Agriculture

At least 170 people protested against land clearing outside the Queensland parliament on August 17 ahead of a bill which would have required landholders to prove they had not illegally bulldozed their land.

Five new books for green lefts and left greens — as compiled by ecosocialist site Climate & Capitalism, which is edited by Facing the Anthropocene author Ian Angus.

Canadian mining giant Tahoe Resources came under fire on August 11 for bulldozing human rights in Guatemala. Two groups have filed a complaint in the United States calling for a probe into whether Tahoe executives lied to investors.

Liverpool Plains' farmers are celebrating the New South Wales state government's decision, on August 11, to buy back BHP Billiton's Caroona coalmine licence for $220 million. This comes after a struggle that began in 2008, when farmer Tim Duddy and the local community began a blockade that put a spanner in BHP Billiton's efforts to start drilling operations on his family's Rossmar Park property.

A new climate report released on August 3 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirms the world is hot and getting hotter.

Industrial agriculture and financial sectors are hand-in-hand worsening climate change and then profiting from it, with an unprecedented number of land grabs over the last eight years, according to a report released in June.

The United States media’s latest offensive against Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro targets a new sustainability program that transplants urban workers to farmland. Some quarters of the mainstream media have equated it with slave labour.

At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week, it seems a sticker is all it takes to keep you out of a room—at least the rooms brought to you by the fossil fuel industry.

Hume Coal is about to lodge plans for a massive coalmine that, if approved, will be the first large scale coking coal mining operation in the Southern Highlands. The coal will be destined for POSCO's steel mills in South Korea. Hume Coal is fully owned by POSCO.

Members of the Merida communal council distributing food. Photo by Tamara Pearson. It's been three years now of food shortages, inflation, and queues in Venezuela, and the millions of people involved in community and movement organizing have been the most affected. But they've also defied right-wing and general expectations, and even perhaps the expectations of the Maduro government, and have become stronger and better organized as a result of the hardships.

A march for jobs in Zimbabwe. A national shutdown or 'stay away' in Zimbabwe this month paralysed the country. For the first time in years the country's ruling party, ZANU-PF, and the tenure of 92 year old president Robert Mugabe, were seriously rattled. Young people, workers and traders – who survive by hawking food, cheap imported goods in cities and towns – engaged in pitch battles with the police and army, in many cases outnumbering the security forces.

In the dead of night on July 17, police vans snaked their way into Chak 4-L village in Okara City in Punjab province. At about 2am, several dozen police officers forced entry into the house of Mehr Abdul Jabbar, younger brother of jailed peasant leader Mehr Abdul Sattar. They broke down the front door and opened fire indiscriminately, shattering cupboards and other household items. They departed 15 minutes later but left behind a cloud of uncertainty and fear that spread among the villagers jolted awake by the gunfire.