In a series of articles, forest communities talk about the violation of their forest rights as a result of government approvals for forest destruction in connection with hydropower and coal projects that were passed or accelerated during the pandemic. During the lockdown, the Ministry of Environment and Forests approved large-scale industrial, mining, hydropower, roads and highway construction projects without the required due diligence and in disregard to environmental laws and the Forest Rights Act (FRA).
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“Dulet”: A highly transferable disease brought by the meginalew (good spirit) to discipline the wrongdoings of humanity. Alim “Kim” Bandara, a member of the Indigenous Political Structure of the Teduray and Lambangian Indigenous Peoples in south-central Mindanao, Philippines, explains how Covid-19 and dulet are similar in many aspects. In this article, Bandara explains how the Teduray and Lambangian have confronted similar situations before and what lessons these experiences hold.
Civil society organizations welcomed a Technical Committee report set up by the government of Sierra Leone to look into a legal dispute between the multinational company Socfin and communities affected by the company’s oil palm plantations in the Malen Chiefdom in Sierra Leone. The completion of the report concludes the investigative phase of the conflict resolution process concerning the land conflict between Socfin and communities in the Malen Chiefdom and is an important step towards finding a resolution to the long-standing land dispute.
Different national and international movements, organizations and networks condemn and vigorously denounce the systematic and selective murders of comrades from rural and urban organizations in Colombia, without the government or multilateral institutions having done a responsible follow up of the murders and massacres perpetrated. Since March 6, when the first case of COVID-19 in Colombia was reported, more than twenty social leaders have been murdered. We stand in solidarity with and demand justice for all those comrades from various Colombian peoples’ organizations.
In the opening article for the Focus on the Global South newsletter, Shalmali Guttal alerts on how lockdowns in Pakistan, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Philippines have left millions of informal sector, agricultural and migrant workers, street vendors, and entertainment and hospitality workers stranded without wages, shelter, food and health care, and have prevented farmers, fishers and herders from crucial food production activities.
The African women network against resource extraction (WOMIN) has compiled useful information for activists confronting the measures against the pandemic.
500 native trees and 500 fruit trees were planted at the Maila Sabrina camp, during the closing of the Training Course for Pedagogical Collectives of the Schools of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Paraná. The action is part of the National Plan “Plant Trees, Produce Healthy Foods”, launched by the MST at the end of 2019, with the goal of planting 100 million trees throughout Brazil, over 10 years. The mystical and political act of planting trees denounced the perverse and destructive logic of agribusiness and the mining market.
Martin Khor (1951-2020), Third World Network's Chairman and former Director, passed away on 1 April 2020 in his home in Penang, Malaysia. Martin was one of the founders of the WRM.
The September 2019 Forest Cover newsletter from the Global Forest Coalition focuses on the bioenergy developments and use in West Africa and how they are impacting women and forests. From bioenergy produced in large-scale, requiring huge areas of land to provide the raw materials, to the ubiquitous household and community-scale energy needs, where wood is collected mainly by women. Clean cookstove projects are increasingly being tied to commercial tree plantations that produce “clean charcoal”, and eucalyptus trees are being planted on a large-scale purely to burn in a power station.
The People’s Climate Report, from the People’s Climate Network, is designed to offer a perspective on climate change from the bottom up. It aims to understand how communities across the world experience the changing climate. This report offers a glimpse of experiences and voices from communities dealing with a changing climate in West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh, parts of India where waters and forests are increasingly under threat from climate change, deforestation, and lop-sided development.
Social organizations from Uruguay, Finland and other countries, together with well-known professionals, presented the results of scientific research carried out over the past 15 years on the impacts of monoculture tree plantations on grasslands, refuting the "green washing" of UPM company, which presents itself as a leading global corporation in the fight against climate change, the defense of biodiversity and the sustainable water management.