Palm Oil
The oil palm tree is native to West Africa. It is an important tree for forest-dependent communities, their cultures and their economies. However, large-scale oil palm monocultures for industrial production (oil and agrofuels) have been driving deforestation and land grabbing in Southeast Asia. More recently, oil palm monocultures are also driving destruction in Africa and Latin America.
Articles
1 November 2024
In the upper Acará River in Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, Turiwara indigenous people are defending their territory against the oil palm monoculture company Agropalma, that invaded the lands. The Turiwara fear for their lives due to the presence of company guards and other heavily armed people, frightening them.
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
Peasant families are threatened with eviction by Brasil Bio Fuels (BBF) oil palm plantation company, with the complicity of the state government. This article shows that the much spoken of ‘bioeconomy’ is not ‘sustainable’ and even less ‘clean’. What it does is destroy communities’ territories, just like fossil fuel-based extractive industries have been doing for a long time.
Articles
12 June 2024
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.
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.
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.
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.
Articles
24 February 2024
On August 8, 2023, the National Human Rights Council (CNDH) sent a recommendation to federal and state authorities regarding measures to protect, promote and defend indigenous peoples and quilombola, riverine, peasant and agro-extractivist populations in Pará state.
Articles
11 August 2023
Your Excellencies Governor Helder Barbalho and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, there is no climate justice without the protection of two forests, urban centers, water and land! (Only available in Portuguese).
Bulletin articles
16 June 2022
In Brazil, oil palm plantations are expanding rapidly, mainly in the Amazonian state of Pará. BBF (Brasil BioFuels), the largest oil palm company in Brazil, stands accused of environmental crimes and violence against indigenous, quilombola and peasant communities such as Virgílio Serrão Sacramento, a community linked to the Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA).
Bulletin articles
23 March 2022
What a certain historiography terms civilizational expansion or capital’s expansion has in fact been the invasion and de-territorialization of peoples and communities using much epistemic and territorial violence. Concessions have been granted in areas that are not demographic voids, a colonial concept that ignores the fact that they have been populated for millennia.
Bulletin articles
17 November 2020
WRM spoke with close allies from Brazil, Gabon, India, Mexico and Mozambique, to hear from them and learn about their understandings of development.