A network of civil society organizations and social movements launched a letter to expose how big companies (agribusiness, industrial tree plantation, oil and mining sectors) take advantage of this time of crisis with the Covid-19 pandemic to strengthen the image of their brands by making donations to vulnerable populations. Meanwhile, they continue operating in the midst of the pandemic.
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Here we share some fragments of a conversation between the journalist Margaret Prescod, from the Sojourner Truth radio show on KPFK Radio, and Winnie Overbeek, WRM coordinator, on July 9th 2020.
The documentary “Selling out West Papua”, shown on Al Jazeera, with associated reporting by news portals Gecko and Mongabay, reveals how two Korean companies, Posco and Korindo, are engaging in corrupt deals as they buy up forests on a large scale to develop oil palm plantations in West Papua. The impacts for communities are devastating.
In a series of articles, forest communities talk about the violation of their forest rights as a result of government approvals for forest destruction in connection with hydropower and coal projects that were passed or accelerated during the pandemic. During the lockdown, the Ministry of Environment and Forests approved large-scale industrial, mining, hydropower, roads and highway construction projects without the required due diligence and in disregard to environmental laws and the Forest Rights Act (FRA).
“Dulet”: A highly transferable disease brought by the meginalew (good spirit) to discipline the wrongdoings of humanity. Alim “Kim” Bandara, a member of the Indigenous Political Structure of the Teduray and Lambangian Indigenous Peoples in south-central Mindanao, Philippines, explains how Covid-19 and dulet are similar in many aspects. In this article, Bandara explains how the Teduray and Lambangian have confronted similar situations before and what lessons these experiences hold.
Civil society organizations welcomed a Technical Committee report set up by the government of Sierra Leone to look into a legal dispute between the multinational company Socfin and communities affected by the company’s oil palm plantations in the Malen Chiefdom in Sierra Leone. The completion of the report concludes the investigative phase of the conflict resolution process concerning the land conflict between Socfin and communities in the Malen Chiefdom and is an important step towards finding a resolution to the long-standing land dispute.
Different national and international movements, organizations and networks condemn and vigorously denounce the systematic and selective murders of comrades from rural and urban organizations in Colombia, without the government or multilateral institutions having done a responsible follow up of the murders and massacres perpetrated. Since March 6, when the first case of COVID-19 in Colombia was reported, more than twenty social leaders have been murdered. We stand in solidarity with and demand justice for all those comrades from various Colombian peoples’ organizations.
In the opening article for the Focus on the Global South newsletter, Shalmali Guttal alerts on how lockdowns in Pakistan, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Philippines have left millions of informal sector, agricultural and migrant workers, street vendors, and entertainment and hospitality workers stranded without wages, shelter, food and health care, and have prevented farmers, fishers and herders from crucial food production activities.
The African women network against resource extraction (WOMIN) has compiled useful information for activists confronting the measures against the pandemic.
500 native trees and 500 fruit trees were planted at the Maila Sabrina camp, during the closing of the Training Course for Pedagogical Collectives of the Schools of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Paraná. The action is part of the National Plan “Plant Trees, Produce Healthy Foods”, launched by the MST at the end of 2019, with the goal of planting 100 million trees throughout Brazil, over 10 years. The mystical and political act of planting trees denounced the perverse and destructive logic of agribusiness and the mining market.