topic: Crime

topic: Crime

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Undercover in a shark fin trafficking ring: Interview with wildlife crime fighter Andrea Crosta
- Worldwide, many of the key players in wildlife trafficking are also involved in other criminal enterprises, from drug smuggling to human trafficking and money laundering.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Andrea Crosta, founder of Earth League International, talks about the group’s new report on shark fin trafficking from Latin America to East Asia and the concept of “crime convergence.”
- International wildlife trafficking, including the illegal trade in shark fins, is dominated by Chinese nationals, Crosta says.
- Since smuggling routes often overlap and criminal groups frequently work together across borders, Crosta calls for field collaboration among countries and law enforcement agencies to fight wildlife crime, the world’s fourth-largest criminal enterprise.

A web of front people conceals environmental offenders in the Amazon
- A paper trail left by a notorious land grabber reveals how he used relatives and an employee as fronts to evade environmental fines and lawsuits, shedding light on this widespread practice in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Fronts prevent the real criminals from having their assets seized to pay for environmental fines, besides consuming time and resources from the authorities, who spend years trying to prove who the real financier of the deforestation is.
- Experts say it’s best to go after environmental offenders where it hurts the most, by seizing their assets, rather than to chase down their true identity.
- This investigation is part of a partnership between Mongabay and Repórter Brasil.

UN puts spotlight on attacks against Indigenous land defenders
- At the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, experts called attention to the criminalization of Indigenous Peoples worldwide, exacerbated by intersecting interests in extractive industries, conservation, and climate mitigation.
- While Indigenous peoples are affected by the global trend of using criminal law to dissuade free speech and protests, the bulk of criminalization of Indigenous Peoples happens because of a lack of — or partial implementation of — Indigenous rights in national laws.
- Urgent actions are needed to address systemic issues, including legal reforms, enhanced protections for defenders, and concerted efforts to prevent and reverse the criminalization of Indigenous communities.

Brazil’s illegal gold trade takes a hammering, but persists underground
- Measures throughout 2023 to curb the illegal gold trade in Brazil led to a 20% drop in the country’s exports of the precious metal.
- In Itaituba, the hub of the Amazon illegal gold trade, taxes from gold sales fell by more than 90% in just the first quarter of this year.
- Experts attribute this drop to police raids on illegal mining operations and on requirements for sellers to issue electronic invoices.
- But they warn the illegal gold still persists, shifting to unofficial channels to evade the eye of regulators.

World Bank’s IFC under fire over alleged abuses at Liberian plantation it funded
- An investigation into the International Finance Corporation’s handling of human rights abuses at a project it financed in Liberia, the Salala Rubber Corporation, is expected to severely incriminate the World Bank’s private lending arm.
- The World Bank’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman investigated whether the IFC did enough to address allegations of gender-based violence, land grabbing and unfair compensation by its client, Socfin, between 2008 and 2020.
- It’s anticipated that the report will find the finance institution didn’t act to prevent Socfin from violating its legal obligations to local communities and protect the environment; this finding would follow closely on a damning report into similar failures to hold another IFC client, Bridge International Schools in Kenya, to account
- The IFC missed a February deadline to respond to the CAO report and submit an action plan; the delay comes as a new remedial action framework for the IFC is due to be finalized and released

Amazon prosecutors get sharper impact tool to charge illegal gold dealers
- New research from the NGO Conservation Strategy fund, working with federal prosecutors in Brazil, has refined a tool that puts a dollar value on the socioenvironmental costs of illegal gold mining across vital ecosystems in the Amazon.
- Brazilian environmental investigators and prosecutors say the updated Mining Impacts Calculator is improving cases they’re bringing against the largest buyers of illegal gold in the country.
- Each kilogram of gold of artisanal mining causes damage valued at up to $389,200, more than twice the market value of gold, the new study found.
- Prosecutors in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and other Amazonian countries are also adopting the new calculator, but with gold values soaring and official corruption entrenched, observers say that reducing illegal mining will remain a significant challenge.

In Raja Ampat, pearl farming balances business and ecological sustainability
- In the Raja Ampat islands of eastern Indonesia, pearl farming thrives within a healthy marine ecosystem, with companies like PT Arta Samudra focusing on sustainable practices.
- Pearl farms are very secretive about their methods, which include the delicate process of implanting beads into oysters to cultivate pearls, a technique developed to accelerate pearl production.
- Challenges such as climate change impacts and maintaining a pristine environment highlight the importance of balancing industry growth with ecosystem preservation.
- With concerted efforts to protect marine habitats, Raja Ampat’s pearl industry aims for global recognition while emphasizing sustainability.

Indonesia unveils plan to launch a satellite network for maritime monitoring
- Indonesia plans to launch a satellite constellation starting in July to monitor its marine and fisheries resources more effectively.
- This constellation of 20 nanosatellites aims to actively manage conservation efforts and ensure economic benefits from marine resources.
- The satellites will feature radio frequency, imaging and vessel-tracking equipment, allowing officials “to know every condition in Indonesia from one [data] center.”
- Challenges such as budget cuts and low compliance among fishing companies underscore the need for technological solutions to protect Indonesia’s vast marine areas.

Indonesia and Spain sign agreement to protect migrant fishing workers
- Indonesia and Spain have signed an agreement that will see Spanish regulators recognize competency certification issued by Indonesia for Indonesian fishing vessel workers.
- The move is part of efforts to boost protection of Indonesian migrant fishing workers in a global industry notorious for the exploitation and abuse of migrant deckhands.
- According to the fisheries ministry, some 1,000 Indonesians worked aboard Spanish fishing boats in 2021, earning on average about 1,000 euros ($1,075) per month.
- At home, Indonesia is also working to enhance training, certification, and protection for its large population of fishers and boat crews.

Labor abuse and work accidents on plantations of Cameroon’s largest sugar producer
- Industrial agriculture companies, considered drivers of economic growth in Cameroon, are also a source of conflict for workers and farmers following an increase in workplace accidents and the growing impact this industry has on the environment.
- With increasing accidents over the years, the industrial agriculture sector alone accounted for 26.4% of work-related accidents recorded in Cameroon in 2020, according to an estimate by the Cameroonian institution overseeing social protection, the CNPS.
- According to estimates from the seasonal workers’ union, the Cameroon Sugar Corporation (SOSUCAM), which holds a monopoly on sugar production in the country, is responsible for about a hundred accidents per year, some leading to death, on its plantations and in its factories.
- Local NGOs also accuse the company of polluting rivers and soil as well as destroying village plantations. Above all, the company is notorious for its glaring violations in applying Cameroonian labor, social security, and environmental protection legislation.

Grassroots efforts and an Emmy-winning film help Indigenous fight in Brazil
- The 2022 documentary “The Territory” won an Emmy award this January, shining a light on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous people and the invasions, conflicts and threats from land grabbers in their territory in the Brazilian Amazon from 2018 to 2021.
- After years of increasing invasions and deforestation in the protected area, experts say the situation has slowly improved in the past three years, and both Indigenous and government officials in the region “feel a little safer.”
- Grassroots surveillance efforts, increased visibility of the problems, and a more effective federal crackdown against invaders have helped tackle illegal land occupiers and allowed the Indigenous populations to take their land back.
- Despite the security improvements, however, the territory still struggles against invasions and deforestation within the region, experts say.

Indonesian palm oil firm fined for fires sues expert a second time over testimony
- Environmental law experts say palm oil company PT Jatim Jaya Perkasa (JJP) is attempting to shirk its liability and fines for a forest fire by suing an expert witness who testified against it.
- The lawsuit is the second that JJP has filed against Bambang Hero Saharjo, an expert on fire forensics at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB); the company dropped its previous lawsuit against him in 2018.
- The company blames Bambang, who testified about the extent of the fire damage on JJP’s concession, for the high amount that it was fined, saying his testimony was “false and exaggerated.”
- Bambang and fellow experts refute this, saying JJP’s repeated lawsuits are a frivolous attempt to avoid having to take responsibility or to pay; to date, the company hasn’t paid any of the $36.7 million that it was fined for the fire.

How independent journalism uncovered a massive crime against people and planet
- By the time it uncovered the massive 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal, the independent media outlet Sarawak Report had built a solid reputation upon years of reporting about how corruption abets deforestation in Borneo.
- No longer able to enter Malaysia due to the political shakeup caused by the 1MDB exposé and her related reporting, the outlet’s founder, Clare Rewcastle Brown, speaks with Mongabay’s podcast about what inspires her reporting, including having been born in Malaysian Borneo.
- Podcast co-host Rachel Donald discusses with Rewcastle Brown — who was recently awarded the Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani Anti-Corruption Excellence Award — how the global financial system became the repository for the billions in stolen funds, some of which ended up as luxury homes in the United States and even gifts to Hollywood celebrities, and the critical role of the press in holding people in power to account.

Illegal gold mining devastates Peruvian Amazon river and communities
- Mongabay Latam traveled along 38 kilometers (24 miles) of Peru’s Cenepa River, near the border with Ecuador, where illegal mining dredges run around the clock in search of gold, hemming in seven Indigenous Awajún communities.
- The constant mining activity and presence of the miners has brought violence, crime and sexual exploitation to the Awajún communities and wrought widespread environmental destruction that shows no signs of slowing.
- Police and environmental defense leaders conducted raids in early October, but the lack of permanent enforcement in this part of the Amazon has allowed the dredging rafts to returned and once again churn up the river basin.

Shrinking civil space and persistent logging: 2023 in review in Southeast Asia
- Home to the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest and some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Southeast Asia has seen conservation wins and losses over the course of 2023.
- The year was characterized by a rising trend of repression against environmental and Indigenous defenders that cast a shadow of fear over the work of activists in many parts of the region.
- Logging pressure in remaining tracts of forest remained intense, and an El Niño climate pattern brought regional haze crises generated by forest fires and agricultural burning returned.
- But some progress was made on several fronts: Most notably, increasing understanding of the benefits and methods of ecosystem restoration underpinned local, national and regional efforts to bring back forests, mangroves and other crucial sanctuaries of biodiversity.

Violent evictions are latest ordeal for Kenya’s Ogiek seeking land rights
- On Nov. 2, a joint force of the police, the Kenya Forest Service and the Kenya Wildlife Service moved to evict 700 Ogiek households from the edges of the Maasai Mau Forest.
- But the African Court on Human and People’s Rights had in 2017 ordered the government to recognize the Ogiek claim to the forest, involve them in its management, and pay damages for earlier evictions.
- The government still hasn’t acted on the court’s rulings, instead accusing the Ogiek of responsibility for the destruction of as much as 2,800 hectares (7,000 acres) of forest.
- But the African Court found no evidence the Ogiek are responsible for this damage, and Ogiek leaders want collective titles to the forest to be formally granted, so the group’s members can live in peace on their ancestral land.

‘The police are watching’: In Mekong countries, eco defenders face rising risks
- Activists, journalists, environmental lawyers and others who raise attention for environmental issues in the Mekong region say they feel threatened by authoritarian governments.
- Environment defenders say they feel under surveillance and at risk both in their home countries and abroad.
- The risks they face include violence and arrests, as well as state-backed harassment such as asset freezes and smear campaigns.

Traditional small farmers burned by Indonesia’s war on wildfires
- An investigation by Mongabay based on court records and interviews shows police in Indonesia are increasingly charging small farmers for slash-and-burn practices.
- Prosecutions surged following a particularly catastrophic fire season in 2015, in response to which Indonesia’s president threatened to fire local law enforcement chiefs for not preventing burning in their jurisdictions.
- Most of those prosecuted were small farmers cultivating less than 2 hectares, and many were of old age and/or illiterate; several alleged they suffered extortion and abuse during their legal ordeal.
- Experts say law enforcers should be more judicious about the charges they bring, noting that a “targeted fire policy” should differentiate between various kinds of actors, such as traditional farmers, land speculators, and people hired to clear land by plantation firms.

Mining company Belo Sun sues environmental defenders in intimidation tactic, NGOs say
- Canadian mining company Belo Sun has filed a lawsuit against community leaders and environmental rights defenders, including members of Amazon Watch and International Rivers, for their alleged support or involvement in the illegal occupation of company-owned land.
- A coalition of environmental lawyers and human rights activists say the lawsuit is an intimidation tactic part of a pattern the company uses to silence and weaken those who speak against its operations near the biodiverse Xingu River.
- Belo Sun denies persecuting or threatening environmental defenders and says it is only acting to preserve its rights, preserve the rights of the protesters and stop criminal activity.
- The lawyers of those accused have started to provide their defense in court and plan to present a complaint of the lawsuit to the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the U.N.

Safety of Peru’s land defenders in question after killing of Indigenous leader in the Amazon
- Quinto Inuma was killed on November 29 while traveling to the Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu community in Peru’s Amazon following a meeting of environmental defenders.
- For years, the Indigenous Kichwa leader had been receiving threats for his work trying to stop invasions, land trafficking, drug trafficking and illegal logging in his community, forcing him to rely on protection measures from the Ministry of Justice.
- After Inuma’s death, a group of 128 Indigenous communities released a statement appealing for justice and holding the Peruvian state reponsible for its inaction and ineffectivtieness in protecting the lives of human rights defenders in Indigenous territories. Several other Indigenous leaders who receive threats have requested protection measures from the state but have not gotten a response.
- According to an official in the Ministry of Justice, providing the Kichwa leader with protection measures was very complex because he lived in a high-risk area. The only thing that could be done, they said, is to provide permanent police protection, which wasn’t possible for the local police.

Investigation shows ‘shadow companies’ linked to Indonesia palm oil giant First Resources
- The investigation is part of Deforestation Inc, a reporting collaboration coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists involving journalists from 28 countries.
- The findings indicate that companies associated with First Resources may have been behind more deforestation in Southeast Asia during the last five years than any other corporate organization.
- First Resources continues to supply blue chip consumer goods companies with palm oil, including Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo.

Report shines partial light on worst labor offenders in opaque fishing industry
- In recent years, examples of forced labor on industrial fishing vessels have commanded headlines in prominent media outlets. Yet ship owners are rarely held to account, often because it’s hard to identify who they are.
- A new report from the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC), a consortium of international NGOs, examined cases of reported forced labor on 475 fishing vessels since 2010.
- The authors could only identify the legal owners (often a company) of about half the vessels, and could only identify the beneficial owners (the people who ultimately keep the profits) of about one-fifth of the vessels.
- Of the accused vessels for which it could identify legal owners, half are owned by Asian companies, and nearly one-quarter are owned by European companies.

End of impunity for Indigenous killings in sight for Brazil’s Guajajara
- Indigenous forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara was killed in November 2019 in an alleged ambush by illegal loggers in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Maranhão state.
- Mongabay’s Karla Mendes, who interviewed Paulo for a documentary film nine months before his death, returned to Arariboia in August 2023 to talk with his family and the other guardian who survived the attack, Laércio Guajajara, and shine a light on a case that still hasn’t gone to trial after four years.
- “If those invaders had managed to kill us both, me and Paulo, they were going to hide us in the forest. Who would find us? Nobody was ever going to find me or Paulo again in a forest of that size,” Laércio says of his will to warn the guardians about Paulo’s murder, even as he suffered four gunshot wounds.
- Justice may soon be on the horizon for the Guajajara people: Paulo’s case will be the first killing of an Indigenous defender that will go before a federal jury, likely in the first half of 2024, after a court in late October denied a motion by those accused to try the case in state court.

Indonesia welcomes new Singapore regulation to help curb lobster smuggling
- A new reexport regulation in Singapore could help stem the smuggling of lobster larvae from neighboring Indonesia.
- The city-state is a key destination for the contraband and a transit point for lobster larvae reexported to third countries like Vietnam and China.
- Under the new regulation, reexporters in Singapore will have to get health certificates for live animals from the country of origin, which in theory should be impossible for smugglers.
- Indonesian authorities have cautiously welcomed the plan, but say both countries must work more closely on the long-running problem.

