfil essential ecological functions, as regulators of hydrological regimes and as habitats for a very rich biodiversity and are a resource of great economic, cultural, scientific and recreational importance that must be preserved.
According to the Danish Data Protection Agency, the environmental NGO Nepenthes is not allowed to advise Danish consumers against purchasing from shops where they risk buying garden furniture whose production has contributed to the destruction of rainforests.
Solomon Islands in the western Pacific have been ravaged by nearly three years of civil conflict. The economy is in tatters, the main city Honiara is run by militant groups, and most education, health and public service functions are not working. In this climate the corruption ridden, destructive and often illegal industrial logging sector has continued unabated.
The 21 Indigenous Communities comprising the Federation of Awa Centres in Ecuador (FCAE) have legal deeds for 120,000 hectares in the Northwest of Ecuador, a region of humid forests and great biological diversity, known as the Awa Territory and containing the last expanse of Chocoano forests remaining in Ecuador.
In Chile, 25 years of implementation of the neo-liberal economy model have had a strong impact on native forests and indigenous and local communities in the South. Over two million hectares of pine and eucalyptus plantations feed a large cellulose industry, geared for export. Over this period, hundreds of thousands hectares of native forests were converted into monoculture tree plantations. An accelerated concentration of land ownership, aided by State subsidies to plantations has led to serious territorial conflicts with the Mapuche indigenous communities, still continuing today.
Over the past few years, an increase in the participation of rural producers’ families and their economic and representative organisations has been noted in activities relating to management and conservation of resources in the Brazilian Amazon.
The National Network of Forest Practitioners (NNFP) is a grassroots alliance of rural people who are striving to build an ecologically sound forest economy whose benefits are accessible to communities that have traditionally depended on the forest for their well-being. NNFP’s 500 members include community-based non-profits, small businesses, indigenous groups, forest workers, researchers, agency officials, and landowners.
Recently some forty locally based community practitioners, academics, graduate students, and NGO heads (see http://www.nnfp.org and http://www.ncfc.org for more information) met for four days at the Federation of Southern Co-operatives ( http://www.fsclaf.org ) in Epes, Alabama, USA, in order to discuss trends in community forestry (CF) and community-based ecosystem management (CBEM) in the United States.
The Department of Rio San Juan is located near the southern frontier of Nicaragua, bordering Costa Rica, and the municipality of El Castillo is on the river between the Lake of Nicaragua and the Caribbean. During the eighties, the United States attacked us with a low intensity war that eroded the economy and uprooted Nicaraguan families. At the end of the war, during the nineties, twelve thousand people from Costa Rica and other parts of the country, immigrated to the Municipality.