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.
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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.
Another two young men have been killed at the industrial oil palm plantations of Plantations et Huileries du Congo (PHC). European development banks have been financing PHC for years, and agreed to hand over the plantations to an obscure private equity fund after the previous owner, Feronia Inc. went bankrupt in 2020 – after having received more than USD 100 million in development funding.
The booming demand for palm oil has come at the high price of rainforest destruction, labour exploitation, and brutal land and water grabbing. Communities living in and around oil palm plantations in Indonesia and elsewhere are deeply concerned about their freshwater sources. But this long-term impact on freshwater streams around oil palm plantations seems to have been overlooked until now. The reality is that along the destruction of these plantations, is also the serious problem of water grabbing.
Since Jair Bolsonaro assumed the Brazilian presidency, deforestation is not only on the rise, it is increasingly out of control. This is largely due to the dismantling of government regulatory agencies, and it means that those who deforest feel more empowered by the impunity that reigns. On top of this, the neoliberal policy of privatization of forests, along with other criminal actions, means that the forests and Brazil are, effectively, for sale. Bolsonaro recently signed Decree N °10.623/2021 to create the “Adopt a Park” program.
A recent publication unpacks the science behind “net zero” claims and how they are used to obscure climate inaction. It explores the new strategies to expand carbon offset markets, linked with new “net zero” demand for offsets. The publication supported by nine organizations concludes that a future with fossil fuels will require carbon unicorns. Read the publication in English here.