‘We won’t give up’: DRC’s Front Line Defenders award winner Olivier Ndoole Bahemuke
- Olivier Ndoole Bahemuke, Africa winner of the 2023 Front Line Defenders Award, is an environmental lawyer and community activist.
- He has spent 15 years working in defense of communities in and around Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Because of his activism in a region dominated by armed conflict and the illicit exploitation of natural resources, including gold and coltan, his life has been threatened on numerous occasions and he currently lives in exile.
- Defending the environment is becoming increasingly dangerous: Nearly half of the 194 human rights defenders killed in 2022 were environmental defenders.

Crime analysis sheds light on tiger poaching in Malaysia
- Conservationists have successfully applied an urban policing strategy to assess and fine-tune their efforts to tackle poaching of tigers in Peninsular Malaysia.
- They reported in a new paper that poaching success by hunters from Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand — the main group of poachers in the country — declined by up to 40% during the study period.
- The conservationists used the EMMIE crime prevention framework (short for effect, mechanisms, moderators, implementation and economic costs) to identify what worked and areas to improve.
- There are fewer than 200 critically endangered Malayan tigers believed to survive in Malaysia, with snaring by poachers among the leading causes of their decline.

How the U.S. financial system props up illegal logging and mining
- The U.S. has an estimated $466 billion in illicit funds floating around its economy, much of it from environmental crimes like illegal logging and mining sourced to Latin America.
- The FACT Coalition, a group advocating for a fair tax system in the U.S., recently made the case that more attention needs to be paid to “financial secrecy” in conservation circles fighting climate change, deforestation and pollution.
- Weak regulation of shell companies, financial institutions and the real estate market make it too easy for environmental criminal activity to hide illicit funds in the U.S., the coalition said.

Indonesia’s oil palm smallholders need both state and EU support (commentary)
- The EU’s recently adopted restrictions on the import of commodities linked to deforestation, such as palm oil from Indonesia, has a noble intention but could have unintended impacts on small farmers, argues Andre Barahamin, a senior campaigner at Kaoem Telapak, an Indonesian NGO.
- Smallholders account for 40% of Indonesia’s palm oil production, but lack the resources and capacity to comply with the new restrictions, and so must be provided with to training, technology, financing, and certification, Barahamin writes.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In biodiverse Nepal, wildlife crime fighters are underpowered but undeterred
- Wildlife crime investigators in Nepal face various challenges, such as lack of training, resources, evidence and database, as well as political and legal pressure.
- They’re responsible for investigating and prosecuting cases related to the hunting and trafficking of iconic species such as tigers, rhinos, snow leopards and pangolins.
- A key obstacle, many say, is a constitutional provision that now requires more serious cases of wildlife crime to be tried before a court; prior to 2015, all such cases would be heard by district forest offices and protected area offices.
- Change is slowly coming, however, with additional training in scientific investigative methods, most recently funded by the U.S. State Department, and with transfer of knowledge.

Bolloré blacklisted over alleged rights violations on plantations in Africa and Asia
- French logistics giant Bolloré SE has been deemed an unethical investment by some of Switzerland’s most powerful pension funds.
- Bolloré failed to act to resolve accusations of human rights abuses committed by its subsidiary, Socfin, around oil palm and rubber plantations in West Africa and Southeast Asia, the Swiss Association for Responsible Investments (SVVK-ASIR) determined.
- Investigators commissioned by Socfin recently found credible claims of sexual harassment, land disputes and unfair recruitment in Liberia and Cameroon; field visits to other sites will take place later this year.

Who were the 11 Philippines environmental defenders killed in 2022?
- The Philippines is now Asia’s deadliest country for land and environmental defenders, recording 281 deaths in the last decade, with roughly one-third linked to mining, according to Global Witness.
- Despite a decline in attacks from 29 in 2020 to 11 in 2022, advocates argue that the current administration has not sufficiently addressed human rights violations and continues to engage in “red-tagging” or labeling defenders as terrorists.
- In 2022, the killed defenders were deemed insurgents and died in “encounters” with state forces, yet their families and organizations argue they were civilian advocates for the environment, climate and farmers and Indigenous peoples’ rights.
- The Philippine Commission on Human Rights, an independent government body, considered red-tagging as “a systematic attack” on human rights defenders and urged the government to enact a law safeguarding them and their communities.

In Indonesia, ‘opportunistic’ whale shark fishery shows gap in species protection
- Indonesia has since 2013 banned the capture, trade and exploitation of whale sharks, a protected species.
- Yet scores of records from 2002-2022 shown whale sharks continue to be butchered and sold along the southeastern coast of Java Island after either beaching or being unintentionally caught by fishers, according to a new study.
- The continuing illegal exploitation shows the need for more awareness raising against it by conservation authorities and groups, experts say.
- Indonesia is home to the longest coastline in Asia, and its waters serve as both a habitat and an important migratory route for species of marine megafauna like whale sharks.

Son of slain Quilombola leader will still strive for community’s rights
- Within six years of each other, Maria Bernadete Pacífico, 72, and Flávio Gabriel Pacífico, 36, mother and son, were killed in the Pitanga dos Palmares quilombo.
- They were community leaders and defended their ancestral territory, home to about 300 families, many of them farmers.
- The quilombo is within an Environmental Protection Area (APA), but it is grappling with deforestation and real estate speculation, and it is surrounded by industries, a prison and a landfill.
- Jurandir Wellington Pacífico, the remaining son of Maria Bernadete who is in hiding with his family out of fear for his life, speaks to Mongabay about the threats the community faces and what has happened since his mother’s death.

Oil and gas exploration threatens Bolivian Chaco water supply
- Aguaragüe National Park is suffering from environmental damage caused by hydrocarbon exploration, the activities of which have been carried out for more than a century. In 2017, a study conducted by the Bolivian government and the European Union identified five high-risk environmental liabilities for the population, for which there is still no official information regarding remedial measures.
- There are at least 60 oil wells in this protected natural area, most of which are not closed, according to Jorge Campanini, a researcher at the Bolivian Documentation and Information Center (CEDIB).
- Per information from the Ministry of the Environment and Water, there are seven environmental liabilities and 94 oil wells in seven protected areas in Bolivia. No information was provided on the situation in the rest of the country.

Indonesia, Singapore to work more closely against lobster larvae smugglers
- Indonesia has called for Singapore’s commitment to shut its borders to illegal exports of lobster larvae.
- Indonesia has since 2021 banned exports of wild-caught lobster larvae, but Singapore still permits their import, serving as both a key market and a regional trading hub.
- Lobsters are among Indonesia’s top fisheries commodities, but the illegal export of larvae and baby lobsters costs the country billions of rupiah in lost revenue and threatens the declining wild population of the shellfish.
- The fisheries ministry puts the latest estimate of potential wild lobster stock in Indonesian waters at 27 billion, but many of the officially sanctioned fishing zones are overfished, with the rest being harvested at maximum capacity.

Investigation confirms most allegations against plantation operator Socfin
- After visits to plantations in Liberia and Cameroon, the Earthworm Foundation consultancy has confirmed many allegations against Belgian tropical plantation operator Socfin.
- Investigators found credible claims of sexual harassment, land disputes and unfair recruitment practices at both of the sites they visited.
- Activists in both countries remain unsatisfied, saying the consultancy should have spoken to a wider range of community members and calling for Socfin to answer directly to communities with grievances.

Indigenous activists demand justice after 5 shot in Amazonian ‘palm oil war’
- Between Aug. 4 and Aug. 7, security guards for a palm oil company allegedly shot and wounded five Tembé Indigenous people, in the latest flareup linked to a long-running land dispute.
- The incidents occurred in a part of the Amazonian state of Pará that’s been dubbed the “palm oil war” region, where Mongabay has over the past year documented the escalating tensions.
- Pará’s State Department of Public Security and Social Defense said the security guard identified as the mastermind of the initial shooting has been arrested, and inquiries to identify the other suspects are ongoing, along with increased security in the area.
- Palm oil company Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF) has denied the accusations, saying the Indigenous people had invaded part of its property and initiated the attack on its private security officers during an attempt to evict them.

Bangladesh orchid losses signal ecological imbalance, researchers say
- Bangladesh has lost 32 orchid species from nature in the last hundred years out of 188 once-available species.
- Habitat destruction, overharvesting, and indiscriminate collection for sale in local and international markets cause the disappearance, researchers say.
- Considering the unique position of orchids in the ecosystem and their herbal, horticultural and aesthetic value, researchers consider this loss alarming.

Brazil claims record shark fin bust: Nearly 29 tons from 10,000 sharks seized
- Brazilian authorities announced the seizure of almost 29 tons of shark fins, exposing the extent of what they described as illegal fishing in the country. The previous record for the largest seizure reportedly took place in Hong Kong in 2020, when authorities confiscated 28 tons of fins.
- The seized fins, reportedly destined for illegal export to Asia, came from an estimated 10,000 blue (Prionace glauca) and anequim or shortfin mako (Isurus oxyrinchus) sharks, according to Brazil’s federal environmental agency IBAMA. Shortfin makos recently joined the country’s list of endangered species.
- IBAMA is filing infraction notices and fines against two companies over the seized fins. Other firms remain under investigation for illegal shark fishing related to the seizure, according to the agency.
- Through detailed analyses of the origins of these fins, an IBAMA statement said the agency identified a wide range of irregularities, including the use of fishing authorizations for other species and the use of fishing gear to target sharks.

Climate of fear persists among Nepal’s eco defenders as threats rise
- Environmental human rights defenders in Nepal continue to fear for their safety and lives amid a lack of protection from the government, a new report shows.
- It found that despite rising threats to the environment, Nepal doesn’t have specific legislation to define who defenders are, their work, or the measures of protection they need.
- It also found that women defenders, in particular, were more likely to experience domestic violence and sexual assault because of their work, as well as excluded from decision-making processes and participation in public life.
- Some of the respondents in the study cited the January 2020 killing of Dilip Mahato, a critic of illegal sand mining in Dhanusha district: “People pay attention … only when they get killed.”

No new mining operations on Yanomami land after raids and deaths
- The alerts of illegal mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Land have zeroed for the first time since 2020, according to satellite monitoring by the Brazilian Federal Police.
- Military operations continue in the region to drive out the last of the illegal miners and federal operations are also underway to remove criminal activity in the Karipuna and Munduruku Indigenous Territories.
- At least 15 people have been killed in the Yanomami land since April and evidence suggests one of South America’s most powerful mafias is operating in the region, putting the safety of federal agents and Indigenous people at risk.
- On June 14, the Brazilian Senate unanimously approved a set of solutions to tackle the Yanomami health disaster, which critics said focuses more on legalizing development in the region than on addressing the humanitarian crisis.

Communities accuse Socfin and Earthworm Foundation of greenwash in West Africa
- A grievance assessment mission commissioned by Belgian oil palm and rubber company Socfin has been rejected by communities affected by the company’s operations in several African and Asian countries.
- Reasons include the Earthworm Foundation’s relationship with Socfin as a paying member, lack of adequate coordination with affected stakeholders, and the company’s history of refusing to enter conflict resolution suggested by third-party bodies.
- Phase one, consisting of missions to Liberia and Cameroon, has just been concluded without the participation of local groups, who say they were not included in the planning process.

Alleged torturers roam free as Indonesia struggles to bring charges in palm oil slavery case
- Prosecutors in Indonesia have still not charged the majority of men implicated in a slave-labor scandal at a local official’s oil palm plantation.
- The New York Times reported that only 13 of some 60 men, including military and police officers, remain free despite dozens of victims and witnesses accusing them of human trafficking and torture.
- The official, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, was jailed last year in a bribery case but never charged in the human trafficking case for enslaving the victims under the guise of a drug rehabilitation program.
- Prosecutor said a reliance on local police investigators whose own colleagues had participated in the forced-labor scheme had impeded their work.

Landmark Nepal court ruling ends impunity for wealthy wildlife collectors
- Wildlife collectors in Nepal will have to declare their collections to the government, under a landmark ruling spurred by the perceived injustice of the country’s strict wildlife protection laws.
- The May 30 Supreme Court ruling caps a legal campaign by conservationist Kumar Paudel to hold to account wealthy Nepalis who openly display wildlife parts and trophies, even as members of local communities are persecuted for suspected poaching.
- Under the ruling, the government must issue a public notice calling on private collectors to declare their wildlife collections, and must then seize those made after 1973, the year the wildlife conservation act came into effect.
- Conservationists and human rights advocates have welcomed the ruling, but say “only time will tell if the government will take this court order seriously or not.”

Indigenous chief shot in head in Brazil’s ‘palm oil war’ region; crisis group launched
- On May 14, Indigenous chief Lúcio Tembé was shot by gunmen on an unpaved road in Brazil’s northern Pará state. This is the latest episode of violence in an area facing an outbreak of land conflicts between a major palm oil company and local communities, the so-called “palm oil war.”
- The Federal Public Ministry raised the possibility of the crime’s connection to conflicts with palm oil companies in the region and requested urgent measures of the Federal Police and Pará’s State Department of Public Security and Social Defense (Segup) in view of the intense level of conflict in the region “with concrete risks to the Indigenous peoples’ life and physical integrity.”
- A crisis committee to contain escalating conflicts in the region was announced on May 16; the crime is being investigated by the Federal Police and the Quatro Bocas municipal police station, urging that any relevant information be forwarded via the hotline 181 under guaranteed confidentiality.
- Some readers may find the images below disturbing, discretion is advised.

Latin America had the most attacks on environmental defenders in 2022, says report
- Almost half of the 401 murders of human rights defenders recorded in 2022 were against people involved in the defense of land and environment, according to the most recent report by the organization Front Line Defenders.
- Latin America is the region with the highest number of cases of recorded violence against defenders.
- The countries with the most cases are Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Honduras.
- The violence against rights defenders has not only included murders, but also stigmatization, prosecution and constant threats to individuals and their families, said the report.

A frontline view of the fight against illegal mining in Yanomami territory
- In the Brazilian Amazon, Yanomami Indigenous people have been suffering a health crisis aggravated over recent years by the dismantling of Indigenous health care support services and the illegal mining invasion.
- Since the start of operations against miners in February, Brazil’s environmental inspectors have been setting fire to gear used to support illegal mining activities, both inside and outside the Indigenous territory.
- “The Yanomami land is one of the most difficult areas in the country in which to conduct our operations,” said one inspector who spoke to Agência Pública.

Cambodian activists commemorate 11th anniversary of Chut Wutty’s murder
- April 26, 2023, marks 11 years since Cambodian environmental activist Chut Wutty was gunned down, with no one ever facing justice for his death.
- Wutty was a frequent thorn in the side of Cambodia’s ruling elite, both in the government and in the security forces, for his repeated exposés of their role in illegal logging.
- In a vigil and march in Cambodia to commemorate his death, fellow activists demanded the Ministry of Justice reopen the investigation into Wutty’s killing.
- They also denounced the killings, arrests and prosecutions of environmental activists in recent years as a message from the government to stop.

Violence escalates in Amazonian communities’ land conflict with Brazil palm oil firm
- Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil’s Pará state have accused the country’s top palm oil exporter, Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF), of violence during attempts to repossess in a disputed area in the Acará region on April 12 and 16.
- The company denies the accusations, saying it’s the community leaders who attacked its employees, holding 30 of them “in private captivity for three full days due to the blocking of the road.”
- The Federal Public Ministry in Pará said it’s investigating the action of armed militias and private security companies in the region, and possible crimes and irregularities by palm oil companies.
- The Public Defender’s Office questioned the legitimacy of the injunction used to justify the repossession as it was issued by a civil court instead of the due agrarian court; a hearing with an agrarian judge is scheduled for April 28.

Professional services abound for Amazon land grabbers seeking legitimacy
- How does public land in the Brazilian Amazon, including chunks of protected areas and Indigenous territories, end up under private ownership?
- This investigation unveils the network of realtors and engineers who take advantage of Brazil’s disjointed land registration system to launder stolen land.
- Experts say the CAR land registry in particular, which was meant to prevent environmental crimes, has instead made land grabbing easier than ever.
- This article was originally published in Portuguese by The Intercept Brasil and is part of the Ladrões de Floresta (Forest Thieves) project, which investigates the appropriation of public land inside the Amazon and is funded by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.

