This bulletin highlights materials and analysis related to communities’ struggles against industrial tree plantations. It also pays homage to communities in DRC struggling to get their lands back from an oil palm company since colonial times. Their courageous struggle showcases the multiple layers of oppression and violations that result from the plantation model.
International Day of Struggle Against Monoculture Tree Plantations 2022
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21 September, the International Day of Struggle Against Monoculture Tree Plantations, is a day for organizations, networks and movements to celebrate resistance and raise their voices to demand: “STOP the Expansion of Monoculture Tree Plantations!”
These plantations invade territories and affect the life of peoples and communities. The Day was launched in 2004 at a meeting of a community network struggling against industrial tree plantations in Brazil; September 21 was chosen because it is the Day of the Tree in Brazil.
Plantations are not forests!!!
(Use the filter "Type of content" to find materials, articles and declarations about these struggles in different parts of the world).
Industrial tree plantations have always been about corporate control over community fertile lands. The monoculture model inherently endangers communities’ survival, food sovereignty and autonomy, deepens the violence of patriarchy and racism while enforcing the same destructive and oppressive way of organizing land (and thus, people) as the one enforced during the colonial era.
The network that brings together movements, organizations and communities in the fight against tree plantations met in the Far South of the State of Bahia. This September 21st, it once again denounced the impacts of this violent and unjust model, which is based on large-scale plantations mostly for pulp export.
The oil palm plantations of BIDCO, a company partially owned by Wilmar, in Kalangala Island, Uganda, generated devastating impacts. The company plans to expand to Buvuma Island, however, they keep confronting strong organized opposition! Watch a short video with testimonies of resistance from Buvuma Island.
A recent report from the Campaign to Stop GE Trees alerts that the global release of genetically engineered (GE) trees is closer than it has ever been.
In the framework of September 21st, International Day of Struggle Against Monoculture Tree Plantations, Colombian organizations and movements made a declaration in which they denounce the expansion of large-scale monocultures, and aim to shine light on a problem “that threatens the life, dignity and autonomy of communities.
Documentary film produced by NUPOMAR, Núcleo de Pesquisa, Mídias e Arte, with the purpose of recording and valuing the social memory of the Pataxó Indigenous Peoples of Aldeia Barra Velha (in the municipality of Porto Seguro-Bahia), Brazil.
We share the final statement where they express their demands and claims.
The Informal Alliance Against the Expansion of Industrial Oil Palm Plantations in West and Central Africa released a declaration to keep breaking the silence of the many abuses around industrial plantations and to reaffirm their strong commitment to resist their expansion in the defence of their territories and lives.
This publication exposes the most common misleading statements currently used by plantation companies. It’s is based on the briefing "Ten Replies to Ten Lies" written by Ricardo Carrere in 1999.
In the Buvuma Islands, in Uganda, communities are resisting the expansion of industrial oil palm plantations.
The quilombola communities of Sapê do Norte, Brazil, are living a violent process with the expansion of large-scale eucalyptus monoculture. After many hardships, they started a process to take back their water and land. And the struggle to take back what is theirs continues. WRM talked to two quilombola activists to reflect on this difficult but fertile process of resistance.