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Lack of protection leaves Spain-size swath of Brazilian Amazon up for grabs
The Brazilian Amazon is home to public lands that span an area the size of Spain — undesignated forests that are at growing risk of land grabbing encouraged by the state, according to a recent study by Greenpeace. These public forests, covering a combined 50 million hectares (124 million acres), are not designated for a specific use — unlike conservation units, Indigenous territories, or quilombola (Afro-descendant) settlements, for instance — which leaves them without protection. This allows land grabbers to invade them and stake a claim through the breaches left open by the government’s Rura...
Mongabay
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Indian farmers stage tractor rally in protest against new laws
Thousands of farmers on Thursday joined a tractor rally from their protest sites near the borders of New Delhi against contentious agricultural laws. The protest action, which took place amid high security, was meant as a show of strength ahead of a further round of talks with the government scheduled to start on Friday. Thousands of farmers from 40 unions took part in the rally, according to farmer activists. Farmer group leader Joginder Singh Ugrahan told broadcaster NDTV that more than 3,500 tractors and trolleys were part of the protest. The seventh round of talks between the farmer unions...
DPA
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Historical data point to ‘imminent extinction’ of Tapanuli orangutan
JAKARTA — Onrizal Onrizal remembers hearing stories of human-like creatures living in the forest when he was growing up in Sungai Dareh, a town in western Sumatra, Indonesia. Legend had it that the creatures, called orang pendek, or “short people,” by the locals, disappeared from the forest in the 1970s. Today, Onrizal is a forestry researcher at North Sumatra University, where he studies the biodiversity of his native island, including the orangutans that likely inspired the stories of the orang pendek. And while the stories may just be stories, there’s still an element of truth to them: the ...
Mongabay
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Gourmet mushroom growers worry about pandemic's toll on gastronomy
The mushrooms are growing inside a mountain in Germany at temperatures of 15 degrees Celsius in dank, humid tunnels. Such conditions are just right for growing oyster, shiitake and beech mushrooms, as well as lesser-known varieties such as the pink oyster mushroom or the golden oyster mushroom, says Mirko Kalkum, a grower. The mushrooms grow on shelves in narrow passageways. "At some point, oyster mushrooms double in size every day and a half," says Kalkum. Demand is usually high for his gourmet mushrooms - at least it was until the pandemic broke out. That was bad news for the gastronomy busi...
DPA
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Indian government asks protesting farmers to return to negotiations
The Indian government reached out again on Thursday to farmers protesting at Delhi's borders, saying it was committed to talks and reaching a solution to the issues they have raised. Tens of thousands of farmers have been parked at the borders of the Indian capital for almost a month after police stopped them from entering the city on November 26. They are demanding the repeal of three farm laws passed by parliament in September that the government says will modernize farming and allied sectors and increase the incomes of farmers. The farmers fear the laws that aim to ease regulations around s...
DPA
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Land inequality is worsening and fueling other social ills, report says
Smallholders and family farms, Indigenous people, rural women, youth, and landless rural communities are being squeezed into increasingly smaller parcels of land or forced out entirely as global land inequality grows around the world, according to a new report. The report, led by the International Land Coalition in collaboration with Oxfam, found that the wealthiest 10% of rural populations across the countries sampled own 60% of the land value, while the poorest 50% of rural populations, who are generally more dependent on agriculture, only own 3% of the land value. About 84% of farms are sma...
Mongabay
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Report finds litany of labor abuses on RSPO-certified oil palm plantations
JAKARTA — A coalition of NGOs has documented rampant labor abuses in five oil palm plantations in Indonesia, the world’s biggest producer and exporter of the commodity. The palm oil from these plantations is certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and ends up in products made by food giant Nestlé. Among the labor abuses documented by the group Transnational Palm Oil Labour Solidarity (TPOLS) are exposure to hazardous chemicals, a reliance on temporary workers, below minimum-wage payments, lack of maternity and menstrual leave for female workers, and the suppression of indepe...
Mongabay
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Brazil scientists map forest regrowth keeping Amazon from collapse: Study
When Celso Silva Junior, a Ph.D. candidate at the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), stepped back from his recently completed map of Brazil’s secondary forests, he was surprised by the sheer quantity that had grown back since the 1980s. About a third of Brazil’s lost forests have recovered naturally, an area approximately the size of the United Kingdom — 262,791 square kilometers (101,464 square miles), according to the map Junior published in a recent study in the journal Scientific Data in collaboration with 11 other researchers. But until the article’s publication this past Augu...
Mongabay
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Through war, wildfire and pandemic, the world’s seed vaults hold strong
By the time the war broke out in Syria, researchers from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) had already duplicated and safely transported most of their genetic treasure trove to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, Norway. The ICARDA facility in Tel Hadia, just south of Aleppo, Syria, once stored the largest collection of crop diversity from the Fertile Crescent, one of the world’s earliest centers of agriculture. When the facility was abandoned in 2014, more than 80% of its collection was backed up in the Norwegia...
Mongabay
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Money to burn: Study finds fire-prevention incentives in Indonesia don’t work
JAKARTA — Paying village in Indonesia to ensure they don’t burn their land for farming appears to have little to no effect on reducing fires, researchers have found. The implication is that without an alternative land-clearing method that’s cheaper, the use of fires to clear land may continue to be widely practiced across Indonesia for the foreseeable future, destroying what’s left of the country’s forests. The large-scale randomized controlled trial was carried out in 75 fire-prone villages in the Bornean province of West Kalimantan in 2018. The team of researchers, from Stanford University, ...
Mongabay
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