Indigenous leader assassinated amid conflict over oil that divided community
- In February, Eduardo Mendúa, an Indigenous leader representing opposition to oil operations in his community, was killed by hitmen after suffering from 12 gunshot wounds.
- Mongabay looks into Eduardo Mendúa’s life and the oil conflict against the Ecuadorian state-owned oil company Petroecuador EP that divided his community and escalated into his murder.
- David Q., a member of the community faction in favor of oil operations, has been charged with allegedly co-perpetrating the crime by transporting the assassins to the scene.
- The incident worsens the fragile relationship between the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador (CONAIE) and President Guillermo Lasso, with the former accusing the government and oil company of amplifying the community conflict.

‘Gold library’ helps Brazil crack down on Amazon’s illegal mining
- Launched in 2019, the Ouro Alvo program is creating a gold database with samples obtained from different parts of Brazil.
- The information is allowing the Federal Police to create a chemical fingerprint of each sample, which they can then use to cross-reference the origin of seized or suspicious gold.
- This strategy could be complemented with other methods, including physically tagging the gold and tracking transactions using blockchain.
- While technology can be a great ally to fight the illegal gold trade, experts say the country still needs stricter regulations governing the industry.

Indigenous Pataxó demand land demarcation amid rising violence and murders
- The Pataxó Indigenous people in southern Bahia state are experiencing a renewed wave of violence and orders to leave their communities after they began reoccupying part of their traditional lands last summer.
- They are looking to see if and how the new administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can curb violence, mitigate land conflicts and demarcate their lands while standing up to powerful economic interests in the region, as state and local authorities are connected to the recent murders and violence.
- Without formal demarcation, agribusiness, ranching, eucalyptus and real estate development continue to encroach on their lands, which are in a legal limbo.
- The new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples has created a crisis desk to help deal with the escalating violence after two more Indigenous youth were killed in early 2023, but the Pataxó leaders say little has changed and they live in a state of constant threats and tension.

RSPO suspension of Brazil palm oil exporter tied to Mongabay land-grabbing report
- Agropalma, the only Brazilian company with the sustainability certificate issued by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) — a members organization including palm oil growers, traders, manufacturers, retailers, banks, investors and others — has had its certificate “temporarily suspended” since February.
- In December 2022, Mongabay published a yearlong investigation revealing that more than half of the 107,000 hectares (264,000 acres) registered by Agropalma in northern Pará state derived from fraudulent land titles and even the creation of a fake land registration bureau. Part of the area overlaps ancestral land claimed by Indigenous peoples and Quilombolas — descendants of Afro-Brazilian runaway slaves — including two cemeteries, which is at the center of a seven-year legal battle led by state prosecutors and public defenders.
- Just a few weeks after the publication of the investigation, representatives from the certifiers contacted Quilombola leaders “to understand the denouncements” published by the report, they went to the region and carried out audits in all affected communities; soon after, IBD Certifications Ltd. suspended Agropalma’s RSPO certificate.
- Assurance Services International (ASI), which evaluates the work of certifiers, confirmed that “the report was a reason for ASI to conduct a compliance assessment to IBD, the certifier of Agropalma, at the Certificate Holder’s premises.” University professors hired by ASI as local experts also cited the Mongabay investigation and this reporter when they contacted other key sources quoted in the report, as shown in email correspondence seen by Mongabay.

How do oil palm companies get away with disregarding Indonesian law? (commentary)
- University of Toronto anthropologist Tania Li argues that companies can act with impunity because of corporate-state collusion and a lack of organised resistance.
- Impunity does not mean Indonesia’s plantation zone is the Wild West. Rather than lawlessness, Li writes, the law sits adjacent to a parallel system of informal rules that affect when and how the law is observed.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
- This article was produced by The Gecko Project and republished by Mongabay.

Can a new regional pact protect the Amazon from environmental crime? (commentary)
- Police, prosecutors, money-laundering experts and others convened last week in Brazil to tackle drug and environmental crimes like illegal mining and logging that are growing in scale across the Amazon.
- The group resolved to move law enforcement beyond occasional raids and periodic destruction of machinery used by organized crime syndicates and toward a concerted and pan-Amazonian push for local, regional and global cooperation on law enforcement.
- While acknowledging the increasing scale of these crimes, participants were optimistic: “We are living in a new moment to fight environmental crime and protect the Amazon,” said the newly appointed director for Amazon environmental crime with Brazil’s federal police, for example.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.

How we built a database of conflicts driven by Indonesia’s palm oil smallholder scheme
- Mongabay, The Gecko Project and BBC News recently published a joint investigation which found that many Indonesian smallholders have lost their cut of the country’s palm oil boom.
- In this article, Tom Walker, head of research at The Gecko Project, explains how our team built a database of public reports to shed light on the issue.
- The database enabled us to target field reporting, identify trends and connect plantation companies to major consumer goods firms.
- This article sets out how we developed the database, how we used it, what it includes, and its limitations. The data can be downloaded at the bottom of this article.

Fishing industry transparency is key for a thriving ocean (commentary)
- As fish populations decline in many regions, unscrupulous fishing fleet operators have turned to illegal fishing, human trafficking, slavery and other abuses to cut costs.
- This is facilitated by the complex, opaque nature of global fisheries, but there is one essential step every government can and must take to end this and bring fisheries out of the shadows: introducing comprehensive transparency.
- “The fact that illegal fishing, human rights abuses and ecological collapse in the ocean are so closely interlinked means that systematic, rigorous transparency can help to resolve them all,” a new op-ed argues.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

‘You don’t kill people to protect forests’: New Thai parks chief raises alarm
- After playing a key role in an anti-corruption sting operation that toppled the head of Thailand’s department of parks and wildlife, senior forest officer Chaiwat Limlikit-aksorn was promoted to head of Thailand’s office of national parks.
- Human rights activists say the appointment raises serious concerns, citing a string of abuses that occurred while Chaiwat was head of Kaeng Krachan National Park.
- Cases against Chaiwat during this period include two murder charges and a corruption investigation.
- Chaiwat’s tenure in his new post will likely be short: He faces mandatory retirement in less than two years, as well as a reopened murder case and an ongoing corruption investigation.

Six steps to tackle exploitation in Indonesia’s palm oil smallholder scheme (commentary)
- An investigation by Mongabay, The Gecko Project and BBC News found villagers across Indonesia gave up their land to corporations in exchange for a share of the palm oil boom but have been left with empty promises.
- Some villagers got nothing at all and others are languishing in debt, while companies operate in flagrant violation of Indonesian law.
- Tom Walker, head of research at The Gecko Project, argues that increasing transparency, accountability and investigations of errant companies are critical steps that could be taken to solve the problem.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

U.S. grocery chains flunk sustainability, human rights tests for tuna sourcing
- Greenpeace has scored the 16 largest U.S. grocery retailers on human rights and environmental sustainability in their tuna sourcing, giving just one, ALDI, a “passing” overall grade.
- The report gave just two of the retailers, ALDI and Whole Foods Market, passing grades for addressing sustainability issues.
- None of the retailers received a passing grade for efforts to rid their supply chains of forced labor and other human rights abuses.
- The U.S. is the world’s second-largest tuna importer and its retailers wield significant clout within the tuna sector, according to the report.

The $20m flip: The story of the largest land grab in the Brazilian Amazon
- This is the story of how three individual landowners engineered the single-largest instance of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The clearing of 6,469 hectares (or 15,985 acres) of forest in the southern part of Pará state could earn them nearly $20 million in profit at current land prices.
- The case is emblematic of the spate of land grabs targeting unallocated public lands throughout the Amazon, where speculators clear and burn the vegetation, then sell the empty land for soy farms, or plant grass and sell it for cattle ranching.
- This article was originally published in Portuguese by The Intercept Brasil and is part of the Ladrões de Floresta (Forest Thieves) project, which investigates the appropriation of public land inside the Amazon and is funded by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.

Indigenous communities in Latin America decry the Mennonites’ expanding land occupation
- A team of journalists followed in the footsteps of five Mennonite colonies that have been reported for clearing forests by Indigenous communities and locals in Bolivia, Colombia, México, Paraguay and Perú. Many of these cases are being investigated by prosecutors and environmental authorities.
- Authors of a recent study to understand the extension of Mennonite presence in the region say that the expansion will continue as the colonies grow in size and continue to pursue farming, creating new colonies.
- Many of these cases are being investigated by prosecutors and environmental authorities.

Rare case of rhino poaching jolts conservation community in Nepal
- A rare case of rhino poaching in Nepal has sent alarm bells ringing among conservationists, who say the method used could easily be replicated throughout the buffer zone of Chitwan National Park, the rhinos’ stronghold.
- Poachers appeared to have electrocuted a female rhino and her calf using a cable connected to a nearby temple’s power supply.
- Conservation officials say there’s a large number of grid-connected temples and other community buildings throughout Chitwan’s buffer zone that could serve a similar purpose.
- The incident is a rare setback for Nepal, which recorded zero rhino losses to poachers in six of the past 12 years, and only six poaching-related kills out of 165 rhinos that died in the past five years.

‘We lost the biggest ally’: Nelly Marubo on her friend Bruno Pereira’s legacy
- In June 2022, Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were brutally murdered in the Brazilian Amazon. Mongabay interviewed Nelly Marubo, friend and colleague of Pereira, giving us a sense of who Pereira was from an Indigenous point of view and how he was perceived by the Indigenous people in the area where he was killed.
- Nelly says Pereira first learned from the Marubo and other Indigenous groups how they were patrolling their Indigenous territories; then he introduced modern technologies to help them in their work.
- Nelly rejects the idea that Indigenous experts like Bruno were leading Indigenous groups into conflict with the outside world; rather, he was responding to the urgent needs of the Marubo and other groups across Brazil.
- For her, Pereira has left a strong legacy among the Indigenous Marubo youth.

Study aims to unmask fishing vessels, and owners, obscured by loopholes
- A new study reveals information about the shifting identities of the global fishing fleet, which can help tackle illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) fishing.
- The research combines a decade’s worth of satellite vessel tracking data with identification information from more than 40 public registries to generate a first-of-its-kind global assessment of fishing compliance, foreign ownership of vessels, and reflagging.
- It found that nearly 20% of high seas fishing was likely unregulated or unauthorized, and that the reflagging of vessels, which operators may do to avoid oversight, mainly took place in ports in East Asia, West Africa and Eastern Europe.
- The researchers plan on making a broader data set publicly available soon and regularly updating this data so that authorities have access to timely information.

Murders of 2 Pataxó leaders prompt Ministry of Indigenous Peoples to launch crisis office
- On Jan. 17, 17-year-old Nawir Brito de Jesus and 25-year-old Samuel Cristiano do Amor Divino were shot dead in Brazil’s northeastern Bahia state, according to the state’s civil police.
- The crimes reportedly occurred when the two Indigenous leaders were returning to a resettlement farm, located within the limits of the Barra Velha Indigenous Territory, an area recognized in 2008 as being traditionally occupied by the Pataxó people but has since awaited its full demarcation.
- The newly created Ministry of Indigenous Peoples is setting up a crisis office to monitor land conflicts in the region with the Ministry of Justice and other authorities “to guarantee the rigorous investigation and punishment of the criminals, besides, of course, the protection of the Pataxó people.”
- Violence against Indigenous people this year is not isolated to Bahia. On Jan. 9, two Indigenous Guajajara were shot in the head in northeastern Maranhão state, near Maranwi village, close to the town of Arame, as confirmed by the state’s civil police.

Violence in Brazil’s Amazon are also crimes against humanity, lawyers tell international court
- Three organizations, including Greenpeace Brazil, filed a case with the International Criminal Court (ICC) pressing for the investigation into a network of politicians, law enforcement and business executives they suspect are responsible for systematic attacks against land defenders.
- They documented over 400 murders, 500 attempted murders, 2,200 death threats, 2,000 assaults and 80 cases of torture that occurred between 2011 and 2022.
- Former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro is one suspect in these crimes, yet the organizations say the attacks are part of a larger system operating in Brazil, and will likely continue even when he’s out of office.
- If the criminal court choses to go forward with this case, it will be the first time they investigate crimes against humanity committed in the context of environmental destruction.

Corruption scandal in Thai parks agency has far-reaching impacts, activists say
- The head of Thailand’s parks department, Rutchada Suriyakul Na Ayutya, was arrested Dec. 27 after anticorruption authorities found envelopes and gift boxes in his desk containing the equivalent of nearly $150,000 in cash.
- Rutchada had allegedly demanded bribes from underlings to secure positions, as well as a cut of departmental budgets.
- Conservationists say corruption in the department, as well as recent budget cuts, has had severe implications for the country’s protected areas.

At a rubber plantation in Liberia, history repeats in a fight over land
- Last year, Mongabay visited the Salala Rubber Corporation in Liberia, which has been accused of sexually abusing women working on its plantation and grabbing community land.
- Salala is owned by Socfin, the French-Belgian agribusiness giant that operates rubber and palm oil plantations across West and Central Africa.
- In 2008, Salala received a $10 million loan from the International Finance Corporation, which advocates say was used to clear community land.
- In 2019, 22 communities in and around Salala’s plantation filed a formal complaint with the IFC, but the investigation has dragged on for years.

Poisoned by pesticides: Health crisis deepens in Brazil’s Indigenous communities
- A recent report reveals communities in Brazil’s Mato Grosso region are contaminated by the agriculture industry’s increasing use of pesticides. About 88% of the plants collected, including medicinal herbs and fruits, on Indigenous lands have pesticide residue.
- Samples discovered high levels of pesticides in ecosystems and waters far from crop fields, including carbofuran — a highly toxic substance which is banned in Brazil, Europe and the U.S.
- Experts blame the lack of control by government officials for widespread environmental damage and an escalating health crisis among Indigenous populations, as communities report growing numbers of respiratory problems, acute poisonings and cancers.
- A spokesperson for the biggest agrochemical companies operating in Brazil disputes the findings of the report and numbers of people far from crop regions affected by pesticide usage.

Brazilian archbishop is threatened for defending Indigenous peoples — even during Mass
- Dom Roque Paloschi, president of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) and archbishop of Porto Velho in the state of Roraima, Brazil, has been under attack because he denounced Indigenous people’s rights violations.
- It has always been risky to live in Amazonia and defend social-environmental issues, but Paloschi says the situation has worsened greatly in the last four years — the period that coincides with Jair Bolsonaro’s administration.
- In 2021, 355 attacks against Indigenous people were reported in Brazil — the most since 2013, according to a CIMI report.

Video: In Brazil’s Amazon, Quilombolas fight major palm oil firm for access to cemeteries
- Areas along the Acará River in northern Pará state are at the center of a six-year legal battle where Quilombolas — descendants of Afro-Brazilian runaway slaves — accuse Agropalma, the country’s second-largest palm oil exporter, of land-grabbing over their ancestral lands, including cemeteries, as revealed by Mongabay’s yearlong investigation.
- One of these areas is Our Lady of Battle Cemetery, where Mongabay witnessed in November 2021 Quilombolas celebrating the Day of the Dead for the first time in decades. They say access to the area was hampered since it became Agropalma’s “legal reserve” — the proportion of land that the Brazilian legislation obliges a private property owner to maintain in its natural state — in the 1980s.
- In this video, Mongabay exhibits what is called a “historic moment” and firsthand footage and interviews with Quilombolas going to this cemetery for the first time. This video also has impressive images of palm trees just a few steps from the graves at Livramento Cemetery, completely surrounded by Agropalma’s crops. Quilombolas accuse Agropalma of destroying three-quarters of its area to make way for its plantations; the company denies.
- “To support future lawsuits,” prosecutors in Pará state have cited the Mongabay investigation in their procedures looking into the conflicts between Quilombola communities seeking recognition of their territory and areas occupied by Agropalma.

