The Mekong/ASEAN Environmental Week (MAEW) is an annual regional platform and process for deeper sharing among people in the region of Southeast Asia, where key actors can exchange, analyze and debate on emerging issues that significantly affect them. This year the focus was on “Redesign ASEAN: Peoples' Voices in World Crises." Discussions covered the environmental situation as well as the economic, political, and other aspects that impact the region and its people.
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In a recent publication, the Ecuadorian organization, Acción Ecológica, reveals how the extraction of balsa wood has affected Amazonian indigenous territories—impacting both the social fabric and the forests in the foothills of the Andes Mountains (including the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve). The balsa wood “boom” is a result of the Chinese wind industry, since China is the country that has built the most wind farms in recent years. The publication also addresses how the balsa wood business is structured in Ecuador, as well as its main producers and exporters. Read it in Spanish here.
An excerpt from a forthcoming book entitled “Climate Opium” explores how we are overdosing on false solutions to climate change, so much that the biggest mammals on earth are being forced into carbon pricing schemes.
As the devastating effects of climate change become more immediate and severe, corporate interests are promoting the use of unproven and potentially dangerous genetically engineered (GE) trees for climate mitigation schemes, including carbon offsetting and an emerging bioeconomy. A statement released by The Campaign to STOP GE Trees warns of the ecological and social harm of using GE trees, in “false solution” climate mitigation schemes.
A recent publication form the WRM explains how contract farming with palm oil companies works, and why it is a serious threat to peasant farming and food sovereignty. The booklet looks at nine of the most common promises that companies make, and most importantly, the information they conceal behind each promise. The publication is available in English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia.
A recent article from Mongabay warns on how the palm oil industry is expanding rapidly in the Brazilian Amazon. Oil palm coverage in northern Pará increased almost five-fold between 2010 and 2019. Studies have shown that the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations is a major problem. Most of Brazil’s palm oil production is controlled by eight companies.
An academic article from Janina Puder exposes how the palm oil industry in Malaysia heavily relies on the cheap labour of migrant workers in order to keep palm oil profitable and globally competitive. Palm oil is often associated with social inequalities concerning land ownership, land use and access to land, but the exploitation of migrant workers is a further significant, albeit lesser-known, expression of social inequality that has been caused by industrial oil palm cultivation and the steady expansion of the palm oil sector in Malaysia since the 1960s.
A report from the organization London Mining Network highlights that extractivism is a militarised process: it violently ruptures ecosystems and habitats. In doing so, it displaces then polices communities with ongoing connections to the land applying various counterinsurgency tactics to maintain extractive legitimacy. Relatedly, militarism is an extractive process: it depends on vast quantities of metals and minerals to innovate and assemble more deadly technologies of control and destruction. Further, it fuels the climate crisis.
Fossil fuel companies and interest groups in Europe captured tens of billions of public money from Covid-19 recovery packages. On top of this, groups from the Fossil Free Politics campaign alert on how the fossil fuel industry has strongly lobbied to win concessions for climate-damaging energy schemes across Europe, including gas, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon offsetting
In February 2021 more than 500 scientists and economists issued a letter urging to stop burning wood as a means of making energy in converted coal burning power plants and to end subsidies now driving the explosive demand for wood pellets. The burning of wood to produce electricity boomed since the United Nations categorized this energy source as ‘carbon neutral’, which enables governments and companies to burn wood instead of coal and not count the emissions in helping them meet their climate related targets.
This is the title of an open access book with 15 chapters focusing on the meanings, agendas, as well as the local and global implications of bioeconomy and bioenergy policies in and across South America, Asia and Europe. It explores how the ‘energy transition’ reinforces and challenges socio-ecological inequalities. Various conceptual discussions and case studies – from knowledge extraction to sexual exploitation and labour migration - clarify how the extraction of biomass sources from agricultural and forest territories affect societies.
The WRM has compiled articles in Bahasa Indonesian and in English in order to expose the many processes of corporate control that are threatening forests and people’s territories across the islands. The compilation also highlights the strong and persevering resistances against the many attempts to destroy and grab land and territories from forest populations.