El Pambilar with its 3123 hectares of native forest, has since 1997 been a matter of dispute between peasant farmers and the logging company Bosques Tropicales S.A (Botrosa), belonging to the Peña Durini group.
Bulletin articles
Following the resounding and anticipated failure of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change held in Copenhagen in December 2009, the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has taken the initiative of calling another type of summit meeting in search of solutions. The World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth will be held from 19 to 22 April 2010, in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba (http://cmpcc.org/).
Criticism of the ineffective and unjust solutions to climate change which under carbon compensation and trading pretend to continue business as usual, are mounting amid global civil society.
There can be no doubt that we are immersed in a long and sometimes resisted process of gender awareness regarding social relationships that in general terms have historically placed women in an unequal and subordinate position.
Women often play a crucial role in environmental conflicts over oil extraction, mining and logging activities, shrimp farming and tree plantations. These courageous women do not hesitate to challenge political power, local tyrants and armed violence for protecting the surrounding natural resources they and their family depend on. Therefore they protect their culture, way of life, sacred places, livelihood means and so on.
The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity. According to the official web site, “It is a celebration of life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives. The world is invited to take action in 2010 to safeguard the variety of life on earth: biodiversity.” Biodiversity is portrayed as our “natural wealth”, on which we rely to provide us with “food, fuel, medicine and other essentials” we “simply cannot live without.”
Africa is richly endowed with mangroves, which cover over 3.2 million hectares, extending from Mauritania to Angola on the Atlantic coast and from Somalia to South Africa along the Indian Ocean.
The last remnants of forests in Bangladesh are disappearing and much of the blame goes to local peoples’ “slash and burn” agriculture. The government –supported with loans and funds from multilateral and bilateral financial institutions- is actively promoting the plantation of trees and would thus appear to be trying to revert the situation.
An article published in the newspaper “La Tercera”(1) and taken up on the Mapuche IMC blog (2) reveals the results of research carried out by scientists from Valdivia’s Austral University that link the presence of native forests with greater water production.
The December 2004 tsunami that played havoc on several Asian coasts also exposed the level of human-made destruction of protective greenbelts including mangroves along coastlines. The need to re-establish natural protective greenbelts followed suit with quite often failed attempts.
A recent report by Greenpeace (“Why logging will not save the climate: the fallacy of GHG emissions reductions from so-called ‘Sustainable Forest Management’ (SFM) or Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) of natural forests”) evaluates greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from the various forms of industrial logging.
Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) is based on a simple idea: Making forests worth more alive than dead. But on closer examination, it is not simple at all. To forest peoples, forests already are worth more alive than dead. REDD could involve the biggest ever transfer of control over forests – to international carbon financiers and polluting companies.