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Mining Companies Use Excessive Legal Powers to Gamble with Latin American Lives
The right of foreign investors to sue governments in international tribunals is one of the most extreme examples of excessive power granted to corporations through free trade agreements and investment treaties.
For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
4 takes on how to build a sustainable world
The Global Landscape Forum (GLF) Kyoto event will explore landscape-based solutions for the climate challenge on 13 May. Sign up online or register for the free digital edition.
Fighting for change
Through collective action, environmental protection can be achieved. This is what the Kalinga indigenous people in the Philippines demonstrated to the world when they stopped the famous Chico River Dam Project from being constructed, and it is what inspired Joan Carling to make her lifelong mission fighting for human rights in land development.
Goldman Prize winner survives armed attack on Afro-Colombian social leaders
- Last week on May 4, two bodyguards were wounded when armed gunmen tried to storm a meeting of Afro-Colombian activists that included 2018 Goldman Prize winner Francia Márquez.
- The community leaders had been meeting to discuss future actions following a massive land rights protests last month in Colombia’s Cauca region in which one protester was killed by armed forces.
- In March and April, Afro-Colombian activists participated in an indigenous-led protest with 20,000 people against the government’s environmental and social policies.
Chinese logging takes heavy toll on farmers in Guinea-Bissau
West Africa's native rosewood was listed as endangered last year following a huge increase in trade driven by Chinese demand
GAMAMADU, Guinea-Bissau - Before the ban, Chinese loggers drove straight through Gamamadu village to harvest its most important resource: the rosewood forest.
"So many Chinese came here. We were praying for a means to stop it," said Braima Djassi, a small, white-haired farmer in the village in central Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country in West Africa.
What we learned from two years of investigating corrupt land deals in Indonesia
- The now-concluded investigative series “Indonesia for Sale” examined the corruption underpinning Indonesia’s land rights and climate crisis in unparalleled depth.
- The series was a collaboration between Mongabay and The Gecko Project, an investigative journalism initiative founded at Earthsight in 2017.
Private property rights at stake in South Africa ballot
Land ownership and income inequality remain highly emotive subjects more than two decades after the end of apartheid in South Africa
JOHANNESBURG, May 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The South African government's promises of returning land to black South Africans taken during apartheid are under the spotlight during national elections this Wednesday, land experts said.
Nature better off with indigenous people, indicates global report
The findings of the first-ever Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services are important in the light of the ongoing Supreme Court case against Forest Rights Act
Biodiversity is declining everywhere at an unprecedented rate, but this rate is lower in areas where indigenous people own land, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
In Nicaragua, a former surgeon fights for Indigenous rights
Myrna Cunningham is the first Miskitu woman to study at a university. In 1973, she received a degree in medicine and returned to her home region in the isolated northeast of Nicaragua, where she was born in a small village surrounded by lush forest. Working as a surgeon, she served in more than one hundred remote villages.
Indigenous mobilization wins battle in President Bolsonaro’s war on indigenous peoples
Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s personal crusade to extinguish indigenous rights and devastate indigenous territories just hit a wall. Two, actually. Both Brazil’s Supreme Court and Brazil’s top congressional leaders handed Bolsonaro setbacks over his executive decision to move control of protecting indigenous lands to the agriculture ministry, which is controlled by members of the agribusiness lobby known for its opposition to indigenous land rights.