Palawan is an island of the Philippines, located in the Western part of the archipelago and surrounded by the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea. As a result of the democratic process started in 1992, the local government, in agreement with local communities and the private sector, cancelled existing logging concessions, and new legislation was issued banning all commercial logging on the island.
Bulletin articles
Vietnam has a history of tree plantation programmes dating back to 1956. According to a report by Nguyen Ngoc Lung, Director of Vietnam's Forest Development Department, between 1956 and 1992 an area of over 1 million hectares was planted with trees. However survival rates have been poor and much of the wood produced has been exported as wood chips to Japan or Taiwan.
In 1999 local residents of Placencia Lagoon --a shallow water body fringed by mangroves and very rich in terrestrial and aquatic wildlife, located in southern Belize-- organized themselves to resist a project to build a two-lane causeway and a bridge across the Lagoon. The works would have caused a severe environmental impact, damaging ecotourism, the main activity in the area, as well as small scale fishing (see WRM Bulletin 23). A new threat is now pending on this rich ecosystem: industrial shrimp farming.
The East of Nicaragua is known as the Atlantic Coast (Costa Atlántica), and is geographically divided in a Northern and a Southern region. This area is characterized by being mostly inhabited by indigenous peoples --mainly Miskitos-- and for being the richest area concerning natural resources. Some 500,000 people (8% of the national population) live in this area (42% of the Nicaraguan territory), representing six ethnic groups who obtain their livelihoods from agriculture and fishing.
Mexican "justice" has once again ruled against justice. Rodolfo Montiel, a "campesino" leader imprisoned for leading a successful opposition movement against logging operations by the US-based Boise Cascade in the state of Guerrero (see WRM Bulletin 26), was found guilty and received a sentence of six years and eight months, in a sentence issued by Fifth District Court Judge Maclovio Murillo. Montiel, together with his colleague Teodoro Cabrera, have already been imprisoned for 15 months. Cabrera was also found guilty and given a 10-year term.
Coinciding with the conquest of the vast territory of Argentina by the Buenos Aires centralized government, started in the second half of the 19th century in the name of modernization, forests in different regions of the country entered a period of decline which has continued until present times. The two cases mentioned below are only examples of a process happening throughout the country.
The basin of the Beni River in western Bolivia, which comprises part of the Andean region and part of the Amazon forests, is being threatened by a hydroelectric megaproject, that is generating grave concern among local communities, environmental NGOs and academic circles.
The U'wa indigenous people are maintaining a long conflict with the Colombian state and the oil company Occidental Petroleum in the defense of their traditional territories. The permit granted to the company and the beginning of the works of oil prospection at the Bloque Samoré, located in the premontane forest region along the border between Colombia and Venezuela, constitutes a threat por the U'wa's life and environment. To the U'wa culture, oil is Mother Earth's blood, and to drill it would be a desecration.
The inclusion in the Venezuelan National Constitution --approved in 1999-- of a chapter that establishes legal rights for indigenous peoples and indigenous communities in line with International Labour Organization Convention 169 led to the idea that indigenous peoples in that country would be in a better position to protect their environment and their traditions against the powerful interests that in the name of "progress" want to destroy them.
It is already a well-known fact that large scale tree monocultures result in a large number of social and environmental impacts. However, we had not yet heard of a situation such as that of Fiji, where plantations generated such acute social and economic tensions that they eventually led to a coup d'etat.
Friends of Hamakua is gravely concerned over a proposed plywood/veneer plant and about the State Forest Hamakua Management Plan, which would imply the harvesting of 4,000 acres of old "non-native" plantations. There are several reasons for this concern. Access roads will have to be built into all of these, many forested areas. Once harvesting begins, all public access to these roads will be closed off due to liability concerns. Once the roads are in place, access will be gained to the few remaining native tree stands, which the plan says, may be removed if necessary.
The Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change -preceeded by a meeting of its Subsidiary Bodies in September in Lyon- will take place in The Hague in November. The obscure language used in the climate talks -and the even more obscure objectives of many governments and businesses- make it necessary to translate what's being negotiated into understandable concepts in order to facilitate very much needed public participation in the debate.