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Misima Island is situated in the Louisiade Archipelago in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. The island is 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide at its broadest point, and is covered in lowland hill rain forest except for the coastal zone and the foothills which have been cleared for cultivation and replaced by woodland.

An expanding international coalition of public interest, human rights, labor and environmental groups has vowed to resist mining in Ghana's forest reserves. At a press conference on Thursday 8 of May, to launch a campaign against mining in the reserves, the coalition expressed outrage at the decision of the Ghana government to open up some of the reserves for surface mining. Coalition members called on the government to rescind its decision and withdraw licenses it has already given to some of the mining companies to mine in the forest reserves.

Briefing Paper prepared by Lee Tan, Australian Conservation Foundation/Friends of the Earth Australia “We, the landowners are developing and will continue to develop OUR LAND on our own term. We therefore sternly warn all those parties involved in wanting to use OUR LAND for oil palm to STAY OUT! Any attempt to bring oil palm on our land will be strongly resisted” Extract from a newspaper advertisement put out by a group of landowners in PNG, February 2003 Oil Palm in PNG

Every time the Asian Development Bank lends money on a project it creates a problem for the government receiving the loan. The project must make money in order that the government can pay the Bank back. This sounds like straightforward economics, but when the Bank gives loans for forestry projects, this means that the forests must make a profit. The simplest way of converting forests to profits is to cut down the trees. The social and environmental impacts of doing this are often devastating.

In February, the World Bank approved a new Water Resources Sector Strategy (WRSS). The strategy says the Bank needs to shrug off its critics and boost spending on big dams and other water megaprojects. This strategy is a reactionary, dishonest and cynical document. If put into effect it will provide rich pickings for the big dam lobby and private water companies, but only worsen poverty, water shortages and the dire condition of the world's rivers.

Have you ever seen "Ghost Busters", the movie? Thanks to the magic of movies, that silly story, perhaps the brainchild of a superstitious youngster became a motion picture. Many kids and a few adults maybe even believed for a moment that ghosts are for real. This is pretty close to what happened in New Zealand, at the "Experts Meeting on Planted Forests". To many of us, this is just absurd, planted forests do not exist. But, is that a reason for not being scared? - Well, I don't know what I saw, but I was scared!

The imagination of technocrats seems to have no limits. On the other hand, their common sense appears to be extremely and increasingly impaired. Their bright ideas surprise us --backward people-- constantly and at times we even doubt --unscientifically-- about their mental sanity. Such is the case of a Dr Klaus Lackner, a Columbia University physicist, who has invented an artificial tree which according to him is much better than the obviously limited real one.

    To governments and civil society committed to halting climate change and reducing fossil fuel emissions at source, the latest developments at the BioCarbon Fund must be worrying. The fund's 'two-window' approach aims at re-opening the door for carbon sink credits from conservation projects even though governments clearly excluded credits from this project type to be used by industrialised countries to achieve their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.

As governments at the 7th Conference of the Parties to the climate change convention, COP7, in Marrakesh in 2001, put the final touches on the decision that made carbon sink projects eligible for credits under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a group of NGOs formed SinksWatch, an initiative to track and scrutinize carbon sink projects related to the Kyoto Protocol.

In WRM bulletin 64 (November 2002), we included an article (Brazil: Research questions FSC certification of two plantations) which summarized the findings of a research carried out in the state of Minas Gerais. The full report --originally in Portuguese-- has been now translated into English and is available at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Brazil/fsc.html

For those of you who are not yet aware about this, we wish to inform you that since issue No.60 (July), the WRM bulletin is also being published in French and Portuguese. Previous issues in French are available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletinfr/previousfr.html , the Portuguese version can be accessed at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/boletim/anteriores.html

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a free trade and investment agreement being negotiated between the governments of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean -except Cuba. It is modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between North America, Canada and Mexico. The goal of the FTAA is to create a free trade and investment zone that extends from northern Canada to the southern tip of Chile.