Large-Scale Tree Plantations

By the World Rainforest Movement - March 2007. At the beginning of the twentieth century, women's struggles for emancipation took on greater visibility. They were times of social and political transformations and women started to mobilize for their rights, and among these, for their right to vote. In 1911, the first International Women's Day was celebrated and in 1975, the United Nations Assembly formally recognized 8 March as International Women?s Day.

Last year, about 170 farmers met in the farming community of South Riana to air their concerns and see how to stop valuable farmland being converted to timber plantations. They were concerned for the future of the area -- built on successful dairy and cropping enterprises -- and called for the Tasmanian Government to abolish tree plantation development on prime agricultural land.

The land near the southern boundary of the Mount Elgon national park is green and the volcanic soils are fertile. But since it was declared a national park in 1993, a sometimes violent conflict between villagers and the national park management has flared up at Mount Elgon.

Biofuels are flavour of the month for car-makers and politicians keen to be seen as green without directly addressing the problem of ever-rising transport emissions. The buzz has also caught on strongly in the EU. On 10 January, the European Commission presented its new energy and biofuels blueprint. It can be summed up in just seven words: bad news for people and the climate.

The present eagerness of the European Union to favour the use and import of biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels has risen serious concerns among those who are aware that global warming should be tackled globally and demand drastic changes in the current Western consumer, commercial and production patterns.

The Veracel pulp mill is located in the south of the Brazilian state of Bahia, some 45 kilometres from the coast, on the border between the municipalities of Eunapolis and Belmonte. Veracel is a corporation in which the Swedish-Finnish group Stora Enso and the Brazilian Aracruz group have equal shares, today managing one of the world’s largest eucalyptus plantation and industrialization projects.

According to the FAO definition, rubber plantations are “forests.” Recently we visited one of these “forests” in Kribi, Cameroon and talked with the workers and local population. Unlike the FAO “experts,” nobody, absolutely nobody there perceives these plantations as forests.

Kenyan winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, and also Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources and Member of Parliament, Wangari Maathai, launched in 1977 the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa.

For decades, the presence of communist insurgents kept Malaysia’s northern frontier free from exploitation. Too dangerous to open up for tourism or development, the Belum-Temenggor forest stood in pristine splendour as the nation built superhighways and superstructures, and extracted timber from other forests.

Vietnam's paper industry is booming. In 1995, paper production stood at 220,000 tonnes. In 2007, the Vietnam Paper Association aims to produce more than one million tonnes of paper. Demand far exceeds supply and in 2006, Vietnam imported 709,000 tonnes of paper products. A large proportion of paper produced is for packaging - a result of Vietnam's expanding export economy.

Costa Rica has been built as an export-oriented economy, with no political or economic independence. Export pressure on resources by the world system resulted in great inequality. Since the Kyoto Protocol, neoliberals have redefined forests as ‘oxygen generators’, a concept that Costa Rica has embraced. In this framework, local communities, especially those living in the tropical rainforests and depending for survival on the bounty provided by the forests, have seen undermined their basic support system.

The notion of High Conservation Value Forest was originally developed as a key principle within the revised standard of the Forest Stewardship Council issued in 1999. However guidance on how such forests should be identified was scarce and not well consolidated. In 2002, the conservation organisation WWF and the retail company IKEA, as part of a three-year cooperative programme, decided to fund a small project to develop guidance on how HCVF should be defined, identified and managed.