Southeast Asian Environmental Movement

From inquire.net article "The environmental movement in the global South / The pivotal agent in fight against global warming?" By Walden Bello

Occurred in the 70s and 80s
Philippines: nuclear power, dams, marine pollution, deforestation
Thailand: dams, marine pollution, deforestation
Indonesia: dams

Indigenous opposition in Philippines and small farmers and fisherfolk in Thailand lead to the abandonment of the Chico River Dam and Pak Mun Dam projects, respectively.

"In the case of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation was seen as an inevitable consequence of a strategy of export-oriented growth imposed by World Bank-International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs that sought to pay off the country’s massive foreign debt with the dollars gained from exporting the country’s timber and other natural resources and manufactures produced by cheap labor."

"In Indonesia, for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against six government bodies, including the Minister of the Environment and Population. By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism fed on one another."

June 08 Food Crisis Summit

clipped from www.grain.org The 10 people involved in the action carried posters contrasting the record profits of agribusiness corporations during the latest reporting financial quarter of 2008 with the estimated 100 million people in the world who now, alongside 800 million or so others, are hungry because they cannot afford to eat. Profits for Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, were up 108 per cent, while Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands, the world's largest food traders, registered profit increases of 86 and 42 per cent respectively. Profits for Mosaic, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, rose 1,134 per cent.

Resistence to AGRA

Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa funded by the Gates and Rockafeller foundation

http://www.gnn.tv/print/3718/Food_Crisis_Which_Crisis

The second version wells up from peasant organizations such as Via Campesina, and is represented by a clutch of eloquent NGOs such as Practical Action, Food First, GRAIN, Movement for the Global South and the World Development Movement. Its diagnosis of the current crisis is far deeper. Rather than being a short term rise in food and oil prices, this version tends to see the crisis as rooted in the longer-term neoliberal project. Food prices in poor countries have been allowed to rocket by the system in which consumers are now embedded – with government run distribution networks dismantled, grain stores abandoned, large corporations dictating prices and highly indebted nations and farmers converting to export crops to earn highly prized foreign currency.