Struggles Against Tree Monocultures
Corporate profit drives land grabs to install industrial tree monocultures. Where industrial plantations take root, communities' territories and lives are violently invaded, their forests destroyed and their water polluted. When communities resist, companies tend to respond with aggression. Despite this extreme violence, communities around the world are resisting, organizing and joining forces to defend their territories. Every September 21 the International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations is celebrated.
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.
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
The company is in the process of renewing part of its oil palm plantations in Edéa. At the end of last year, communities started to mobilize against this process. The community resistance has led the sub-prefect to request Socapalm to stop its activities. This is a first victory of the community but the struggle will continue until SOCAPALM returns the lands to the communities!
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
The Argentine province of Corrientes has the largest area of tree plantations in the country. 80% of the timber from these plantations goes to sawmills, where mountains of sawdust are regularly burned, causing serious health problems for neighboring communities. The local organization, Guardians of Y'vera, conducted a community health survey to highlight the problem, demand the relocation of these mills, and denounce the impacts of the forestry model.
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
Other information
22 August 2024
Other information
22 August 2024
On July 5, 2024, three peasant families were violently evicted in Paraje San Lorenzo 2, in the municipality of Wanda, in the Argentine province of Misiones. The provincial police carried out the eviction, in collaboration with the multinational company, Arauco. During the operation, the police destroyed the ten-hectare farm which had been the families' livelihood for a decade.
Publications
20 August 2024
This is a summary edition of the booklet “Promise, Divide, Intimidate and Coerce: 12 tactics palm oil companies use to grab community land”, launched in 2019 by the Informal Alliance Against Industrial Oil Palm Plantations in West and Central Africa. In this edition, you will find one tactic per page, together with an illustration.
Action alerts
13 August 2024
Press release. SOCAPALM, a subsidiary of Socfin, must immediately cease replanting operations at Edea 1, in Cameroon.
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
10 May 2024
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.
Action alerts
6 May 2024
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.
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.