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 23 March 2022

Colonization and Monoculture Plantations: Histories of Large-Scale ‘Grabbings’

The control of land was vital to colonisers. It meant wealth, territorial influence, access to ‘resources’ and cheap (and often enslaved) labour. The separation of indigenous inhabitants from their territories was a crucial component that persists until today. The effect of this history continues to influence the management of and conflicts over land.

Bulletin articles 23 March 2022

Forest Colonialism in Thailand

British firms not only controlled 80 per cent of the established ‘logging lands’ in Thailand, but they also influenced the establishment of the Royal Forest Department, which came to have total power over the nation’s forests. Massive land grabs and various colonial laws made half the country’s territory into a colony of the central state.

Bulletin articles 23 March 2022

Forest Concessions, Colonial Concept

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 23 March 2022

A Century of Agro-Colonialism in the DR Congo

Many oil palm plantations’ concessions in West and Central Africa were built on lands stolen from communities during colonial occupations. This is the case in the DRC, where food company Unilever began its palm oil empire. Today, these plantations are still sites of on-going poverty and violence. It is time to end the colonial model of concessions and return the land to its original owners.

Bulletin articles 23 March 2022

The Concession Model in Southeast Asia: Coming Full Circle?

Colonial and anti-colonial movements’ have deeply shaped the patterns and impacts of concessions in SE Asia. In some cases, communities have experienced dispossession through land grabs dressed as concessions. In others, concessions are part of a re-concentration of land holding. Either way, the concession model fits well with ideologies of modernisation.

Other information 22 March 2022

“Colonial history and the environmental crisis are closely linked”

The book, Une écologie décoloniale' (a decolonial ecology), written by Malcom Ferdinand, presents an analysis of how we cannot understand the current environmental crisis without knowing colonial history.

Other information 22 March 2022

Jari Cellulose Group land titles in Brazil declared illegal

A Public Civil Action from the Prosecutor of Agrarian Justice in the state of Pará, Brazil, against the Jari Cellulose Group requested that part of their land titles be annulled.

Publications 18 March 2022

How forest policies and agencies promote sustainable destruction

On the eve of March 21, the day FAO celebrates its International Day of sustainable forest destruction, WRM is releasing a briefing that looks back at a UN-led process on the Underlying Causes of Deforestation that took place more than 20 years ago. The Underlying Causes identified in 1999 do not only remain as significant today as they were. They have even been reinforced in many ways.