The entrance to the bank has nothing to do with human scale. Built of steel and glass, the building towers over visitors like a spotlessly cleaned, giant machine. A machine for swallowing people and making money, perhaps.
Other information
Fiske Menuco (General Roca), (see footnote)*
The struggle between two agricultural projects has stepped up in Brazil. On the one hand, the agro-business project based on the concentration of vast stretches of land, on production for export, on large-scale production and on monoculture plantations, mainly of soybean, eucalyptus, and sugar cane.
At the end of April this year, the Brazilian Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) was host at its Florestan Fernandes National School (Guararema, Sao Paulo) to almost 80 members of social movements and organizations from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe attending the International Meeting on Monoculture Eucalyptus Plantations. The aim of this meeting was to define an agenda for joint action against the advance of monoculture tree plantations and pulp mills at global Southern level.
The Thai government has set its policy on producing palm oil-based biodiesel as energy. At present, the country’s large-scale oil palm harvest areas account to around 400,000 hectares, but since 2006, a discourse on oil palm has emerged to promote its plantation as a “renewable source of energy”, a “country savior”, a “reforestation scheme”, a “wind-protection zone”, and a “transformation of deserted rice fields into palm fields”.
The promotion of large-scale fast-growing monoculture tree plantations started in Uruguay in 1987, with forestry law Nº 15939 of December 1987. Today these plantations occupy over one million hectares of land and not only lands in the “forestry priority” category.
The US South Carolina-based company ArborGen is a partnership between the timber corporations International Paper and Mead Westvaco, and the New Zealand-based Genesis Research and Development. ArborGen has been growing GE Eucalyptus hybrid trees and testing them for cold tolerance on a secret 1-acre plot in Baldwin County, Alabama, close to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The place was found to be home to a number of experimental, genetically modified crops, many of which appear to be growing on a Loxley farm owned by agricultural giant Monsanto Co.
WRM has created a new video section in its website. You can find it in the page’s left column or going directly to http://www.wrm.org.uy/Videos/index.html.
The Congo rainforests of central Africa are, after the Amazon, the second largest rainforest on Earth and a major biodiversity hotspot: Two-thirds of the forest lies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -- still divided by a vicious civil war fuelled by competition for control over natural resources, and that claimed 3.5 million lives. About 40 million people of DRC depend on the rainforests for their very survival.
Between 1959 and 1987, a great majority of the Ayoreo from Paraguay (see WRM Bulletin No. 96) were contacted by force and deported to places outside their vast ancestral territories. They were also displaced from their lands taken over for farming activities. This situation has submitted them to a high degree of dependency on the religious missions and the regional market.
Intense and continuing logging has taken place in Sarawak for the last 30 years or so. More than 95% of Sarawak's original forest cover has now been logged at least once. The few remaining portions of unprotected primary forest in Sarawak are in mountainous regions close to the border with Indonesia, and these are now being hastily logged by the five leading logging groups active in Sarawak and their myriad of subsidiaries and associated contractors.
Miguel A Altieri, Professor of Agroecology, University of California, Berkeley
Elizabeth Bravo, Red por una América Latina Libre de Transgenicos, Quito, Ecuador