Ecological debt

Climate scheme hands $105 million profit to global insurance industry

27 November 2018 - by Jubilee Debt Campaign

Caribbean disaster insurance scheme receives $293 million in premium payments and grants, pays out $131 million in claims, with $105 million going as profit to global insurers Figures released ahead of climate change negotiations in Poland show that for the most economically damaging disasters (...)
Mining conflicts multiply, as critics of “extractivism” gather in Johannesburg

14 November 2018 - by Patrick Bond

The World Social Forum’s “Thematic Forum on Mining and Extractivism” convenes from 12-15 November 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, just after the Southern Africa People’s Tribunal on Transnational Corporations. In between, at the notorious 2012 massacre site on the platinum belt to the west, (...)
How Kabila and the mining giants went from best friends to adversaries

6 November 2018 - by Claude Kabemba, Pascal Kambale

A new mining code has created a rift between mining multinationals and government. For much of this year, two of the most powerful forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been engaged in a tense standoff. President Joseph Kabila, the country’s powerful political leader since (...)
UN Human Rights Council passes a resolution adopting the peasant rights declaration in Geneva

1 October 2018 - by La Via Campesina

(Geneva, September 28, 2018) Seventeen years of long and arduous negotiations later, peasants and other people working in rural areas are only a step away from having a UN Declaration that could defend and protect their rights to land, seeds, biodiversity, local markets and a lot more. On (...)
India: Bullet Train – Train with ‘Bullets’ i.e. ‘A Symbol of Violence, Absolute Force’

16 August 2018 - by Krishnakant, Rohit Prajapati

Our First Few Bullet Questions to the Modi Government: - Why is MoEF&CC absent while a foreign government agency is participating in Environmental Consultation? - Ongoing Consultation accepts the need for environmental concerns. Then, why the Environment Laws of India and MoEF&CC have (...)
Small–scale farmers of Africa and Denmark reject free trade agreements

27 July 2018 - by La Via Campesina

Representatives of La Via Campesina in Southern and Eastern Africa (LVC SEAf) and in European (ECVC) small-scale farming agree that free trade agreements (FTAs) on farm products benefits primarily transnational corporations and furthers the industrialisation of agriculture. All at the expense (...)
Bio-piracy: the sale of Uganda’s lakes to investors

7 June 2018 - by Mary Serumaga

The fishermen of Kabarole District appear to have blown the whistle on an audacious act of bio-piracy. They brought to the attention of the authorities that they were being barred from access to the 53 crater lakes that they have fished in from time immemorial. In law this is known as a (...)
Land-grabbing and the Financialization of Agricultural Land

28 May 2018 - by Mary N. Taylor

On the occasion of the publication of the report Transnational Corporations and Land speculation in Brazil by Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights), Mary Taylor of LeftEast spoke with Fábio Pitta, Devlin Kuyek and Attila Szőcs about the broader (...)
European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) launches a peasant agroecology manual on how to phase out the use of pesticides

22 May 2018 - by La Via Campesina

Europeans are fundamentally questioning the use of pesticides. In 2017, more than one million citizens signed the European Citizens’ Initiative « STOP Glyphosate », which aims to ban glyphosate marketing in the EU, reform the pesticide authorisation process and set targets to reduce their use. (...)
As World Bank signals end of extraction finance, CSOs call for end to its other fossil fuel funding

10 April 2018 - by Bretton Woods Project

World Bank Group (WBG) President Jim Yong Kim announced at December’s One Planet Summit in Paris that the Bank will cease project lending for ‘upstream’ oil and gas projects after 2019. SUMMARY WBG announced it will end finance for ‘upstream’ oil and gas projects after 2019 Pledge includes (...)
Mega-infrastructure as a mechanism of indebtedness

4 April 2018 - by ODG (Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalización)

ODG’s publication “Mega-infrastructure as a mechanism of indebtedness – the risk of illegitimate, ecological and gender debt” analyses the main mechanisms of indebtedness that mega-infrastructure projects entail, raising the question of the illegitimacy of debt, and also considering the creation of (...)
Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline: Not in Our Interest

23 March 2018 - by Collective

In December 2016, an announcement was made of a nearly 5000 km Nigeria-Morocco offshore gas pipeline which at today’s prices will cost an estimated 20 billion US dollars. In reality, the actual costs will likely be much higher. This pipeline would be a continuation of the existing 678 km long (...)
“Castor Case” citizen lawsuit

