Mozambique

updated on September 22 Last week we asked your support for communities in Mozambique who are facing rapid expansion of timber monoculture plantations in their territories. This message is to inform you that this Action Alert will continue open for sign-on´s until September 29. If you haven’t sent your endorsement yet, please do so!

"Nobody eats eucalyptus."  With this statement farmers expressed their outrage when the company Aracruz Celulose expanded its monoculture eucalyptus plantations several years ago on arable land in Espirito Santo, Brazil.  While the objective was  to produce and export more pulp, Aracruz and other companies publicly promote their practices as "smart.” They claimed they only plant trees on "degraded" or "abandoned" land, for example.  And now with the climate crisis, the FAO suggests adopting "climate-smart forestry" practices.  The question that arises: Can we really consider current company

Peasants in northern Mozambique are struggling to keep their lands and water sources, as governments and foreign companies move aggressively to set up large-scale agribusiness projects. The long-awaited ProSavana Plan for agribusiness development in the Nacala Corridor, inspired by the so-called “successful” agribusiness development in the Brazilian Savannah (cerrado) region, is out.

A new report by the Oakland Institute introduces the term ‘carbon violence’ to describe the impact of Green Resources’ plantation operations in Uganda on local communities and their environment. Green Resources is a Norwegian-registered plantation company with 41,000 hectares of plantations in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. The company’s plantations, certified under FSC, are used for timber products and generate carbon credits.

REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies presents summaries of reports from 24 REDD projects or programmes with a common characteristic: they all show a number of structural characteristics that undermine forest peoples' rights, or fail to address deforestation. As offset projects, they all fail to address the climate crisis because by definition, offset projects do not reduce overall emissions: emission reductions claimed in one place justify extra emissions elsewhere.

   

The NO REDD in Africa Network gathered here in Maputo Mozambique, on 26 August 2013 during the occasion of an international workshop on REDD with participants from Mozambique, other African countries, North America and South America deliberated on the implications of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) for Africa and by extension the global South.  

Governments are opening the doors to corporations for planting vast areas of land with oil palm plantations. This trend is not only happening in West and Central African countries, but is even expanding to parts of Eastern Africa. Large scale oil palm plantations are already causing serious environmental and social impacts in some countries, resulting in loss of community rights over their territories.