Top 10 notable Indigenous stories of 2022
- This year was a historic one for many Indigenous communities around the world that marked many ‘firsts’ with successful land rights rulings, both on the global and national level.
- As Indigenous rights, roles and contributions in biodiversity conservation gain more attention, underreported and critical issues impacting Indigenous peoples were thrust into the spotlight this year.
- To end this impactful year, Mongabay rounds up its 10 most notable Indigenous news stories of 2022.

Illegal orchid trade threatens Nepal’s ‘tigers of the plant world’
- Roughly 500 orchid species grow in Nepal’s forests, including a rare pale purple beauty that attracts thousands of pilgrims each April.
- Orchids are among the most diverse and charismatic plant groups in the world, and they are threatened by illegal and unsustainable trade, largely for Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine.
- Kathmandu-based NGO Greenhood Nepal has a project that outlines key steps for government agencies to take in efforts to curb illegal and unsustainable trade in Nepal’s orchids.

Podcast: Into the Wasteland, part 3: Buried in Europe’s recycling
- The European Commission estimates that the illegal handling of recycling and other wastes represents around 15-30% of the total EU waste trade, generating EUR 9.5 billion annually.
- Our team visits a facility in Poland that’s supposed to be handling U.K. recycling but finds it shuttered and infested with rats.
- We also speak with the ‘James Bond of waste trafficking’ who reveals that much recycling is being ‘laundered’ via the Netherlands and shipped on to countries where such resources are often dumped, not recycled.
- This is the final episode in Mongabay’s three-part, “true eco-crime” series, where investigative reporters trace England’s — and Europe’s — towering illegal waste problem.

Video: Stolen Quilombola cemeteries in the Amazon, and the probe that revealed it all
- Palm oil is a ubiquitous ingredient in products ranging from chocolate to cookies to lipstick, but its production in a corner of the Brazilian Amazon may be linked to a land grab from traditional communities, including cemeteries, a year-long investigation by Mongabay’s Karla Mendes has revealed.
- Prosecutors in Pará state have cited the Mongabay investigation in their procedures looking into the conflicts between Quilombola communities seeking recognition of their territory and areas occupied by Agropalma, the country’s second-largest palm oil exporter.
- In November 2021, Mendes went to Pará’s Alto Acará region to investigate these land-grabbing claims, and shares her reporting journey in this behind-the-scenes video, including witnessing a historical Day of the Dead celebration at a cemetery that the Quilombolas say they were locked out of by Agropalma.
- Mendes also witnessed another cemetery hemmed in by Agropalma’s oil palms, where Quilombolas accuse the company of planting the trees over the graves of their loved ones, and investigated other palm oil-linked issues reported by local communities, including water pollution and the threat of displacement from the paving of a trucking road.

Major Brazil palm oil exporter accused of fraud, land-grabbing over Quilombola cemeteries
- Agropalma, the only Brazilian company with the sustainability certificate issued by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), is accused of a wide range of land-grabbing allegations in Pará state.
- The claims allege that more than half of the 107,000 hectares (264,000 acres) registered by Agropalma was derived from fraudulent land titles and even the creation of a fake land registration bureau, which is at the center of a legal battle led by state prosecutors and public defenders.
- Quilombola communities say that part of the area occupied by Agropalma overlaps with their ancestral land, including two cemeteries visited by Mongabay. In one of them, residents claim that just one-quarter of the cemetery remains and that the company planted palm trees on top of the graves, which the company denies.
- There are also other financial interests in the land at stake, researchers say, pointing to the company’s moves into bauxite mining and the sale of carbon credits in the areas subject to litigation, further intensifying the disputes.

Dalian Ocean Fishing, subject of Mongabay probe, now sanctioned by U.S.
- The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recently announced sanctions on Chinese individuals and companies allegedly involved in human rights abuses and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing while operating in distant waters.
- One sanctioned company, Dalian Ocean Fishing Co., Ltd. (DOF), was the subject of two Mongabay investigations: one uncovered widespread human rights abuses, and the other exposed extensive illegal shark-finning operations within the DOF fleet of longline fishing vessels.
- China, which operates the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet and has a long history of fisheries offenses, denounced the sanctions, saying that it is a “responsible fishing country.”

Podcast: Is waste crime ‘the new narcotics’ in the U.K.? Into the Wasteland, part 2
- The U.K.’s Environment Agency calls waste crime — where instead of delivering recycling or rubbish for proper disposal, companies simply dump it in the countryside — “the new narcotics” because it’s so easy to make money illegally.
- It’s estimated that one in every five U.K. waste companies operates in this manner, and the government seems powerless to stop it.
- In a three-part, “true eco-crime” series for Mongabay’s podcast, investigative journalists trace England’s towering illegal waste problem.
- On this second episode, a lawyer describes her year-long campaign to get the government to deal with a single illegal dump site, but they failed to act before it caught fire. We also speak with a former official at Interpol who shares that his agency also lacks the resources to tackle the problem.

Podcast: True eco-crime in the U.K., ‘Into the Wasteland’
- In a three-part, ‘true eco-crime’ series for Mongabay’s podcast, investigative journalists trace England’s towering illegal waste problem.
- The country is facing a mountain of waste problems, but ‘fly-tipping’ might not be one you’ve heard of: it’s the clandestine, illegal dumping of household and business waste, even dead animals, in the countryside.
- In a country that throws away more plastic per person than anywhere else in the world, fly-tipping has become a much more serious – and dangerous – problem lately, with the involvement of criminal elements seeking easy profit.
- On this episode, a mild-mannered English IT professional shares how he’s gone to great lengths — and has had to run for his life — for exposing the people behind the rubbishing of the country’s farms, fields, and public spaces.

New criminal code rings alarms for environmental protection in Indonesia
- Indonesia has passed an overhauled criminal code that experts and activists say will weaken environmental protections and make it easier to persecute environmental defenders.
- Among the controversial provisions in the heavily criticized bill: an exemption from prosecution for companies that violate environmental laws; reduced punishment and the choice to pick a fine over a jail sentence for convicted violators; and a higher burden of proof for environmental crimes.
- It could also be used to prosecute environmental defenders who protest public works projects, on the pretext of insulting the president.
- The new code will not go into full effect until 2025, giving opponents time to challenge it at the Constitutional Court.

‘It was a shark operation’: Q&A with Indonesian crew abused on Chinese shark-finning boat
- Rusnata was one of more than 150 Indonesian deckhands repatriated from the various vessels operated by China’s Dalian Ocean Fishing in 2020.
- Previous reporting by Mongabay revealed widespread and systematic abuses suffered by workers across the DOF fleet, culminating in the deaths of at least seven Indonesian crew members.
- In a series of interviews with Mongabay, Rusnata described his own ordeal in detail, including confirming reports that DOF tuna-fishing vessels were deliberately going after sharks and finning the animals.
- He also describes a lack of care for the Indonesian workers by virtually everyone who knew of their plight, from the Indonesian agents who recruited them to port officials in China.

Indigenous youths lured by the illegal mines destroying their Amazon homeland
- An increasing number of young Indigenous people in Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous Territory are leaving their communities behind and turning to illegal gold mining, lured by the promise of small fortunes and a new lifestyle.
- Work in the mining camps ranges from digging and removing tree roots to operating as boat pilots ferrying gold, supplies and miners to and from the camps; recruits receive nearly $1,000 per boat trip.
- The structures, traditions and health of Indigenous societies are torn apart by the proximity of the gold miners, and the outflow of the young generation further fuels this vicious cycle, say Indigenous leaders.
- Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a lack of authorities monitoring the area, illegal mining in the region has increased drastically, with 20,000 miners now operating illegally in the territory.

A new tool to peer into fishing networks: Q&A with Austin Brush of C4ADS
- Washington, D.C.-based think tank C4ADS is launching Triton, a web tool to visually display the corporate structures behind fishing vessels.
- The initial cache of data focuses on the industrial fishing fleets of five key flag states: China, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and Japan, which together account for most high-seas fishing.
- Understanding who owns these vessels ultimately reveals the factors driving a vessel’s movements at sea and fishing activity, according to C4ADS analyst Austin Brush.

Alleged macaque-smuggling ring exposed as U.S. indicts Cambodian officials
- U.S. federal prosecutors have charged eight people, including two Cambodian forestry officials, for their alleged involvement in an international ring smuggling endangered long-tailed macaques.
- The indictment alleges forestry officials colluded with Hong Kong-based biomedical firm Vanny Bio Research to procure macaques from the wild and create export permits falsely listing them as captive-bred animals.
- One of the officials charged was arrested in New York City on Nov. 16, en route to Panama for an international summit focused on regulating the global trade in wildlife.
- This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn is a fellow.

How Mitsubishi vacuumed up tuna from a rogue Chinese fishing fleet
- Last week, Mongabay revealed a massive illegal shark finning operation across the fleet of a major Chinese tuna fishing firm.
- The company, Dalian Ocean Fishing, mainly serves the Japanese market. Most of its tuna has gone to Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation and its seafood trading arm, Toyo Reizo.
- While the general outlines of their partnership are well-documented, tracing specific tuna flows from individual fishing boats to Mitsubishi’s supply chain is impeded by the murky nature of the supply chain.
- Experts say this lack of transparency must be solved in order to prevent illegal fishing and labor abuses at sea.

Element Africa: Keeping platinum in the ground, and minors out of mines
- South Africa’s minister of mines has approved a platinum mine in the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve despite objections from a farming community of 500 whose homes sit atop the deposits.
- The end of a government-funded program to incentivize parents in the Democratic Republic of Congo to keep their children in school has seen more than 250 return to working in cobalt mines.
- It’s a different story in Kenya’s Makueni county, where strong local regulations are keeping minors, and criminal elements, out of the sand mining industry.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin rounding up brief stories from the commodities industry in Africa.

‘There are solutions to these abuses’: Q&A with Steve Trent on how China can rein in illegal fishing
- Earlier this week, Mongabay published an article uncovering a massive illegal shark finning scheme across the fleet of one of China’s largest tuna companies, Dalian Ocean Fishing.
- China has the world’s biggest fishing fleet, but oversight of the sector is lax, with many countries’ boats routinely found to be engaging in illegal and destructive practices, especially in international waters.
- Mongabay spoke with Steve Trent, the head of the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has also investigated the fishing industry, about DOF’s shark finning scheme and how China can better monitor its vessels.

Exclusive: Shark finning rampant across Chinese tuna firm’s fleet
- Dalian Ocean Fishing used banned gear to deliberately catch and illegally cut the fins off of huge numbers of sharks in international waters, Mongabay has found.
- Just five of the company’s longline boats harvested roughly 5.1 metric tons of dried shark fin in the western Pacific Ocean in 2019. That equates to a larger estimated shark catch than what China reported for the nation’s entire longline fleet in the same time and place.
- The findings are based on dozens of interviews with men who worked throughout the company’s fleet of some 35 longline boats. A previous investigation by Mongabay and its partners uncovered widespread abuse of crew across the same firm’s vessels.
- Campaigners said Dalian Ocean Fishing’s newly uncovered practices were a “disaster” for shark conservation efforts.

Element Africa: Mines take their toll on nature and communities
- Civil society groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo are demanding the revocation of the license for a Chinese-owned gold miner operating inside a wildlife reserve that’s also home to nomadic Indigenous groups.
- Up to 90% of mines in South Africa aren’t publishing their social commitments to the communities in which they operate, in violation of the law, activists say.
- A major Nigerian conglomerate that was granted a major concession for industrial developments in 2012 has still not compensated displaced residents, it was revealed after the company announced it’s abandoning the project.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin rounding up brief stories from the commodities industry in Africa.

Panama restricts information on sanctioned boats, evading transparency
- Over the course of three months earlier this year, Mongabay and Bloomberg Línea requested information from the Panamanian authorities concerning inspections carried out on Panama-registered boats and the resulting sanctions that were imposed.
- Panamanian authorities denied much of the request, claiming it concerns information of a restricted nature.
- The authorities did grant a request to review vessel records at the location where they are held, but prohibited the reporting team from taking photographs or making photocopies. The team found paper records arranged in thick folders with pages in neither ascending nor descending order, which made the search a complex task.
- Lawyers who specialize in fishing and environmental issues say the authorities should release the information, and that the difficulty accessing it hinders efforts to uncover illicit activities.

Panama: A ‘flag of convenience’ for illegal fishing and lack of control at sea
- Why would a Chinese ship want to fly the Panamanian flag? This practice is known as flying a “flag of convenience” and although it’s legal, experts say it often lets shipowners benefit from lax auditing and is closely associated with illegal fishing because it can hide the identity of a vessel’s true owners.
- Mongabay Latam and Bloomberg Línea investigated violations and alleged crimes committed by the fleet of ships flying the flag of Panama, the country whose flag is most commonly used.
- Our analysis of an official database shows that some of the vessels operating under the Panamanian flag do business with a Chinese company that has one of the global fishing industry’s longest criminal records.

Element Africa: Diamonds, oil, coltan, and more diamonds
- Offshore diamond prospecting threatens a fishing community in South Africa, while un-checked mining for the precious stones on land is silting up rivers in Zimbabwe.
- In Nigeria, serial polluter Shell is accused of not cleaning up a spill from a pipeline two months ago; the company says the spill was mostly water from flushing out the pipeline.
- Also in Nigeria, mining for coltan, the source of niobium and tantalum, important metals in electronics applications, continues to destroy farms and nature even as the government acknowledges it’s being done illegally.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin rounding up brief stories from the commodities industry in Africa.

Indonesian lobster larvae bound for Singapore reveal role of smuggling network
- Two recent seizures of lobster larvae shipments destined for Singapore have prompted an investigation by Indonesia into a smuggling network operating between the two countries.
- The shipments had an estimated value of $2.2 million, and were the latest in a string of attempts to smuggle the larvae to buyers in Singapore, Vietnam and China.
- Indonesia has banned the export of wild-caught larvae in an effort to its lobster stocks, and is encouraging the growth of the domestic lobster-farming industry.
- Lobsters are among Indonesia’s top fisheries commodities, but the illegal exports cost the country $64 million in lost revenue in 2019 alone, according to official data.

The Fixers: Top U.S. flooring retailers linked to Brazilian firm probed for corruption
- New evidence uncovered by a yearlong investigation by Mongabay and Earthsight reveals the corrupt deals made by Brazil’s largest flooring exporter, Indusparquet, and its suppliers.
- The company was charged in two corruption lawsuits in Brazil over its use of public officials to gain access to timber supplies. Mongabay and Earthsight gained access to dozens of hours of wiretaps and video footage, along with thousands of pages of court records, revealing how the alleged bribery schemes were carried out.
- One of the court cases showed the company used a local official to secure the supply of bracatinga, a tree species native to the Atlantic Forest, for an unnamed “U.S. client.”
- We also found indications that the American client was Floor & Decor, America’s largest flooring retail chain, which was previously involved in illegal timber scandals with Indusparquet, while LL Flooring, fined for breaching the Lacey Act in 2013 over its illegal timber exports, is also an Indusparquet client.

Trafficked: Kidnapped chimps, jailed rhino horn traffickers, and seized donkey parts
- Armed intruders who kidnapped three young chimpanzees from a sanctuary in the DRC have threatened to kill them unless a ransom is paid for the apes’ return.
- Calls for renewed focus on organized crime in wildlife trafficking, as specialized courts in Uganda and the DRC are delivering convictions for wildlife crimes that in the past would likely have gone unpunished.
- A seizure in Nigeria has sounded the latest alarm over growing exports of donkey parts for traditional Chinese medicine.
- Trafficked is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin rounding up brief stories from the illegal wildlife trade in Africa.

Indonesia urged to update fisher training program to international standards
- Many Indonesian seafarers on domestic and foreign boats lack proper training for safety and fishing operations, which experts say leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and endangerment.
- Fisheries and human rights observers are calling for a revamp of the government’s fisher training program ahead of a scheduled evaluation of measures to protect maritime workers at home and overseas.
- Indonesia in 2019 ratified an International Maritime Organization (IMO) convention on the protection of crews working aboard domestic and foreign boats, and its progress on implementing it is due for an assessment in 2024.
- Indonesia, one of the world’s largest fish producers, is home to some 2.3 million people who identify as fishers and boat crews working on domestic and foreign-flagged fleets.