7 March 2018 - by Collective

Here we published an article on the Castor Case in Spain and the citizen initiative to suit before National High Court the responsibles of this project. On Tuesday February 27th 2018, we publicly presented a CRIMINAL LAWSUIT before the National High Court in Spain, against: Former Minister (...)
Seed Freedom and the Future of Farming

26 February 2018 - by Vandana Shiva, Joris Leverink

In an era of climate change, rejuvenating and regenerating the soil through ecological processes has become a survival imperative for the human species. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned Indian scholar, environmental activist and author of over twenty books. She has been involved in (...)
Meet the frontline activists facing down the global mining industry

7 February 2018 - by Hannibal Rhoades, Tatiana Garavito, Sebastián Ordóñez

Activists are defending land, life and water from the global mining industry. Tatiana Garavito, Sebastian Ordoñez and Hannibal Rhoades investigate. Leaders from the frontlines of mining struggles in the Philippines, Colombia and Uganda travelled to the UK this November to expose the true costs (...)
Bushra Khaliq, CADTM Pakistan : “There are immense impacts of the climate changes on poor communities in Pakistan”

6 February 2018 - by Bushra Khaliq , Robin Delobel

We asked a few questions to Bushra Khaliq during IIRE’s last Ecosocialist school session in Amsterdam. Bushra Khaliq has been a feminist activist and a member of CADTM Pakistan for years. She gave us insightful answers about this country which has a turbulent history, where close to 200 million (...)
No TAV: feeding the fire of resistance in northern Italy

18 January 2018 - by Frank Barat

The decades-old struggle of the No TAV movement in northern Italy is an inspiration to environmentalist and anti-capitalist movements worldwide. When I get to Turin airport, on a warm autumn day, the smell of smoke is overwhelming. The weather forecast on my phone shows me a big bright sun, (...)
TuNur in Tunisia: Another case of energy colonialism

10 November 2017 - by Hamza Hamouchene

A familiar ‘colonial’ scheme is being rolled out: the unrestricted flow of cheap natural resources from the Global South to the rich North, maintaining a profoundly unjust international division of labour. While fortress Europe builds walls and fences to prevent human beings from reaching its (...)
Rural Peoples - Mobilizing Against the Dispossession of the Commons

28 September 2017 - by FIAN

While neo-liberalism has created an acute crisis around the world, its agrarian variant has turned rural areas into a grand arena of capitalist accumulation in newer ways. It purchases (or acquires with the collusion of the state) peasants’ land at throwaway prices; enforces contract (...)
Canada’s hand in Tanzania mining fraud

4 August 2017 - by Yves Engler

The Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold’s African subsidiary, Acacia Mining, is embroiled in a major political conflict in Tanzania. With growing evidence of its failure to pay royalties and tax, Acacia has been condemned by President Magufuli, had its exports restricted and slapped with a (...)
Accusation manifest, People’s tribunal on the castor project

30 May 2017 - by ODG (Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalización)

Faced with impunity, the citizens accuse. The Castor project -a geological gas storage offshore in the Mediterranean-, granted to ESCAL UGS (66.6% participated by Florentino Perez’s ACS) by the PSOE government, hibernated its activity in 2013 after causing 1,000 earthquakes that shook the (...)
Colombia: Free Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) from capitalism and put cities in the service of the people

29 May 2017 - by Eric Toussaint

Bogota, 2600 m altitude, 7.5 million inhabitants. Sunday 30 April, Daniel Libreros, facilitator of the ecosocialist movement, Camila C. (23) and John F. (24), members of CADTM in Colombia picked me up at 8:30 a.m. at the city centre hotel to take me to a working-class district on a mountain (...)
ADB violates its own safeguard policies in Nepal Hydropower Project

27 April 2017 - by Ratan Bhandari

The 140 MW Tanahu Seti Hydroelectric Project (THP) is located in the Tanahu District of Nepal’s Western Development Region. It is a storage type hydropower project with a capacity of 140 MW. As part of the project, a dam with a height of 140 metres would be constructed in the Vyas Municipality (...)
Food sovereignty : A feminist struggle ?

21 March 2017 - by Aurélie Leroy

The starting point of this study is a paradox : among social, institutional and political actors, peasant and family farming are gradually becoming established as legitimate and credible alternatives to an agro-productivist model that has ’run out of steam’. They address both environmental and (...)
Kathmandu Declaration of South Asia Peasants’ Convergence

14 March 2017 - by Collective

We, the representatives of South Asian peasant organizations, agricultural labourer unions, plantation workers unions, young farmers, women, landless and Dalits, Adivasis, small and marginal farmers, pastoralist and herders and other small food producers gathered here in Kathmandu call upon all (...)