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Conflict/Dispossession

Conflict/Dispossession

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How climate disasters can drive violent conflict around the world

10th August 2016

Chelsea Harvey reports: It’s increasingly clear that the consequences of climate change won’t stop at just heatwaves and sea level rise. A new study suggests that violence, war and other forms of human conflict may be driven or worsened by the effects of climate change — specifically in countries with high levels of ethnic divides….

A black day for the rights of millions – Rajya Sabha passes Afforestation Bill

29th July 2016

Campaign for Survival and Dignity release: The Rajya Sabha has passed the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, 2016. This Bill essentially gives carte blanche to forest officials to spend gigantic amounts of money (over Rs. 40,000 crores) without any accountability to the people whose forests, lands and lives will be damaged or destroyed by their activities….

Purshottam Singh Thakur/Down to Earth

A forest drought no one is talking about

25th July 2016

Down to Earth reports: Severe dry spells in Indian forests have hit the livelihood of more than 100 million people. But India simply does not acknowledge this drought. There’s no official nomenclature for forest droughts, nor any official plan to deal with them. So, while a farmer gets compensation for failed crops, forest-dwellers receive nothing….

Anupam Nath/Associated Press

Adivasi boy shot at by guards of ‘shoot-first’ Kaziranga national park

22nd July 2016

The Ecologist magazine reports: A 7-year old boy has been injured after getting shot by park guards in Assam’s Kaziranga national park, which operates a strict ‘shoot first’ policy. In the last nine years, an estimated 62 people have been shot dead by Kaziranga guards, four of whom were ironically arrested for alleged rhino poaching recently….

Archival photo of a boat rally in protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam

Narmada Bachao Andolan

Spotlight: The Narmada valley’s unfolding social and ecological disaster

21st July 2016

Its 25 years since the Narmada Bachao Andolan started mobilising resistance against the destruction of life and livelihood in the Narmada valley. Today, with more than two lakh people who’ve not been resettled threatened with submergence, that resistance is being revived. A closer look at the history and politics of big dams on the Narmada river….

The global farm land grab in 2016: How big, how bad?

18th July 2016

In 2008, GRAIN exposed how a new wave of land grabbing was sweeping the planet in the name of addressing the global food and financial crises. Their new report shows that the global farmland grab is far from over. Rather, it’s in many ways deepening, expanding to new frontiers and intensifying conflict around the world….

Elephants raiding a banana plantation near Bannerghatta, Karnataka

Nishanth Srinivasaiah

The culling of wild animals herald future water wars in India

10th July 2016

Peter Smetacek writes: Culling wild animals that have come to depend on agriculture for sustenance is only a short-term measure. This was portrayed as a man-animal conflict rather than what it actually is: the conversion of our forests from rich storehouses of bio-diversity to green deserts by a combination of mismanagement, political expediency and ignorance….

Indigenous Terra Madre festival – The Shillong Declaration

7th July 2016

The Indigenous Terra Madre festival 2015 at Shillong brought together indigenous peoples from around the world to share knowledge about food, nutrition and biocultural diversity. The Shillong Declaration, asserts that everyone has a right to good, clean and fair food and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage, tradition and culture that make this possible….

In Bangladesh, a growing movement to save the world’s largest mangroves from coal power attack

6th July 2016

Bangladesh’s 1,320 megawatt Rampal coal power project threatens to devastate the Sundarbans and the communities whose livelihoods depend on it. If completed, it will consume about 13,000 tons of imported coal daily, result in over six miles of river dredging each year, discharge highly toxic sludge, and release ten million tons of carbon dioxide annually….

A view of the Athirapilly falls

Countercurrents.org

Athirappilly: Kerala’s destructive dam project that refuses to die

1st July 2016

Neha Miriam Kurian writes: The Left-Front government in Kerala is reviving the Athirappilly Hydro Electric Project against stiff resistance from local tribes and environmentalists. If implemented, it will displace the ancient hunter-gatherer Kadar tribe and submerge the only remaining low elevation riparian forests left in the Western Ghats, one of the world’s eight biodiversity ‘hotspots’….

Video: Bihar’s great walls of destruction

29th June 2016

Floods are not a new thing in Bihar, a state in the lap of these flood plains. Around the time of India’s independence, the state started caging its rivers with embankments. In this video, Dinesh Mishra explains why Bihar is so vulnerable to flooding and more importantly, why embankments have caused more harm than good….

A calamity bigger than drought

27th June 2016

Archana Mishra writes: Authorities failed to use MGNREGA and NFSA provisions meant for relief in difficult times. Even delayed wage payments forced downtrodden farmers to migrate towards cities. The national average of MGNREGA wages delayed beyond the statutory limit of 15 days is 62 percent of all wage payments for 2015-16, an RTI query revealed….

Dmitry Orlov: Negative interest rates and the impending global financial collapse

25th June 2016

What the flashing neon words on the wall seem to be saying is: negative interest rates are on the way throughout the “developed world.” In due course, they will demolish any remaining value of the US dollar, and blow up the bond bubble. In turn, this financial collapse will trigger the next stage: commercial collapse….

A view of the Vizhinjam fishing harbour

Aneesh/Wikimapia

How ‘development’ is set to create 2000 jobs, but destroy 50,000 livelihoods in Kerala

23rd June 2016

Job creation for Keralites from the controversial Adani-run Vizhinjam Port project is estimated at around 2,000. Compare that to 50,000 fisherfolk who’ll lose their livelihoods. Anjana Radhakrishnan takes a closer look at a project that already seems a social, ecological and economic disaster in the making, but has so far escaped the national media’s attention….

Report: More earth defenders were killed last year than ever before

The non-profit Global Witness has documented 185 killings across 16 countries of people defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries in 2015. It’s by far the highest annual death toll on record. Communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and contract killers….

Ashish Kothari: Livelihoods vs. Deadlihoods

22nd June 2016

Economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life, with no sharp division between work and leisure; replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs where we wait desperately for holidays… Less visible is the pauperisation of those deprived of natural resources they depended on….

Draft National Forest Policy sets up another battle over Forest Rights Act

Nitin Sethi reports: The government has made public its draft National Forest Policy, to replace the existing one crafted in 1988. Incorporating consequences of climate change but entirely ignoring one of the three forest related laws, the Forest Rights Act, the policy brings new focus to plantations, growing trees outside forest lands and wood industry….

Elephants raiding a banana plantation near Bannerghatta, Karnataka

Nishanth Srinivasaiah

Debate: Is the ongoing culling of wild animals necessary?

17th June 2016

The Centre has endorsed various states’ move to list wild animals – elephants in Bengal, monkeys in Uttarakhand, peacocks in Goa and nilgai in Bihar – as ‘vermin’, allowing them to be culled. With human-animal conflict once again in under the lens, we present a selection of articles that examine both sides of the story….

Droughts and floods: India’s water crises demand more than grand projects

14th June 2016

Bhaskar Vira writes: Water is an issue that cuts across all aspects of social and economic life in India. Compartmentalised responses are unlikely to adequately address the current crises. There is a need for an integrated approach, which addresses source sustainability, land use management, agricultural strategies, demand management and the distribution and pricing of water….

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Bookshelf: Blood Red River: A Journey Into The Heart Of India’s Development Conflict

In this excerpt from his new book, published by Hachette India, Rohit Prasad looks at the roles of the different players in the battle between Adivasis, Maoist rebels, corrupt bureaucrats and hungry corporations, concluding that the situation is one of “cooperative plunder”, where two apparently antagonistic forces align for the purpose of siphoning away resources….