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.
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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.
Everywhere in the world where large-scale monoculture tree plantations are established, their arrival is preceded by a series of promises used to trick the local population into welcoming these ventures. After a few years have gone by, people start to realize that these promises are not being kept, and that things are actually even worse than before. But by then it is too late. The companies have taken over the area and set up their plantations.
The term “planted forests” was coined by FAO with the aim of placing tree plantations on the same level as forests. Gradually it has spread and been assimilated by many international and national organizations, while multinational corporations from the forestry sector have taken advantage of this to emphasize the matching, as was evident at the latest World Forestry Congress, held in Argentina in October 2009.
The UN Climate Change Convention in Copenhagen presents itself to the world as if it were truly tackling the major global crisis of climate change, with thousands of government delegates and even a hundred or so presidents and heads of state joining the meeting.