Position Paper of the Global South on Food Sovereignty, Energy Sovereignty and the transition towards a post-oil society.
Quito, September 2007
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Only available in Spanish -
Nota que da cuenta de la indudable existencia de grúpos indígenas nómadas en aislamiento voluntario en la Amazonía sur oriental del Perú - Intendencia de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, Lima, setiembre 2007
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Press Release - September 17 - 2007
Very few studies have been undertaken on the health and safety of tree plantation workers around the world. In addition, this sector generally tends to be addressed as part of the larger sector of the forestry industry, which also encompasses logging and wood harvesting activities in natural forests.
In Uruguay we have entered the 21st century as witnesses to the transformation of the landscape throughout the length and breadth of the country. Plantations of eucalyptus and pine trees seem to have invaded every type of terrain. This geographical transformation has also had a direct social impact, affecting numerous aspects of life.
Since the mid 1980's there has been a global trend towards the outsourcing of labour-intensive aspects of the plantation timber production model. In South Africa, the timber industry has openly admitted that its main motive for replacing permanent employment of workers with contract outsourcing was to cut costs.
An article from Jennifer Mourin, deputy executive director of Pesticide Action Network’s regional office for Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), referred to a situation which is hardly unique in the Malaysian oil palm sector: “Rajam worked as a pesticide sprayer on an estate earning a daily wage of RM18. The main pesticide she sprayed was paraquat [herbicide]. She was not provided any protective clothing such as boots, masks, gloves, goggles or apron.
We the undersigned wish to register our concern over the certification of tree plantations by the FSC, which has granted a green label to monoculture plantations that have proven to be socially and environmentally destructive.
We are aware that the FSC is carrying out a review of its plantation certification policy, and it is our hope that the result of this process will be an end to the certification of these types of plantations by the FSC in the future.
The book authored by Philip Gain -Stolen Forests, published in 2006- denounces the horrendous consequences of the introduction of plantations —teak, rubber, eucalyptus and acacia monocultures— on Bangladesh’s native forests.
The Sixth Assembly of the Pataxo Front for Resistance and Struggle met at Monte Pascoal, Bahia, on 19 August to assess the problems they are facing as a consequence of insufficient land, impairing their sustainability and culture.
The history of the Pataxo and their uprooting goes back to 1861, when together with other indigenous communities they were evicted from their lands by the government of the Province of Bahia, to gather them in a single locality.
In April 2003, in WRM Bulletin Nº 69, we wrote an article on the Democratic Republic of Congo focused on the exploitation of columbium-tantalite (coltan, for short), widely used in cellular phones, laptop computers and video games, and how the mining of this ore has devastated forests like the Ituri forest, changing forever sites which used to sustain the Mbuti livelihoods and were the habitat of several animals like gorillas, okapis --a relative of the giraffe--, elephants and monkeys. It was a sad picture that coltan left in the forests of DRC, a scenario for war and depredation.
Tourism has come to stay in Costa Rica and, with it, ransacking and depredation of the country’s prodigious ecosystems (see WRM Bulletin 84). This is denounced by Juan Figuerola, of the Costa Rican Federation for Environmental Conservation (FECON), in a press release under the heading of “The environmental devil: lord and master of Costa Rica” (“El diablo ambiental: amo y señor de Costa Rica”, available in Spanish at http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/CostaRica/Diablo_Ambiental.html).