Many Latin American governments, in order to obtain income and satisfy the conditions of the IMF structural adjustment programmes, and supported by World Bank loans, have placed the natural resources of their country at the disposal of multinational companies, and grant concessions to those, who at any cost, wish to perpetuate the exploitation model to their own benefit. Many Latin American peoples have also understood that if they get organised they can defend their lands, their forests and their very survival.
Bulletin articles
The last preparatory conference for the World Summit on Sustainable Development is now taking place in Bali, Indonesia and people around the world are increasingly concerned about the process and asking themselves questions about the relevance of the upcoming Johannesburg Summit to address the problems being faced by humanity.
Six Central African countries --Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), Cameroon and the Central African Republic-- share the rainforest ecosystem of the Congo Basin, which is home to one of the world’s largest contiguous blocks of tropical rainforest, only second to that of the Amazon Basin in South America in terms of not fragmented forest areas.
Liberia is a biodiversity rich country with rocky cliffs and lagoons facing the Atlantic Ocean, with plains covered by forests and savannahs, and rainforests in the highlands, crossed by rapids and waterfalls, all of which are home to the Kpelle, Bassa, Gio, Kru, Grebo, Mano, Krahn, Gola, Gbandi, Loma, Kissi, Vai, and Bella peoples. The evergreen and semi-deciduous rainforests of Liberia also harbour many and even rare and unique plant and animal species.
Biodiversity rich and varied African ecosystems, including tropical rainforests in central and western regions, were disrupted when the European powers landed and encroached on those territories. This disruption extended to customary social structures which were subordinated to a central decision-making organisation to handle regulation and management of natural resources exploitation.
Over the last decade the area of fast-growing tree plantations in the Mekong region has expanded dramatically. Villagers throughout the region have seen their forests, fallows and grazing lands replaced with eucalyptus, acacia and pine monocultures. A new World Rainforest Movement report, "The Pulp Invasion: The international pulp and paper industry in the Mekong Region", written by Chris Lang, gives an overview of the industry, profiles the actors involved and documents the resistance to the spread of plantations.
In the mid 1980s, the plight of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak got visibility when they staged peaceful protests against depletion of their home --the forest-- to logging activities or agroindustrial plantations for the benefit of commercial groups.
Many community-based forest management projects are implemented in the Philippines aiming at increasing community involvement in forest management and at providing employment and livelihood. Although there are many examples of successful cases, we decided to choose a less positive one, as a means to show how the exclusion of women or lack of gender awareness can lead to increasing gender inequalities, both within communities and in households.
Together with many other organizations, we have once and again insisted on the need to remove tree plantations from the definition of forest, for the simple reason that plantations are not forests. But once and again the forestry establishment has insisted on including them as "planted forests" to adequate the definition to vested interests regardless of its scientific absurdity. The following extracts from a recent article by Ranil Senanayake sheds more light on the issue (the full article is available at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/SriLanka/loans.html ):
In Guatemala deforestation processes are in rapid acceleration; every year around 90,000 hectares of forests are lost and less than twenty percent of the original forest cover is left. The Department of El Quiché in the west of the country, has been one of those most affected by deforestation. However, to the north, in the municipalities of Chajul, Uspantan and Chicaman, a major remnant of relatively well conserved cloud forest is to be found.
For many years now the indigenous Mbya Guarani communities from the villages of Tekoa Yma and Capii Yvaté (Pepiri Guazu) have been inhabiting lands located at El Soberbio, in the Municipality of San Pedro, Province of Misiones, where the Uruguay river descends the Mocona falls.
Starting at different points of Bolivia, peasants and indigenous peoples have been carrying out marches in favour of the right to lands and natural resources, arriving in the city of La Paz in the next few days.