Oil palm plantations are spreading like wildfire across the eastern Brazilian Amazon. But local communities are standing up to the palm oil industry’s brutality and sweeping land grabs, demanding the return of their ancestral lands and calling on the authorities to protect them from encroachment and violence.
Large-Scale Tree Plantations
Industrial tree plantations are large-scale, intensively managed, even-aged monocultures, involving vast areas of fertile land under the control of plantation companies. Management of plantations involves the use of huge amounts of water as well as agrochemicals—which harm humans, and plants and animals in the plantations and surrounding areas.
Action alerts
6 May 2024
Articles
6 May 2024
On 1 April 2024, eight representatives chosen by communities from Lokutu, in the Tshopo province of the DR Congo, to represent them in the mediation process with the oil palm company PHC presented a letter rejecting the outcome presented by the mediation.
Articles
8 April 2024
In a letter to Guatemalan national authorities, 115 organizations from 39 countries demanded a halt to the abuses and violence that palm oil company Industria Chiquibul has been committing in indigenous and peasant communities. The organizations also called for suspension of the RSPO certification process, which they denounce as greenwashing a destructive industry.
Articles
4 April 2024
An alliance of organizations have demanded that European governments pause the mediation process and provide the communities access to the land documents and legal support to defend their interests.
Articles
2 April 2024
Brazil’s Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA) has written to the state of Pará’s authorities requesting that they urgently regularize the land tenure of three peasant communities threatened with eviction. The letter has the support of 60 organizations from several countries.
Articles
8 March 2024
This March 8, International Women's Day, we share some materials that highlight the key role that feminism and women’s resistance play in the defense of forests and life.
Action alerts
28 February 2024
We call on organizations to sign this petition in support of the Mayan Q’eqchi community Santa Elena in the northern region of Guatemala. The community is asking for international and national support in the face of recent threats and growing criminalization by Industria Chiquibul, a palm company that supplies palm oil to transnational corporations such as Nestle and Unilever. Read and sign the letter below.
Bulletin articles
27 February 2024
The Amazon region is one of the final frontiers of resistance to capital expansion. This is epitomized by the struggles of social activists such as Chico Mendes, as well as by the presence of most of the earth’s remaining indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. However, different forms of ‘green’ extractivism are currently and increasingly advancing on this territory.
Bulletin articles
26 February 2024
In the Acará Valley, Pará state, the Tembé and Turiwara indigenous peoples, and quilombola and peasant communities are fighting to take back part of the living spaces they traditionally occupied. It is not just a struggle for territory, but one to reverse a history of oppression and injustice. Today, they are denouncing structural violence and state omission.
Bulletin articles
26 February 2024
The expanding agricultural frontier to grow soybean and oil palm, in addition to mining and the potential construction of mega-dams, are advancing upon the living spaces of indigenous and peasant communities. In late 2018, communities organized a coordinating committee to defend their territories and their right to a dignified life.
Other information
26 February 2024
The certifying company has turned a blind eye to the fact that the Peruvian government has not only not demarcated the indigenous territory but has also given the company two contracts for concessions.
Articles
24 February 2024
Between August 4 and 7, 2023, there were violent attacks on the lives of four indigenous Tembé people as a consequence of the struggle to take back territories from the hands of the company Brasil BioFuels (BBF). In the face of this, the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA) sent a formal letter to the authorities requesting the immediate regularization of indigenous and quilombola territories, as well as an investigation into the mechanisms of criminalization of their leaders and the suspension of all incentives to companies involved in the violence.