Indigenous Brazilians demand justice as 4 killed in escalating violence
- Two Indigenous Guajajara men were killed on Sept. 3 in Brazil’s Maranhão state and a 14-year-old Guajajara boy shot and hospitalized, Indigenous leaders and rights groups say.
- The day after, a 14-year-old Indigenous Pataxó boy was also allegedly gunned down and a 16-year-old shot and wounded as they sought to retake a farm that had reportedly been established illegally within their territory in Bahia state.
- On Sept. 11, another Indigenous Guajajara was murdered in Maranhão. In the past 20 years, more than 50 Guajajara individuals have been killed in the state, with none of the alleged perpetrators ever going on trial, advocates say.
- Indigenous groups and advocacy organizations are demanding justice for these and earlier killings, and have raised concerns about escalating violence against native peoples throughout the country.

Trial of palm oil tycoon Surya Darmadi begins in Jakarta
- Surya Darmadi returned to Indonesia on Aug. 15 and was arrested by awaiting officers at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
- Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office has estimated total losses amounting to almost $7 billion, including damages incurred by communities.
- Environmental groups have spent decades documenting harmful activities by Surya’s companies.

Indonesia pursues agreements to protect its fishers on foreign vessels
- The Indonesian government says it hopes to sign agreements with other governments to improve protection of its citizens working in those countries’ fishing industries.
- Indonesia is thought to be the largest source of labor in the global fishing fleet, but Indonesian deckhands are often subject to predatory recruitment processes, labor abuses, and even deadly working conditions.
- In May 2021, the Indonesian government signed one such agreement with the South Korean government, addresses key issues such as recruitment and placement mechanisms, and a dedicated training center for Indonesian fishers.
- The Indonesian foreign ministry is now seeking similar agreements with Taiwan and China, with the latter’s fishing fleet accounting for nearly as much activity in distant waters as the next four top countries combined.

Illegal fishing, worker abuse claims leave a bad taste for Bumble Bee Seafood
- A new report published by Greenpeace East Asia has found that Bumble Bee Seafoods and its parent company, Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company (FCF) of Taiwan, are sourcing seafood from vessels involved in human rights abuses as well as illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices.
- It found that 13 vessels supplying seafood to Bumble Bee violated Taiwanese fishery regulations, and were even on the Taiwan Fisheries Agency’s (TFA) list of vessels involved in IUU fishing, and that many supply vessels were involved in issues of forced labor and human trafficking.
- Both Bumble Bee and FCF have sustainability and corporate social responsibility policies in place.

In revising its criminal code, Indonesia risks unraveling environmental laws
- Indonesia’s plan to revise its outdated criminal code could lead to a systematic weakening of existing environmental laws, experts warn.
- The latest draft of the code contains provisions that would make it more difficult to prosecute environmental crimes, such as dumping toxic waste in rivers and setting forest fires, the experts say.
- They note also that it makes punishment more lenient and lets companies off the hook, while potentially making it easier to prosecute environmental defenders.
- The experts have called on the government and lawmakers to go back to the drawing board and ensure that environmental crimes are treated as the extraordinary crimes that they are.

Crimes against the Amazon reverberate across Brazil, analysis shows
- Crimes associated with illegal logging, mining and other illicit activities in the Brazilian Amazon are being felt in 24 of Brazil’s 27 states, a new report shows.
- Records of more than 300 Federal Police operations between 2016 and 2021 show that crimes such as tax evasion, money laundering, corruption and wildlife trafficking are reverberating far beyond the rainforest.
- Deforestation is at the center of the criminal economy in the Amazon, driving four main illegal activities: logging, mining, occupation of public lands, and environmental violations associated with agriculture.
- Nearly half of the police operations investigated crimes that occurred in protected areas in the Amazon, including 37 Indigenous territories.

Raids reveal how illegal gold from Indigenous lands gets laundered in Brazil
- Coordinated raids on mining company Gana Gold have revealed how gold mined illegally in Indigenous territories and other protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon makes its way into the legitimate trade.
- The company only has a permit to prospect, but is alleged to have doctored other licenses and sourced gold from illegal mines, before laundering it into the legitimate supply chain.
- The raids also uncovered strong links between drug traffickers and illegal miners, who were found to use the same trafficking routes to get their respective illicit commodities out of the forest and into the rest of the world.
- Experts say that given that the vast majority of Brazilian gold is exported, there’s an onus on overseas buyers to establish chain of custody controls to ensure they’re not buying illegally mined gold.

Snares: Low-tech, low-profile killers of rare wildlife the world over
- Snares are simple, low-tech, noose-like traps that can be made from cheap and easily accessible materials such as wire, rope or brake cables. Easy to set, a single person can place thousands, with one report warning that snares “are a terrestrial equivalent to the drift nets that have devastated marine and freshwater biodiversity.”
- Used throughout the tropics, one estimate says 12 million snares are present in protected areas of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, with the number likely far greater across the wider Southeast Asian region. Snaring is also common in Africa.
- While many hunters target smaller game to eat or sell, snares are indiscriminate, and often maim or kill non-targeted animals such as elephants, lions and giraffes, and endangered species including gorillas, banteng, dhole and saola. One report calls snares “the greatest threat to the long-term presence of tigers in Southeast Asia.”
- Snaring is difficult to stop. Hunters hide snares from their prey, which makes them hard to spot, though rangers are known to collect thousands. It’s “like a game of hide and seek,” says one expert. “Forest rangers hasten to dismantle snare lines even as poachers reconstruct them at other locations.” Behavior change is one solution.

Violence persists in Amazon region where Pereira and Phillips were killed
- Armed illegal gold miners on July 15 threatened government rangers near the site where British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were killed in June.
- Days after the threats, federal prosecutors charged three men in the killing of Phillips and Pereira, but activists and lawmakers say the investigation needs to be expanded to identify the possible involvement of criminal organizations.
- Activists say threats against government officials, including Pereira, have happened for decades, but that the situation has grown dire under President Jair Bolsonaro.
- The government’s weakening of environmental agencies and Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric have created a sense of impunity, emboldening criminals in the Amazon to retaliate against activists and environmentalists who expose their illicit activities, experts say.

Organized crime drives violence and deforestation in the Amazon, study shows
- Increasing rates of both deforestation and violence in the Brazilian Amazon are being driven by sprawling national and transnational criminal networks, a study shows.
- Experts say criminal organizations engaged in activities ranging from illegal logging to drug trafficking often threaten and attack environmentalists, Indigenous people, and enforcement agents who attempt to stop them.
- In 2020, the Brazilian Amazon had the highest murder rate in Brazil, at 29.6 homicides per 100,000 habitants, compared to the national average of 23.9, with the highest rates corresponding to municipalities suffering the most deforestation.
- Experts say the current government’s systematic dismantling of environmental protections and enforcement agencies has emboldened these criminal organizations, which have now become “well connected, well established and very strong.”

No permit? No problem for palm oil company still clearing forest in Papua
- A field observation by Greenpeace Indonesia has confirmed reports that a palm oil company has resumed clearing land on its concession in Indonesia’s Papua region despite its permit having been revoked.
- As of June, the company, PT Permata Nusa Mandiri (PNM), had cleared more than 100 hectares (247 acres) of land, according to data from Greenpeace Indonesia.
- The resumption of land clearing has prompted the district head to reprimand PNM, and raised the possibility that the company is committing a crime.

Peru’s Amazon rainforest is threatened by an ecosystem of environment crime (commentary)
- While Brazil attracts more attention, deforestation is also substantial in the Peruvian Amazon, where forest clearing is on the rise.
- Carolina Andrade and Robert Muggah of Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank, write that “the scale and breadth of the assault” currently underway in Peru’s rainforest is “unprecedented”. They chalk up much of the damage to “resource pirates”.
- But while challenging, the situation isn’t without hope, argue Andrade and Muggah. “Resource pirates can be confronted,” they write. “Fostering closer cooperation between the many-layered and often competing oversight institutions could help focus government policy and action.”
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Indigenous advocates sense a legal landmark as a guardian’s killing heads to trial
- For the first time in Brazil, the killing of an Indigenous land defender is expected to be tried before a federal jury — escalated to that level because of what prosecutors say was an aggression against the entire Guajajara Indigenous community and Indigenous culture.
- Paulo Paulino Guajajara, 26, was killed in an alleged ambush by illegal loggers in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in November 2019; two people have been indicted to stand trial in the case.
- The impending trial stands out amid a general culture of impunity that has allowed violence against Indigenous individuals and the theft of their land — including the killings of more than 50 Guajajara individuals in the past 20 years — to go unpunished.
- It could also set an important legal precedent for trying those responsible for the recent killings of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira.

Amazon rainforest activist under threat in Brazil plans to flee his home
- Erasmo Theofilo, an agroecologist, founded a farmers’ cooperative in one of the most hostile corners of the Amazon to defend landless and poor rural workers and promote sustainable farming practices.
- He has been the target of death threats, ambushes and attempts on his life for his work in the municipality of Anapu, in Pará state, where U.S.-born nun Dorothy Stang was killed for her activism in 2005.
- Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office at the start of 2019, land conflicts and deforestation in the Amazon have surged, with a recent report showing that Pará is the most dangerous for land rights defenders.
- Theofilo told Mongabay he believes he will never be safe in Anapu again, even if the land conflicts are resolved, and is planning to leave for good with his family.

Experts fear end of vaquitas after green light for export of captive-bred totoaba fish
- After a 40-year prohibition, international wildlife trade regulator CITES has authorized the export of captive-bred totoaba fish from Mexico.
- Conservationists say they fear this decision will stimulate the illegal fishing of wild totoabas and that this will intensify the threats facing the critically endangered vaquita porpoise.
- Only around eight individual vaquitas remain alive; they regularly drown in nets set illegally for totoabas in the Upper Gulf of California, where the two species overlap.
- The swim bladders of totoabas are sold in Asian markets at exorbitant prices because of their value as status symbols and their supposed medicinal properties.

In Brazil, an Indigenous land defender’s unsolved killing is the deadly norm
- Two years after the death of Indigenous land defender Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in Brazil’s Amazonian state of Rondônia, questions about who killed him and why remain unanswered.
- Perpetrators of crimes against environmental activists are rarely brought to justice in the country, with a government report showing zero convictions for the 35 people killed in incidents of rural violence in 2021 — about a third of them in Rondônia.
- Indigenous groups and environmental activists in Rondônia say they fear for their lives as the criminal gangs that covet the Amazon’s rich resources act with impunity in threatening defenders and invading protected lands.
- Activists and experts point to a combination of the government’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric and the undermining of environmental agencies as helping incite the current surge of invasions and violence against land defenders in Rondônia and the wider Brazilian Amazon.

Deaths of Phillips and Pereira shine light on a region of the Amazon beset by violence
- Brazilian police reported on June 15 that they had found the bodies believed to be those of Brazilian Indigenous defender Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips deep in the western Amazon.
- The bodies were found not far from where the pair disappeared on June 5, in the Vale do Javari region, considered the most violent region of Brazil, where criminal groups vie to seize land occupied by Indigenous and traditional communities.
- Similar conflicts occur all over the Amazon, with some land grabbers admitting that they will, if necessary, use violent methods to achieve their goals.
- The Brazilian Senate has launched an investigation into the disappearance of Pereira and Phillips, but observers say it’s unlikely to deliver the far-reaching change required to tackle the violence.

Legal and illegal cannabis: A cause for growing environmental concern
- Legalization of cannabis for medicinal and recreational use is an expanding global trend in the U.S. and globally, while the illicit market continues to feed large swaths of demand.
- Both the legal and illegal markets are linked to environmental challenges such as freshwater use, land-use change, toxic and nutrient pollution, and climate change-contributing CO2 emissions.
- Emerging legal cannabis businesses in the U.S. are subject to strict regulation, but many operate in ways that can contribute to environmental harms.
- While the scope of damage from booming legal growing operations is now being better assessed, the impacts of illicit clandestine operations remain mostly undetermined.

Cash-strapped Zimbabwe pushes to be allowed to sell its ivory stockpile
- Zimbabwe is continuing to push for international support for selling off its stockpile of elephant ivory and rhino horn, saying the revenue is needed to fund conservation efforts.
- Funding for the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Authority comes largely from tourism-related activity, which has virtually evaporated during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the authority with shortages of staff, equipment, and funds for communities living adjacent to wildlife.
- But critics say allowing the sale of the 136 metric tons of elephant ivory and rhino horn that Zimbabwe is holding (mostly from animals that died of natural causes) will only stoke demand and lead to a surge in poaching.
- They point to similar surges following other one-off sales in 1999 and 2008, but some observers say these were unusual circumstances (the latter sale coincided with the global recession), and that a poaching spike won’t necessarily follow this time around.

Year of the Tiger: Illegal trade thrives amid efforts to save wild tigers
- As the world celebrates the Year of the Tiger in 2022, humans continue to threaten the cat’s long-term survival in the wild: killing, buying and selling tigers and their prey, and encroaching into their last shreds of habitat. That’s why they are Earth’s most endangered big cat.
- Undercover video footage has revealed an enlarged tiger farm run by an organized criminal organization in Laos. It’s one of many captive-breeding facilities implicated in the black market trade — blatantly violating an international treaty on trade in endangered species.
- Under a 2007 CITES decision, tigers should be bred only for conservation purposes. Evidence shows that this decision is being disregarded by some Asian nations, including China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. But CITES has done little to enforce it, which could be done through sanctions, say critics.
- With the world’s second Global Tiger Summit and important international meetings on biodiversity and endangered species looming, it’s a crucial year for tigers. In the wild, some populations are increasing, some stable, and others shrinking: Bengal tigers in India are faring best, while Malayan tigers hover on extinction’s edge.

Government inaction sees 98% of deforestation alerts go unpunished in Brazil
- A new study has found that Brazil’s environmental enforcement agencies under President Jair Bolsonaro failed to take action in response to nearly all of the deforestation alerts issued for the Amazon region since 2019.
- Nearly 98% of Amazon deforestation alerts weren’t investigated during this period, while fines paid by violators also dropped, raising fears among activists that environmental crimes are being encouraged under the current administration.
- Environmental agencies at the state level did better, but in the case of Mato Grosso state, Brazil’s breadbasket, still failed to take action in response to more than half of the deforestation that occurred.
- In an unexpected move, Bolsonaro on May 24 issued a decree raising the value of fines for falsifying documents to cover up illegal logging and infractions affecting conservation units or their buffer zones, among other measures.

In Singapore, a forensics lab wields CSI-like tech against wildlife traffickers
- A wildlife forensics laboratory launched in Singapore last year is making breakthroughs in tracking down criminal syndicates trafficking in wildlife.
- Singapore is a major transit point for the illegal ivory trade; the nation impounded 8.8 metric tons of elephant ivory in July 2019 — evidence from which led to the arrest of 14 people in China.
- The researchers use the same method to capture poachers that authorities in California used to arrest the Golden State Killer.
- Elephant ivory and pangolin scales account for the bulk of the new lab’s workload; figuring out how traffickers accumulate this material from two species could uncover much of their methods.

Slick operator: Indonesian cooking oil probe may spread to biodiesel industry
- A top economist in Indonesia has been charged for his alleged role in helping palm oil companies export the commodity instead of selling it domestically — a practice blamed for a shortage of cooking oil in the world’s top producer of palm oil.
- The arrest of Lin Che Wei, who prosecutors allege was “involved in every palm oil policy,” also puts the spotlight on the state palm oil fund that he helped create and that disproportionately channels subsidies to many of the same companies implicated in the cooking oil scandal.
- President Joko Widodo has called for a thorough investigation to “find out who is playing a game here,” but the palm oil lobby has pushed back against what it says is a vilification of the industry — even threatening to stop producing cooking oil for the domestic market.
- The cooking oil shortage has battered domestic trust in Indonesia’s powerful palm oil industry, whose reputation abroad has long been tarnished by its links to deforestation, labor abuses, and conflicts with Indigenous and local communities.

