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.
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.
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.
Publications
21 March 2024
On 21 March, which has been promoted by the FAO as the International Day of Forests, WRM is releasing a briefing about the importance of the words we use. The briefing explores how concepts like “forests,” which have been historically imposed and adopted without considering a diversity of viewpoints (in particular those of forest-dependent Peoples) contribute to the creation of policies that neither recognize this diversity nor halt deforestation.
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.