In response to timber industry efforts to expand the area of land under industrial timber plantations by 600,000 hectares, a Plantations Campaign was started by a small group of NGOs in South Africa in 1995.
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“All villagers understand the need to protect the forest. We can't live without it.” The speaker is a villager from Dak Dam Commune in Mondulkiri province in the north-east of Cambodia. “Now our life is more difficult,” he said.
In July 2004, a business delegation from the Vietnam General Rubber Corporation visited Laos. At the time only a small area was planted with rubber in the south of Laos. “We can provide 50,000-100,000 hectares of land for Vietnam to grow rubber,” Thongloun Sisolit, the Lao Deputy Prime Minister, told the delegation.
It is almost certain that the Finnish public know little or nothing about Uruguayan history and on how this history relates to the current Metsa Botnia pulp mill project in this country. It is therefore important to explain that a military dictatorship ruled Uruguay from 1973 to 1984. During that period the military violated every possible human right and torture was common practice during those years. Thousands of Uruguayans –men and women- were tortured and imprisoned; scores of people were killed and “disappeared” and thousands had to live in exile during that period.
In Brazil, production through agriculture of a new energy model is present every day in the mass media and increasingly the development of this field is gaining social endorsement and economic justification. Rapidly, the use of land to produce food is sharing its space with the fuel production. This change in social perception is very evident in the repeated news features showing farmers and landowners as the new “oil field” owners.
In Cameroon, like in other African countries such as Ivory Coast or Ghana, the production of oil palm is distributed in 3 sectors: an agro-industrial sector, a village sector controlled by agro-industries, and a small-scale traditional sector.
Even though Indonesia and Malaysia hold a strong leadership position in the oil palm global market, the agro-industrial sector in Cameroon can rely on several advantages.
The Western world, and in particular the countries of the North, gave in to addiction to fossil fuels. This path has led to something that today nobody can doubt: climate change. Many solutions have been put forth to face it, but most of them let humanity’s race towards suicide continue as vigorously as before.
Indonesia is one of the world’s most populous and rural countries, with a total population of 220 million people.
Malaysia, together with Indonesia, is the world's leading producer of crude palm oil for export, at a high cost, though. According to a 2005 Friends of the Earth report, 87 per cent of recent deforestation in the country has occurred to make way for palm-oil plantations. Since Malaysian rainforests are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, clearing these areas poses serious threat to countless species of plants and animals.
At its last Conference of the Parties (COP8), the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a very important Decision in relation to the issue of genetically modified trees and invited everyone “to provide relevant views and information to the Secretariat for inclusion in this assessment”.
In our previous issue (WRM Bulletin Nº 110), we published a section on “plantation certification at its worse”, including the case of the Pan European Forest Certification Scheme (PEFC), a programme for the endorsement of national certification schemes.
I recently had the opportunity of travelling to the Indian province of West Bengal and to visit the Dhoteria, Bagora and Mayung “Forest Villages” in the districts of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong.
To the outsider, the mountain area of the Outer Himalayas appears to be covered by dense forests, mostly composed of very large trees. However, local people know that these are not forests, but old and new plantations of mostly two species: the Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) and Teak (Tectona grandis).