Ivory from at least 150 poached elephants seized in the DRC raid
- A three-year investigation has led authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 2 metric tons of ivory hidden in a stash house in the southern city of Lubumbashi.
- The tusks are valued at $6 million on the international market and estimated to have come from more than 150 elephants.
- The three people arrested in the May 14 raid are allegedly members of a major wildlife trafficking ring in the Southern African region.

Wage-related abuses in fishing industry exacerbated by pandemic response
- The COVID-19 pandemic left migrant fishers in Asia, already a highly vulnerable section of the workforce, with less income and at higher risk of labor abuses, a new report says.
- The brief, commissioned by the International Labour Organization and authored by Cornell University researchers, looked at workers’ experiences in the fishing and seafood-processing industries of Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan from March 2020 to March 2021.
- Common issues they uncovered included employers paying wages below the legal minimum, making illegal wage deductions, deferring wage payments, and not paying wages upon termination of employment.
- Labor shortages caused by border closures due to the pandemic should have given workers more leverage in wage negotiations, but this wasn’t the case, the researchers found.

Murky provenance of a Chinese fleet clouds Madagascar shrimp fishery
- Thirty-nine trawlers are licensed to catch up to 4,170 metric tons of shrimp in Madagascar’s waters during the 2022 campaign, which officially began on March 1.
- Chinese-owned company Mada Fishery, which holds eight exploration rights did not apply to catch shrimp this year, and its eight vessels are now sitting idle.
- Three of the vessels were previously engaged in fishing violations in the Gambia, and under Malagasy law should not be eligible to fish in Madagascar now — unless there’s been a change in their ownership.
- But a murky document trail and general lack of transparency into the vessels’ ownership makes it unclear whether that has happened; transparency advocates say the implementation of simple measures would have made a significant difference in the investigation of Mada Fishery.

Fisher groups are the marine militia in Indonesia’s war on illegal fishing
- Indonesia has a vast maritime area, but not enough personnel to patrol and monitor for illegal and destructive fishing.
- To address this gap, in recent years the government has incentivized fishers and other coastal communities to form monitoring groups that are responsible for patrolling their local waters.
- In the Raja Ampat archipelago in the country’s east, Mongabay meets some of the people who have volunteered for the task of protecting their waters from blast fishing and cyanide fishing, among other violations.

California subpoenas ExxonMobil over plastic pollution
- California Attorney General Rob Bonta has subpoenaed ExxonMobil as part of an investigation into the role fossil fuel and petrochemical industries have played in the widening plastics crisis.
- The California Department of Justice is looking into whether ExxonMobil deliberately misled the public about the harmful effects of plastic and the difficulties of recycling it.
- In response, ExxonMobil has said the company shares society’s concerns about the plastics crisis, and that it is working to address the issue with advanced recycling technology.
- Environmental experts have welcomed the investigation, saying it’s time for the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to be held accountable for the role they have played in this environmental issue.

Illegal miners bring sexual violence and disease to Indigenous reserve in Brazil
- A new investigative report shows that Brazil’s largest Indigenous reserve is experiencing the most intense spate of invasions by illegal miners in 30 years.
- An estimated 15,000 of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory’s Indigenous inhabitants have been directly affected by the mining, with girls as young as 11 lured into sex work with the promise of food and clothing.
- The miners are also exploiting Venezuelan refugees fleeing the economic crisis in their country, effectively keeping them in indentured labor through insurmountable debts.
- Forest destruction as a result of illegal mining has nearly tripled since 2018 inside the Yanomami reserve; the practice has also been blamed for outbreaks of malaria and high rates of child malnutrition.

Analysis: Myanmar’s gemstone riches bring poverty and environmental destruction
- Myanmar is endowed with rich reserves of jade, rubies and other gemstones, but endemic corruption and poor regulation mean little wealth has flowed to ordinary citizens.
- The jade-mining hotspot of Hpakant, in Kachin state, is emblematic of the problem: There are currently no licensed mines in the area, but jade extraction nonetheless continues at a massive scale.
- The speed and size of these poorly regulated operations results in both massive environmental damage and human casualties, as scavengers flock to unstable dumpsites to hunt for jade left behind by machines.

More than half of activists killed in 2021 were land, environment defenders
- An analysis by Front Line Defenders and the Human Rights Defenders Memorial recorded at least 358 murders of human rights activists globally in 2021.
- Of that total, nearly 60% were land, environment or Indigenous rights defenders.
- The countries with the highest death tolls were Colombia, Mexico and Brazil.
- Advocates say the figure is likely far higher, as attacks on land and environment defenders in Africa often go unreported.

All coked up: The global environmental impacts of cocaine
- Cocaine is one of the most widely used illicit drugs in the world, consumed by an estimated 20 million people in 2019, mostly in North America and Europe.
- Production, transit and consumption of the drug are exacting a heavy environmental toll, impacting tropical forests, freshwater and estuary ecosystems. Some of these effects, such as pollution impacts on eels and other aquatic species, have been documented, but most are still poorly understood, with many unresearched.
- Indigenous peoples are often at the front lines of criminal gangs’ activities in producer and trafficking countries. Often, when new narco-trafficking transport routes are established, like those in Central America, those same routes are used for other criminal activities such as wildlife and weapons trafficking.
- Researchers argue that detaching the environmental harm caused by the cocaine trade from the long-lasting war on drugs is not possible. Solutions implemented to deal with the drug problem, such as the aerial spraying of illegal coca crops, while locally effective in curbing illegal cultivation, also cause deforestation and biodiversity damage.

Study links many reported fisheries crimes to just a few repeat offenders
- A new study in the journal Science Advances analyzed roughly 8,000 fisheries offenses reported globally between 2000 and 2020, a database the authors call the “largest existing repository” of reported fisheries offenses.
- The study shows that a small number of companies may be responsible for a large chunk of international industrial fisheries crimes.
- It also shows that the vessels committing abuses, such as unauthorized fishing and human rights and labor violations, often engaged in more than one offense.
- Illegal fishing accounts for one fourth the value of all landed seafood products, roughly $30 billion globally. It contributes to the depletion of fish and other marine wildlife populations.

Indonesian ex-minister gets sentence cut for ‘good work’ fueled by corruption
- Indonesia’s top appeals court has slashed the jail sentence for Edhy Prabowo, the country’s former fisheries minister, from nine years to five.
- In their ruling, the judges said a lower court had been unduly harsh in its sentencing, and specifically praised Edhy’s “good work” in lifting a ban on lobster larvae exports.
- But it was precisely over this policy that Edhy was arrested in 2020 and subsequently convicted in 2021: He was found guilty of collecting nearly $2 million in bribes from crony-linked companies that were awarded the lucrative export contracts.
- Fisheries observers have criticized the latest ruling, saying it fails to reflect the severity of Edhy’s crime.

In a national park plagued by encroachers, Indonesia tries a new approach
- For years, people have settled illegally in national parks around Indonesia, clearing the land and farming it in the hope they will eventually be granted legal title to it.
- While the authorities’ default response has been to evict them, a new government program is taking a more collaborative approach that aims to be a win-win for both the parks and the people.
- Under the “conservation partnership” program, the settlers acknowledge that they cannot lay claim to the land and must work to restore damaged ecosystems.
- In turn, they’re allowed to allowed to remain on the land and cultivate “traditional” crops and harvest non-timber forest products, such as rattan and honey, but not allowed to grow rubber and oil palm.

Refuge of endangered ‘African unicorn’ threatened by mining, poaching, deforestation
- Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) shelters some 470 mammal and bird species, including up to 20% of the world’s remaining endangered okapi (Okapia johnstoni), which are related to giraffes.
- While Okapi Wildlife Reserve has escaped much of the environmental destruction affecting surrounding areas, satellite data show deforestation has been increasing in the reserve in recent years.
- Satellite imagery shows the expansion of what appear to be gold mines in the latter half of 2021.
- Conservationists say illegal mining is attracting more people to the reserve, which in turn increases poaching and deforestation.

DRC’s cacao boom leaves a bitter aftertaste for Congo Basin forest
- The DRC’s Tshopo province lost a record-breaking area of intact forests to fires in 2021, a trend researchers say is driven by agricultural expansion, as displaced people from the violence-ravaged eastern DRC move into the province.
- There’s been an increase in clearing of forests to cultivate food crops and cash crops like cacao beans, used to make cocoa for chocolate.
- Around 70% of the world’s supply of cacao beans is produced in West African countries, with Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon the biggest producers, where its cultivation has also accelerated deforestation.
- “You are aware of what has happened in West Africa in countries like Ivory Coast and Ghana,” Germain Batsi, a DRC agroforestry expert, told Mongabay. “I am afraid such scenarios will be reproduced here, something we would regret afterwards.”

Photos: Caged orangutan found in Indonesian politician’s home
- The head of Langkat district had an illegal pet orangutan, authorities say.
- The politician is only the latest in a long line of public officials found to be keeping protected species.
- Authorities also found dozens of people in iron-barred cells in the home who were allegedly forced to work on the politician’s oil palm plantation, prompting calls for an investigation into whether they were subject to “modern slavery.”

Links between terrorism and the ivory trade overblown, study says
- As killings of elephants in Africa spiked in the early 2010s, some conservation organizations claimed the ivory trade was financing armed groups like al-Shabaab and the Lord’s Resistance Army.
- According to a study published in Global Environmental Politics, those ties were overstated and strategically pushed by NGOs in order to attract funding for anti-poaching efforts.
- Despite shaky evidence for some of the claims, they helped frame wildlife trafficking as a global security issue and were subsequently repeated by policymakers from the U.S. and elsewhere.
- The study said the confluence of conservation and security policy has had “material outcomes for marginalized peoples living with wildlife, including militarization, human rights abuses, enhanced surveillance, and law enforcement.”

Online trade and pet clubs fuel desire for little-known Javan ferret badgers
- Researchers identified an increase in online sales of Javan ferret badgers, a small carnivore relatively unknown to the general public outside its native Indonesia.
- Pet clubs and online forums are driving demand for small mammals such as ferret badgers, civets and otters.
- Enforcement against the illegal wildlife trade online and in open-air markets in Indonesia remains lax.

Attack on environmental lawyer’s home alarms DRC rights defenders
- Armed men, including two dressed in police uniform, attacked the home of Congolese lawyer Timothée Mbuya earlier this month and told family members they were sent to kill him.
- Mbuya is also facing a defamation lawsuit after publishing a report alleging encroachment of a protected area by a farm owned by former DRC president Joseph Kabila.
- Campaigners say both the lawsuit and the violent assault on the lawyer’s home fit a pattern of harassment of environment and human rights activists in the country.

Chemical defoliants sprayed on Amazon rainforest to facilitate deforestation in Brazil
- Chemicals created to kill agricultural pests are being sprayed by aircraft into native forest areas.
- Glyphosate and 2,4-D, among others, cause the trees to defoliate, and end up weakened or dead in a process that takes months. Next criminals remove the remaining trees more easily and drop grass seeds by aircraft, consolidating deforestation.
- Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, discovered that in addition to land grabbers, cattle ranchers use the method in order to circumvent forest monitoring efforts.

‘Huge blow’ for tiger conservation as two of the big cats killed in Thailand
- Authorities in Thailand have arrested five suspects for killing two Indochinese tigers in a protected area in the country’s west; the suspects said the tigers had been killing and eating their cattle.
- Authorities seized the two tiger carcasses, which had been stripped of their skins and meat, raising suspicions among experts that financial motives, namely selling the tiger parts in the illegal market, may have driven the killing.
- Indochinese tigers have been declared extinct in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in recent years, and while several breeding populations persist in Thailand’s protected area networks, they number no more than 200 individuals.
- The killing on Jan. 8 comes days before officials from Thailand and other tiger range countries are due to meet to discuss progress toward an ambitious goal set in 2010 to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022.

Illegal mangrove logging surges in Indonesia’s Batam amid economic hardship
- Police in Indonesia’s Riau Islands have reported a 280% increase in seizures of mangrove wood from would-be smugglers this year.
- Police said much of the wood was cut from the main island of Batam, and destined for nearby Singapore and Malaysia.
- Indonesia is targeting the rehabilitation of 630,000 hectares (1.55 million acres) of mangrove forests across the country by 2024.
- The country is home to more than a quarter of the world’s mangroves, an ecosystem that buffers coastal communities against storm surges and sea-level rise, stores four times as much carbon as other tropical forests, and serves as a key habitat for a wealth of marine species.

‘They will die’: Fears for the last Piripkura as Amazon invasion ramps up
- Overflight images show that outsiders have not just invaded the Piripkura Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon, but are also expanding their illegal cattle ranches in what’s supposed to be the protected land of one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted Indigenous groups.
- Deforestation inside the territory surged nearly a hundredfold in the 12 months since August 2020, which Indigenous rights activists attribute to anticipation among would-be invaders that a restriction ordinance banning outsiders won’t be renewed as it has every two years since 2008.
- The invaders are closing in on the parts of the territory inhabited by Pakyî and Tamandua, the last two known Piripkura individuals living in the territory; there may be another 13 there who have chosen to remain uncontacted.
- The Piripkura suffered from at least two massacres since their first contact with outsiders in the 1980s, and now face the risk of extermination again, activists warn.

Major clothing brands contribute to deforestation in Cambodia, report finds
- A new report suggests that the garment industry is contributing to deforestation in Cambodia due to factories relying on illegal forest wood to generate electricity.
- Garment factories were found to use at least 562 tons of forest wood every day, the equivalent of up to 1,418 hectares (3,504 acres) of forest being burned each year, according to the report.
- Between 2001 and 2019, Cambodia is reported to have lost an estimated 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of forest through deforestation.
- While the garment industry does contribute deforestation, experts say that economic land concessions granted by the Cambodian government for agro-industrial purposes are by far the dominant driver of forest loss.

Police bust 2 men selling hornbills on Indonesian Facebook
- The online trade in hornbills is on the rise, a monitoring group says.
- The birds are widely hunted for their large casques and also sought as pets.

Bolsonaro evades genocide blame amid Indigenous deaths by invaders, COVID-19
- A Senate inquiry has opted not to call for genocide charges against President Jair Bolsonaro over his failure to sufficiently protect Brazil’s Indigenous population from the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalating illegal invasions of their reserves.
- The final report nevertheless accuses Bolsonaro of crimes against humanity, saying he took advantage of the pandemic to harm traditional communities.
- The Senate’s backtrack on the genocide call comes a week after two Indigenous children in the Yanomami reserve were killed in an accident involving illegal mining machinery.
- The Yanomami, like other Indigenous reserves across Brazil, has faced a rising influx of invaders under Bolsonaro’s watch, which prosecutors attribute in part to the president’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric and support for illegal mining inside these territories.

Hidden camera footage exposes bribery for palm oil in Papua New Guinea
- Palm oil executives were caught on camera admitting to bribery in Papua New Guinea in an investigation by Global Witness.
- The company’s Malaysian CEO also described a tax evasion scheme involving palm oil exports to India.

In Bali, prominent official faces backlash over illegal pet gibbon
- A public official in Indonesia has handed over a baby gibbon to conservation authorities following an outcry over his illegal possession of the endangered animal.
- I Nyoman Giri Prasta, the head of Badung district on the island of Bali, said he was giving up the siamang so that it could be rehabilitated and released into the wilds of its native Sumatra.
- Conservation authorities in Bali say they have not yet considered taking legal action; under Indonesian law, the illegal possession of protected species, like siamangs, is punishable by up to five years in prison.
- Giri Prasta is the latest in a long list of public officials known to keep protected species as pets, with enforcement of the crime still weak, conservationists say.

For Brazil’s persecuted Krenak people, justice arrives half a century later
- A federal court has condemned Brazil’s federal government, the Minas Gerais state government and the country’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, for human rights violations against the Krenak Indigenous people committed under the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
- Decades of reports, witness statements and evidence show torture, beatings, solitary confinement and forced labor were commonplace in the Krenak Reformatory and Guarani Farm, considered concentration camps by the Federal Public Ministry.
- Speaking Indigenous languages, drinking alcohol, and resisting land invasions by farmers were among the supposed infractions to justify the arbitrary imprisonment of Indigenous individuals deemed rebels by the regime.
- The court has ordered the federal government to organize an official ceremony for a public apology with national coverage, as well as deliver reparations.

