Both ENDS
Fabio Schvartsman and Gerd Peter Poppinga attended a Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) trial session, last Tuesday, October 1st. Poppinga was convicted by one of the CMV directors, but the second CMV director requested more time to review the case files, postponing the judgment by 60 days. Victims’ families and supporters will have to keep waiting for justice regarding one of Brazil’s worst human and environmental disasters.
The Saamaka People, the Afro-descendant tribe of Suriname, have preserved close to 1.4 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest. They have for decades urged the government to recognise their ancestral territorial land rights.
The Dutch development bank FMO and the Finnish FinnFund announced this week that they are seeking ‘a responsible and legal exit’ from the Agua Zarca project in Honduras. Last week, it was reported that four suspects had been arrested in connection with the murder of human rights activist Berta Cáceres, who opposed the project for many years. One of those arrested is the manager for social and environmental affairs of DESA, the company implementing the Agua Zarca project. Because the company is a direct client of FMO and FinnFund, the banks consider the arrest good reason to take action.
This week, Both ENDS, together with 16 other environmental and human rights organisations from around the world issued a press release in response to the draft version of the ‘Safeguard policies’ of the World Bank. These are social and environmental criteria that a project must meet before it can be eligible for World Bank funding. An earlier draft version, released in July 2014, was strongly criticized by academics, experts from the United Nations, several banks and civil society organisations, because according to them the bank’s rules are becoming much too weak.
Over the past 15 years the production of palm oil has increased enormously, and not without reason: palm oil, pressed from the fruit of the oil palm, is cheap and is used in many different products. It is processed in ice cream, chocolate, margarine and sauces, but also in personal care products and cosmetics such as lipstick, detergent, toothpaste, soap and biofuel. Unfortunately, the large demand for palm oil has quite some negative side effects: large-scale deforestation, pollution, 'land grabbing' and above all human rights violations are common practice in countries where palm oil is produced.
Both ENDS warns that the current debate on “simplification” of EU environmental law must not become an excuse to weaken or postpone urgently needed safeguards. In earlier contributions to the drafting of the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), Both ENDS relayed the voices of local and Indigenous forest-dependent peoples, who consistently urged the EU to take responsibility for the massive deforestation linked to European imports. They underlined how this deforestation destroys biodiversity, undermines climate stability, and erodes their rights, livelihoods and cultures.
The Government of Ecuador offered a petition to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations on September 13th. In this petition, which was signed by Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, the African Group and the Arab Group, Ecuador stresses the need for binding international regulation for transnational corporations. This action is warmly welcomed and supported by more than 100 social movements and civil society organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, farmers and members of indigenous communities. Both ENDS strongly supports this action and our colleague Lieke Ruijmschoot explains why.
Palm oil production is widely associated with land grabs, human rights violations, large scale monoculture and severe environmental damage. Positive examples in the palm oil sector are rarely highlighted, but fortunately they do exist. Companies like Musim Mas and Bumitama in Indonesia are leading a much needed shift to a more environmentally and socially responsible way of palm oil production. Recently, Ms. Lim Sian Choo, Head of Corporate Secretarial Services and of Corporate Social Responsibility of Bumitama was in the Netherlands for an informal meeting organised by AidEnvironment and Both ENDS. Representatives from the private sector, NGOs and government were also present to discuss concrete steps taken by Bumitama to achieve sustainability in real time.
This week the brand new South-African website ‘EMG’s Untold Stories’ was launched. On the website, author Leonie Joubert gives a voice to different people who work to improve their environment, together with the South African organization ‘Environmental Monitoring Group’ (EMG). Each of the four stories collected by Joubert focuses on a different aspect of the work EMG does to ensure that South African natural resources are managed in a sustainable and equitable way. The online book has been published as part of the Both ENDS’s project ‘An Untold Story’, which gives human rights and environmental organisations from four different corners of the world a chance to tell their story about the impact the global economy has on their local environment.