Large-Scale Tree Plantations

An investigation shows that While companies like the Swedish fast food chain Max Burgers AB sells ‘carbon neutral’ burgers, a carbon offset project in Uganda is pushing families into hunger.

A report documents how a tree planting carbon project in Port Loko, Sierra Leone is violating the country’s community rights laws and risks locking families into 50-year contracts. The British oil company BP has already paid USD 2.5 million to Carbon Done Right, one of the companies behind this tree plantation and carbon offset project.

We recommend rereading the publication, “The Carbon Market: Planting More Problems,” written by Larry Lohmann in 2000.

São famílias da Comunidade de Virgílio Serrão Sacramento no município de Moju (estado do Pará, Brasil) que coletivamente somam forças desde o final de 2015 quando reocuparam o território conhecido pela ação dos grileiros, no qual já fizeram várias vítimas. Desde então, o Acampamento ocupa sua terra com moradias, plantações, produção e fornecimento de alimentos.

Once again the Ka’apor people, through their ancestral organization TUXA TA PAME, has demonstrated its strength, on May 12, 13 and 14. They denounce the atrocities that Indigenous Peoples and quilombola and peasant traditional communities suffer in the hands large-scale landowners, loggers, mining corporations, gold diggers, carbon credit speculators and the agribusiness sector.

The president of the Tshopo provincial assembly supports the call of international NGOs demanding to pause a mediation process between the oil palm company PHC and communities affected by its oil palm plantations. Since 2018, the mediation has not addressed the communities’ demand for investigation of the (il)legality of the concessions at the basis of the companies palm oil business but has led to increased the violence and put community rights at the plantation sites in Lokutu and Boteka, in neighbouring Equateur province, at risk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.