Beached whale shark in Indonesia reportedly cut up by locals to eat
- Locals in Indonesia’s West Java province reportedly cut up and ate a whale shark that washed up on a beach last week.
- Authorities have deplored the incident, noting that the species is protected under Indonesian law.
- Marine animal strandings are common in Indonesia as its waters serve as both a habitat and an important migratory route for dozens of species.

Malaysian hornbill bust reveals live trafficking trend in Southeast Asia
- The recent seizure of eight live hornbills at Kuala Lumpur International Airport confirmed experts’ suspicions that live hornbill trafficking is on the rise in Southeast Asia.
- Analysis of seizure records across Southeast Asia indicates that the incident is just the tip of the iceberg: Between 2015 and 2021, there were 99 incidents of live hornbill trafficking involving 268 birds spanning 13 species.
- Among the recent haul was a baby helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil), a critically endangered species hunted to the brink of extinction for its distinctive ivory-like bill casque, which is prized by collectors in parts of Asia.
- Specialists say more information on how poaching for live trade affects wild populations is urgently required; only then, they say, will it be possible to push for stronger enforcement and close loopholes that allow the illegal trade to flourish.

As tigers dwindle, Indonesia takes aim at poaching ring
- Indonesian officials recently confiscated three tiger skins from a man in Sumatra.
- They believe the perpetrator is connected to a larger ring of wildlife traffickers.

For sustainable global fisheries, watchdogs focus on onshore beneficial owners
- Onshore owners of global fishing vessels have benefited from the illegal activities their crews practice, yet remain largely untouched by law enforcement.
- In the last decade, a growing number of international NGOs have worked in parallel to map out and highlight the onshore networks that fund and benefit from illegal fishing vessels around the world.
- They compile data from a wide range of sources to connect the dots between the people sailing the vessels to the people ultimately benefiting from the business.
- Eradicating fisheries crimes requires a broad portfolio of measures, from increased monitoring to strengthened corporate due diligence, with full transparency throughout the seafood supply chains at the center of it, experts say.

Lockdowns didn’t stop 2020 being deadliest year yet for earth defenders
- The countries with the highest death tolls overall were Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Overall, the Americas were the most dangerous for land and environmental defenders, with seven of the top 10 countries by number of killings located in Latin America.
- Nicaragua and Honduras were the deadliest per capita, as threats against Indigenous land by cattle ranchers and economic migrants continue to rise.
- Global Witness said governments need to take more aggressive action to force businesses to monitor and regulate their supply chains.

Worked to death: How a Chinese tuna juggernaut crushed its Indonesian workers
- One of China’s biggest tuna companies, Dalian Ocean Fishing, made headlines last year when four Indonesian deckhands fell sick and died from unknown illnesses after allegedly being subject to horrible conditions on one of its boats.
- Now, an investigation by Mongabay, Tansa and the Environmental Reporting Collective shows for the first time that the abuses suffered by workers on that vessel — most commonly, being given substandard food, possibly dangerous drinking water and being made to work excessively — were not limited to one boat, but widespread and systematic across the company’s fleet.
- Moreover, migrant fishers were subject to beatings and threats to withhold pay if they did not follow orders. Many have not received their full salaries or been paid at all.
- China has the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet, and Indonesia is widely believed to be the industry’s biggest supplier of labor. In 2019 and 2020, at least 30 fishers from Indonesia died on Chinese long-haul fishing boats, often from unknown illnesses.

Mother tiger and her cubs found dead in Sumatran forest
- The tigers were caught in a snare trap in Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem.
- The Sumatran tiger is a critically endangered species, with only a few hundred left in the wild.

Indonesian former fisheries minister jailed for bribery in lobster exports
- Indonesia’s former fisheries minister Edhy Prabowo has been sentenced to five years in jail for taking bribes to lift a ban on lobster larvae exports in 2020.
- A court in Jakarta also fined Edhy and barred him from running for elected office for three years after his release from jail.
- Despite the conviction, anti-corruption experts were left disappointed by the relatively low sentence, given his status as a high-profile active government official at the time.
- Lobsters are among Indonesia’s top fisheries commodities, but the illegal export of lobster larvae cost the country some $62 million in lost revenue in 2019 alone, and depleted the wild population.

Environmental defenders in Ecuador aren’t safe, new report shows
- A new report by Ecuador’s Alliance for Human Rights examines abuses against environmental rights defenders over the past 10 years, and finds 449 defenders subjected to intimidation, threats, harassment, persecution, and assassination.
- The report concludes that not only has the Ecuadoran state failed to protect rights defenders, but it has also been directly responsible for some of the abuses, like the concerning number of persecutions and prosecutions of rights defenders.
- Three environmental rights defenders have been murdered in Ecuador over the past 10 years — Andres Durazno, Freddy Taish and José Tendetza — with no one brought to justice for the crimes.

‘Technical problems’ holding up enforcement of rulings in Indonesian fire and haze cases, official says
- Plantation companies convicted of causing fires in Indonesia owe the government the equivalent of $233 million in unpaid fines, according to the environment ministry.
- The ministry is pushing courts to enforce their rulings but is facing difficulties on several fronts.

Unregulated by U.S. at home, Facebook boosts wildlife trafficking abroad
- The world’s largest social media company, Facebook, regularly connects wildlife traffickers around the world, and advocates are stepping up the pressure to address the problem in the company’s home country.
- Proposed U.S. legislation targets a decades-old law that protects online companies’ content as free speech on their platform. Advocates say wildlife crime is not speech, and that online companies lack the regulation that other “real-life” companies must follow.
- Trafficking has increased since Facebook chose to self-regulate in 2019, researchers say. The company could cooperate with law enforcement or conservationists, but it has rarely chosen to do so.
- Meanwhile, researchers are gathering more and more evidence that wildlife trafficking is one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity.

CSI, but for parrots: Study applies criminological tool CRAAVED to wildlife trade
- Parrots as the most traded animal taxon have the potential to provide a primary source of data for investigating the causes and consequences of the animal trade.
- A new study applies the CRAAVED model analysis to shed new light on key drivers of the illegal parrot trade in Indonesia, home to the highest diversity of the birds and a thriving wildlife market.
- The analysis identified three main factors for which species were targeted by traffickers: how accessible parrot species are to people and traders; whether legal export of the species is possible; and whether the species is enjoyable through its color, size or mimicry.
- Other experts have welcomed the findings and their implications, but point to limitations in the CRAAVED model and the importance of considering other factors such as harvest quotas and the motivation behind wildlife crime.

New bill seeks to end Hong Kong’s days as an illegal wildlife trade hub
- Hong Kong is a leading transportation hub for the illegal wildlife trade: In the past two years, Hong Kong authorities seized more than over 649 metric tons of illegal wildlife and wildlife products across 1,404 seizures, according to a new report.
- While many seizures lead to prosecution, the people who tend to be punished are the “mules” rather than the leaders of organized criminal syndicates. Additionally, some of the largest wildlife seizures in Hong Kong have not been followed by any prosecution, possibly due to the lack of evidence.
- A new bill may change the status quo by allowing wildlife crimes to be subject to the provisions of Hong Kong’s Organised and Serious Crimes Ordinance, which would allow authorities to conduct more in-depth investigations and hand out harsher penalties.
- Supporters of the bill say there is a strong possibility that it will pass into law due to strong political support and a lack of opposition.

In the Honduran Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, an illegal road for cattle and drugs
- Multiple sources, backed by satellite data, say an illegal road is being cut through the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Sources say the road will facilitate land invasions into the biosphere and is likely to be used as a drug-trafficking route.
- The road has created divisions between Indigenous groups, with the Bakinasta Miskito denouncing its presence and demanding the government step in to halt it.
- Despite knowing about the road for more than a year, the Honduran government has not taken definitive action to enforce the law.

Indonesian omnibus law’s ‘whitewash’ of illegal palm oil shocks its architects
- Indonesian lawmakers appear outraged at a scheme from a law they already passed that grants amnesty to oil palm plantations operating illegally inside forest areas.
- The amnesty scheme gives the operators a grace period of three years to apply for the proper paperwork, including a redesignation of the forest they’re illegally occupying to a non-forest designation.
- The lawmakers, who overwhelmingly approved the law last November despite near-universal criticism, have called the scheme “whitewashing” and “eco-terrorism.”
- One even expressed his own regret at not being a “forest thief” had he only known how lucrative it would be.

Indonesian law enforcers call for financial approach to fight illegal logging
- Law enforcement officials in Indonesia have called for using anti-money-laundering statutes to go after illegal loggers.
- Illegal logging is the most common environmental crime currently handled by the country’s forestry ministry, but enforcement tends to focus on the perpetrators on the ground.
- By treating illegal timber as a commodity, say officials from the Attorney General’s Office and the anti-money-laundering agency, enforcers can take a financial crimes approach that also goes after those perpetrators higher up the trafficking chain.
- They also identified addressing corruption as a key step in tackling illegal logging, noting that perpetrators are known to bribe officials.

Indigenous Dayak man jailed after Indonesian palm oil firm alleges theft
- An Indigenous Dayak man has been arrested for allegedly stealing oil palm fruit from a company’s plantation in Indonesia’s North Kalimantan province.
- The company is embroiled in a long-running conflict with five Dayak communities in the area as its concession overlaps with their ancestral lands.
- The arrest has triggered fear among the communities of further arrests if they keep trying to assert their land rights.

Skin in the game? Reptile leather trade embroils conservation authority
- The reptile skin trade is a controversial issue, with some experts saying that harvesting programs help conserve species and provide livelihood benefits, while others say that the trade is fraught with issues and animal welfare concerns.
- From a conservation standpoint, there is evidence that the reptile skin trade is sustainable for some species and in some contexts, but other research suggests that the trade could be decimating wild populations and doing more harm than good.
- Exotic leather is falling out of favor in the fashion industry: Numerous companies and brands have banned products made from reptile skin as well as fur, replacing them with products made from materials such as apple, grape or mushroom leather.
- Experts connected with the IUCN have written open letters and op-eds to lament the decisions of companies to ban exotic leather, arguing that these bans have damaged conservation efforts, but other experts question the IUCN’s unfailing support of an imperfect trade.

Intimidation of Brazil’s enviro scientists, academics, officials on upswing
- Increasingly, Brazilian environmental researchers, academics and officials appear to be coming under fire for their scientific work or views, sometimes from the Jair Bolsonaro government, but also from anonymous Bolsonaro supporters.
- Researchers and academics have come under attack for their scientific work on agrochemicals, deforestation and other topics, as well as for their socio-environmental views. Attacks have taken the form of anonymous insults and death threats, gag orders, equipment thefts, and even attempted kidnapping.
- A range of intimidation is being experienced by officials, including firings and threats of retaliation for institutional criticism at IBAMA, Brazil’s environment agency, ICMBio, the Chico Mendes Institute of Biodiversity Conservation overseeing Brazil’s national parks, and FUNAI, the Indigenous affairs agency.
- “Whose interests benefit from the denial of the data on deforestation… from criminalizing the action of NGOs and environmentalists? What we are witnessing is a coordinated action to make it easier for agribusiness to advance into Indigenous territories and standing forest,” says one critic.

Exposing organized crime in the Amazon: Q&A with Robert Muggah of the Igarapé Institute
- Relentless deforestation has pushed the Amazon to the brink of an ecological shift from rainforest to savannah with potentially devastating consequences for climate change and biodiversity.
- Home to most of the world’s tropical forest land, almost all logging in the Amazon is thought to be illegal, yet few penalties are imposed on offenders.
- To address the culture of impunity, a new data visualization platform, Ecocrime, has been developed by the Igarapé Institute, which seeks to expose the organized criminal networks that sustain illicit trade in the Amazon.

Guarani Indigenous men brutalized in Brazilian ‘expansion of violence’
- In the 1960s and 70s, the Guarani Kaiowá Indigenous group was expelled from its ancestral lands in Mato Grosso do Sul state by the Brazilian military dictatorship to expand the country’s agricultural frontier. Today, their traditional Indigenous homeland is occupied by large farms, whose owners refuse to return the property.
- A federal Supreme Court decision resulted in an order to allow the return of the Guarani Kaiowá to their former homeland where they now await the official demarcation of their territory to be approved by the federal government — an approval that still hasn’t come after the passage of ten years.
- The land dispute and standoff between the ranchers and the Guarani Kaiowá has repeatedly flared into violence over the years. In 2011, Indigenous leader Nízio Gomes was murdered in the Guaiviry community area by armed thugs.
- Violence flared yet again in Guaiviry last week when three Guarani Kaiowá men were assaulted, they say, by gunmen from the large Querência Farm. The Guarani Kaiowá say that intimidation of their community members has seriously escalated under the Jair Bolsonaro administration, which has shown hostility toward Indigenous rights.

Legal failings leave illegal loggers unpunished and certified in Indonesia
- Illegal loggers in Indonesia continue to go largely unpunished because of a weak judicial system and loopholes in timber regulations, according to a new report.
- The report by investigative NGOs EIA and Kaoem Telapak looked at law enforcement actions against more than 50 companies, most of them found to be trading in illegally logged merbau, a prized tropical hardwood, but evading prosecution.
- The few companies and individuals prosecuted and found guilty in court were still allowed to operate and even retain their certificates of timber legality — a stamp of approval that allows them to export the illegally logged wood.
- In one case, Indonesia’s highest court overturned a lower court’s judgment against a convicted merbau trafficker, ordering the authorities to give him back the stockpile of illegal timber they had seized from him.

Papua tribe moves to block clearing of its ancestral forest for palm oil
- Members of the Auyu tribe of Papua, Indonesia, are demanding a halt to the operations of palm oil company PT Indo Asiana Lestari (IAL), which appears to be gearing up to clear their ancestral forests.
- They say that the company failed to obtain the community’s consent for the project, and that it’s not clear whether it even has the requisite permits to begin operations.
- IAL’s concession is part of the Tanah Merah megaproject that is already dogged by allegations that key operating permits have been falsified.
- The Papua region is home to the world’s third-largest contiguous swath of tropical rainforest, after the Amazon and the Congo Basin, but large areas may be cleared for plantations.

Video: Romania’s deadly fight against illegal logging
- Romania’s rich and ancient forests are in peril. Since joining the European Union in 2007, the country has seen its forest cover depleted at record levels.
- Rangers and environmentalists who investigate and document these crimes face violence, intimidation and even murder from agents of an extensive criminal network that supplies multinational corporations with timber.
- New technology has become one of the most effective ways for activists to investigate and document environmental crimes.
- In late 2020, activists teamed up with technologists to monitor illegal logging using bio-acoustic devices hidden in treetops. The devices record sound patterns in the forest, sending instant alerts to rangers who can intervene to stop the theft in its tracks.

Lobster export policy that landed Indonesian minister in jail could resume
- Indonesia’s interim fisheries minister has indicated a controversial program to export lobster larvae could likely resume, despite being at the heart of an ongoing corruption investigation that has ensnared his predecessor.
- The former minister, Edhy Prabowo, was arrested Nov. 25 on allegations of bribery related to the issuance of permits for the export of lobster larvae.
- Resuming exports was itself a controversial move, reversing a ban imposed by Edhy’s predecessor, Susi Pudjiastuti, to allow Indonesia’s wild lobster populations to replenish after decades of overfishing.
- But Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for maritime affairs, who has taken over as interim fisheries minister, says there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the program and that it could soon continue, following an evaluation.

Indonesian fisheries minister arrested over graft in lobster policy
- Indonesia’s fisheries minister Edhy Prabowo and other top officials have been arrested by the anti-graft agency in connection to the new lobster seed export policy that was issued in May.
- Fishery watchdogs have praised the KPK for the arrest of Edhy in connection to the lobster export policy which observers have criticized for catering more to the interests of few businesses and politicians than those of the small fishers.
- Lobsters are among Indonesia’s top fisheries commodities, but the illegal export of larvae cost the country 900 billion rupiah ($62 million) in lost revenue in 2019 alone, according to the the government’s anti-money-laundering watchdog.

