In a study published recently in Germany on Climate and Development, we find the following statements: “Poverty affects many, too many people – and it affects men and women differently and in different numbers.
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Living should not have to be a struggle against deadly forces. The life of the indigenous Ayoreo women and men living in isolation (without contact with our civilization) did not used to be a struggle; it was a life lived in and with the land they inhabited, over the course of many centuries. Today, however, through no choice of their own, for these women and men, living has come to mean resisting, enduring – and having to struggle – since the arrival of another world bent on invading and replacing their own world…
Sicilia Snal (25), is a Garo woman of the forest village Sataria in the Modhupur sal forest. It is merely a 62 thousand acres forest patch, yet the third largest forest of Bangladesh, a country having one of the lowest per capita forest coverage on earth. Sicilia has to routinely visit the nearby forest to collect firewood. This is a traditional right that she and other villagers have always enjoyed.
What is happiness? We can find many answers and we may even consider that being happy is a strictly personal matter. However, at least two aspects of happiness are universal: we all want it and it would be hard to find someone who could declare him/herself happy when confronting hunger, homelessness or when lacking access to the knowledge constructed and accumulated by humanity.
Plantar S.A. Reflorestamentos, a pig-iron and plantation company operating in Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais, has been trying hard to get money through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
An article published on the website EUobserver.com (1) informs that “a draft commission communication offering guidance to EU member states on the use of biofuels has classified palm oil plantations - the source of one of the most destructive forms of biofuels - as "forests." Essentially, the document argues that because palm oil plantations are tall enough and shady enough, they count as forests.”
A research project was carried out in Laos to evaluate the economic, social and ecological impacts of large-scale land concessions to plant rubber and for making recommendations for the future management of land in Laos PDR. Two provinces were selected in the south of Laos (Champassak and Salavane), to conduct research over the course of one year from July 2007 to July 2008.
What follows is a communiqué from the Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations (RECOMA) reporting on the violent situation that local communities and Indigenous Peoples of the Lacandona forest in Chiapas are presently going through.
“Appeal to international solidarity to protect the Lacandona Forest in Chiapas (Mexico), February 2010.
As experts like geographer Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves have repeatedly stressed, economic models based on monoculture plantation activities will always be incompatible with a healthy, balanced environment. Any industrial-scale monoculture activity, and especially plantations of millions of cloned eucalyptus trees, cannot contribute to the goal of so-called sustainable development.
There are two realities in the forestry sector in Indonesia. In one, the forests continue to be destroyed, peatswamps are drained, forests are logged, burned and replaced by industrial tree plantations. Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' rights are bulldozed along with the forests. Meanwhile, in the other reality, trees are planted, forests are restored and greenhouse gas emissions will soon become a thing of the past.
Pine and eucalyptus planting companies are advancing on land belonging to peasant family communities in several provinces in northern Mozambique. This is a relatively recent process, encouraged by the Mozambique Government that sees monoculture tree plantations as a tool to promote development and progress in the more remote regions such as the province of Niassa.
Natural forests aren’t the only landscapes being taken over by timber plantations. South Africa’s biologically diverse native grasslands are being rapidly replaced by water-intensive monocultures including eucalyptus and tropical pine – trees used for paper pulp exports.