More Indonesian sailors repatriated from deadly Chinese fishing fleet
- Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry says another 88 of its citizens have been repatriated from a Chinese fishing fleet where six of their compatriots died under harsh working conditions.
- At least 257 Indonesian crew members have now returned this year from working on board vessels owned by Dalian Ocean Fishing; six sailors are known to have died while working, one of them dumped at sea.
- The returning sailors allege dangerous and likely illegal working conditions on board the boats, including 18-hour workdays and being forced to catch and fin sharks, including protected species, despite the vessels being tuna-fishing boats.
- Officials from three Indonesian recruitment agencies have been charged with human trafficking in connection with the case.

Breaking: Deaths of 2 more Indonesian crew uncovered on board Chinese tuna fleet
- Official documents show the deaths of two Indonesian crew members of a Chinese fishing fleet went unreported amid an outcry over the deaths of four other men and allegations of forced labor and illegal fishing.
- Saleh Anakota, 22, died on Aug. 10, three months after the deaths of four of his compatriots aboard the same boat, the Long Xing 629, drew international condemnation; Rudi Ardianto, 30, died on Aug. 8 aboard another boat, the Tian Xiang 16, in the same fleet.
- Both deaths, attributed to an unknown “sickness,” are mentioned in Indonesian Foreign Ministry documents seen by Mongabay.
- The documents also show Indonesia and China are working to bring home 155 Indonesian crew members from the Long Xing 629 and 11 other vessels owned by Dalian Ocean Fishing (DOF), a major Chinese tuna-fishing company that supplies Japanese and Chinese markets.

‘Potentially lethal’ police assault on Indigenous Papuan man was caught on camera
- Marius Betera was allegedly assaulted by a police officer in May in Papua, Indonesia. Though he died some two hours later, authorities moved quickly to attribute his death to a heart attack.
- Mongabay and The Gecko Project have learned that the alleged assault was caught on CCTV camera belonging to a palm oil company, the Korindo Group. The video has yet to be released to the public.
- Indonesian police and the National Commission on Human Rights have cited a post-mortem report to dismiss the possibility that Marius’ death was linked to the assault, but a forensic pathologist points to a “realistic possibility” of a connection.

Which version? Confusion over environmental fallout of Indonesia deregulation law
- A rule allowing subsistence farmers to burn small plots of land has been reinserted into the Job Creation Act passed last week.
- Other provisions affecting the plantation industry have also been adjusted in a new version of the law that appeared this week.

New Indonesian law may make it harder to punish firms for haze-causing fires
- A sweeping new law passed this week in Indonesia makes it easier to prosecute subsistence farmers for using fire to clear small plots of land.
- It also erodes the “strict liability” provision in existing law used by authorities to sue companies for causing fires.

Vietnam conservation regulations improving, but much work remains
- Vietnam made headlines earlier in the year for considering a wildlife trade ban in response to COVID-19, but such a development has not occurred.
- Nonetheless, the country’s laws related to biodiversity conservation are robust and generally comprehensive, with strong penalties for violations in place.
- But enforcement remains a problem, while corruption and other issues also hinder improved protection of Vietnam’s wildlife.
- Conservation organizations have been heartened by recent legal and regulatory improvements, but caution that there is still a long way to go.

Indonesia’s new intelligence hub wields data in the war on illegal fishing
- The Indonesian Maritime Information Center (IMIC), launched in July, aims to tackle illegal fishing and other maritime violations in the country’s waters by drawing on data and analysis from various ministries and agencies.
- Its proponents say it will enhance and expedite coordination among the many agencies involved and offer a public-facing data-sharing outlet.
- Indonesia’s waters are frequently plundered by foreign fishing vessels, and some areas are disputed by other countries, including China.

Two deaths, zero accountability: Indonesia’s mining pits claim more lives
- Two boys drowned in a rain-filled mining pit in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province in early September, highlighting once again the danger posed by abandoned pits.
- Police have ruled the deaths accidental, but a mining watchdog plans to file a criminal complaint against the mining company, PT Sarana Daya Hutama (SDH), for failing to rehabilitate the site at the end of its operations, as required by law.
- There are more than 1,700 of these abandoned pits throughout East Kalimantan, Indonesia’s coal-mining heartland, which have claimed 39 lives since 2011.
- The companies behind them are rarely ever punished; the only one to be prosecuted was fined the equivalent of just 7 U.S. cents.

New paper highlights spread of organized crime from global fisheries
- A recently published paper by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy highlights the extent of transnational organized crimes associated with the global fisheries sector.
- Besides illegal fishing, these crimes include fraud, money laundering, corruption, drug and human trafficking, and they occur globally throughout the entire fisheries value chain: onshore, at sea, in coastal regions, and online, the paper says.
- The paper calls for an intersectional, transboundary law enforcement by governments around the world to combat these “clandestine” crimes in the global fisheries industry.

Understaffed and under threat: Paraguay’s park rangers pay the ultimate price
- Protected areas in eastern Paraguay are beset by illegal marijuana cultivation and logging. Government interventions have had limited success, with clearing resuming shortly after agents leave an area.
- Park rangers tasked with monitoring the country’s reserves and parks say they routinely encounter hostile criminal groups when on patrol. These encounters can take a violent turn – several rangers have been murdered over the past decade while patrolling protected areas for illegal activity.
- According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the ideal number of park rangers is one for every 1,000 hectares. However, in Paraguay, there is just one park ranger for more than 38,000 hectares.
- Rangers say they need more resources and support to do their job safely and effectively.

Forest crimes persist in Peru following Indigenous leader’s murder
- The leader of an Indigenous community in Peru’s Huánuco region was murdered when he went fishing earlier this year. Despite this, criminal groups have reportedly continued to operate in the area.
- The death of Arbildo Meléndez Grandes is one of a series of environmental crimes reported since the COVID-19 state of emergency began in Peru.
- Operations against illegal mining and logging have been carried out in the Madre de Dios, Loreto and Ucayali regions in recent months.

No choice: Why communities in Paraguay are cutting down forests to survive
- Illegal deforestation for marijuana cultivation is a growing problem for eastern Paraguay’s protected areas.
- Sources say much of the clearing is done by indigenous community members and small farmers who are beset by poverty and have no other options.
- A joint project between the Paraguayan government and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations seeks to provide more opportunities for rural communities, but has been stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Marijuana farms expand in Paraguay reserve despite gov’t crackdowns
- Approximately 600 metric tons of marijuana was seized by agents of Paraguay’s National Anti-Drug Secretariat (SENAD) in an operation in the heart of the forests of Morombí Reserve, between the departments of Canindeyú and Caaguazú.
- Over eight days, some 70 officers destroyed 202 hectares of marijuana and dismantled 23 camps set up by drug traffickers.
- But sources say this is just the tip of the iceberg and many more illegal marijuana farms are pockmarked throughout Morombí, increasing by the day. Satellite data support this, showing the reserve’s deforestation rate skyrocketed in 2019 and continues to climb into 2020.

Protected areas in Paraguay hit hard by illegal marijuana farming
- Agriculture has deforested much of eastern Paraguay’s Upper Parana Atlantic Forest, an endangered ecoregion of which less 10% remains today.
- More recently, illegal marijuana cultivation has become a driving force of deforestation in the region. Even protected areas are not immune from destruction, with satellite data and drone footage confirming large swaths of protected primary forest have been cleared for marijuana cropland over the past year. Sources say timber and charcoal are also being produced as by-products of clearing for marijuana and are illegally transported out of protected areas.
- Four protected areas have been particularly affected: Mbaracayú Reserve, San Rafael National Park/Proposed National Reserve, Morombí Reserve and Caazapá National Park.
- Forest rangers working in the protected areas say there aren’t enough enforcement staff to combat the illegal encroachment.

Video: ‘Injustice’ for West Papuans whose land was sold out from under them
- Al Jazeera’s 101 East program recently aired a documentary about allegedly fraudulent land deals on Indonesian part of New Guinea, produced as part of a collaboration with Mongabay, The Gecko Project and the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism-Newstapa.

Indonesian parliament to probe pulpwood firm’s dispute with Indigenous group
- Lawmakers in Indonesia want to question pulp and paper company PT Arara Abadi about its dispute with an Indigenous community in Sumatra that resulted in a member of the community being jailed on dubious charges.
- The company has held the concession to the land since 1996, but the Sakai Indigenous tribe have lived and farmed there since 1830, and claim ancestral rights to the area.
- Those rights, however, are not recognized by the government, which allowed PT Arara Abadi, a subsidiary of paper giant Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), to press charges against Indigenous farmer Bongku for clearing a small plot of pulpwood trees.
- Bongku was granted early release in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and says his fight will continue.

Groups demand financial, human rights probes into palm conglomerate Korindo
- Activists have called for a financial probe into the Korindo Group, a conglomerate that paid a $22 million “consultancy fee” for the permits to expand its oil palm operations in Indonesia’s Papua province.
- The circumstances around the payment were recently uncovered in an investigation by Mongabay, The Gecko Project, the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism-Newstapa and Al Jazeera.
- Activists want Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency to look into the possibility that the money was channeled as bribes to officials.
- They also want the government to ensure the safety of Papuan communities featured in the Al Jazeera documentary about the payment, in light of a record of rights abuses associated with Korindo’s operations.

Drug trafficking could be putting ‘fragile fisheries’ at risk, study says
- A new study found that fishing vessels are increasingly being used to traffic drugs, tripling over the past eight years, and accounting for 15% of the global retail value of illegal drugs.
- Small-scale fishermen commonly get involved in the drug trade, possibly due to collapsing fish stocks and strict conservation measures threatening their livelihoods, or because they have been coerced.
- While most fishing vessels carrying drugs don’t appear to be involved in other maritime crimes like illegal fishing, drug traders may reinvest profits into illegal fishing activities, which could lead to fisheries collapse and environmental destruction.
- The COVID-19 pandemic may intensify the issue of drug trafficking on small fishing vessels due to global economic stress, and maritime routes currently being more accessible than land routes.

The Consultant: Why did a palm oil conglomerate pay $22m to an unnamed ‘expert’ in Papua?
- In a year-long investigation with The Gecko Project, the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism-Newstapa and Al Jazeera, Mongabay traced a $22 million “consultancy” payment connected to a major land deal in Indonesia’s Papua province.
- It took us from South Korea and Singapore to the heart of the largest rainforest left in Asia, to find out how the payment helped make the Korindo Group one of the largest oil palm producers in the region.
- Photography by Albertus Vembrianto.

Indonesian court jails indigenous farmers for ‘stealing’ from land they claim
- A court in Indonesia has sentenced two indigenous farmers to eight and 10 months in prison respectively for harvesting palm fruit from land whose ownership is contested by the community and a palm oil firm, PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun Persada.
- The ruling appeared to ignore evidence showing that the villagers are the rightful owners of the land; the defendants say they will appeal and also file a lawsuit against the company.
- Activists have lambasted the verdict, saying the entire case is riddled with irregularities, such as the inability of the prosecutors and the company to present proof that the firm owns the contested land.
- A third defendant died in police custody in April after reportedly being denied medical care for his ill health.

Land conflicts escalate with spread of COVID-19 in Indonesia
- Companies embroiled in land disputes with rural communities in Indonesia appear to be using the lull in oversight during the COVID-19 outbreak to strengthen their claims, activists say.
- Since the first confirmed cases of the disease were reported in the country on March 2, two local land defenders have been killed and four arrested in connection with land disputes in Sumatra and Borneo.
- The national human rights commission has called on companies, including palm oil and mining firms, to cease their activities during this public health emergency.

Plantation director in dispute with indigenous community is charged with illegal logging
- Imanuel Darusman, a director of CV Sumber Berkat Makmur, was charged by Indonesia’s forestry ministry.
- An official with the ministry’s law enforcement bureau said they began to look into the case when the arrest of 26 indigenous people by the local police for vandalizing the company’s equipment made headlines across the Maluku region in February.
- Most of the indigenous people were quickly freed, though two of them were formally charged with vandalism.

National parks pay the price as land conflicts intensify in Colombia
- Last month, authorities extinguished a fire in Sierra de la Macarena National Park that nearly reached the banks of the Caño Cristales river. A well-known tourist attraction, the Caño Cristales provides habitat to a sensitive species of underwater plant called Macarenia clavigera, which explodes into a living rainbow of gold, olive green, blue, black and red for a few months every year.
- The Colombian Ministry of Defense and Reuters reported the blaze was set by FARC guerrillas who have rejected the peace process, known by the government as “FARC dissidents,” as they attempted to expand coca cultivation in the region. However, local sources suspect small farmers called campesinos or cattle ranchers set the fires to protest the government’s recent anti-deforestation operations that have been blamed for the displacement of families residing within the country’s national parks.
- Satellite data show deforestation is intensifying in Sierra de la Macarena, as well as in two adjacent national parks: Tinigua and Cordillera de los Picachos. This trend is not limited to these parks, with a new study finding dramatic increase in deforestation in the majority of Colombia’s protected areas and buffer zones following the demobilization of the FARC in 2016. The study said armed groups, especially FARC dissidents, are consolidating within national parks such as Tinigua, assigning land to farmers and promoting livestock and coca crops as an economic engine of the colonization process. Local sources say areas without FARC presence are being invaded by large-scale landowners.
- Meanwhile, the Colombian government has reportedly given the go-ahead to petroleum exploration projects in and around Tinigua and Cordillera de los Picachos national parks, attracting criticism for launching offensives against small farmers while greenlighting extractivist industries.

New player starts clearing rainforest in world’s biggest oil palm project
- A company owned by a politically connected Indonesian family and an investor from New Zealand has begun clearing rainforest within an area slated to become the world’s largest oil palm plantation.
- The project will push industrial agriculture deep into the primary rainforests of southern Papua, but has been plagued by allegations of illegality.
- While the new investors represent a break from those allegations, the government’s failure to investigate them has ongoing consequences.

Peru uncovers organized crime network laundering illegally mined gold
- A massive operation involving more than a thousand law enforcement officers in five regions has led to the arrests of 18 people accused of belonging to a criminal network called Los Topos, or The Moles, laundering illegally mined gold.
- Four of those under investigation are listed in the mining formalization registry,with their documents used to legitimize the transport of large quantities of gold.
- The Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines says those who abuse their mining formalization status will be removed from the registry.
- But law enforcers investigating the network say the government’s repeated extension of the deadline for miners to register allows opportunity for more such abuses of the system.

Palm oil firm has farmers jailed for harvesting from land it stole from them
- A palm oil company found to be operating illegally outside its concession has filed a criminal complaint of theft against indigenous farmers who harvested palm fruit from that land.
- Local officials and rights groups have since 2010 declared that PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun has been operating illegally on community lands in Central Kalimantan province.
- The company has still not acted on an order to cede back to the community up to 1,800 hectares (4,450 acres) of illegally cultivated land.
- Instead, it has accused three indigenous farmers of stealing palm fruit from the land, in a case that activists say is emblematic of how corporations can weaponize law enforcement against communities over land disputes.

Deregulation in Indonesia: Economy first, environment later. Maybe
- Sweeping changes being proposed under the Indonesian government’s deregulation bill could prove more disastrous for the environment than previously thought, experts say.
- The bill calls for stripping local governments of the power to issue permits for environmentally sensitive projects and handing that authority to the central government — effectively a return to the power structure of the authoritarian New Order era, critics say.
- The bill also prescribes lighter penalties for environmental violators, including an end to criminal charges for plantation companies that set fire to their concessions to clear the land for planting.

Video: Abraham Khouw, the professor who joined the Save Aru movement
- Professor Abraham Khouw is one of dozens of academics in the Indonesian city of Ambon who lent his expertise to the Save Aru movement in the mid-2010s.
- The movement formed after a company called the Menara Group got permits to clear nearly two-thirds of the Aru Islands’ rainforest for a giant sugar plantation.
- The academics lent extra firepower to the fight against the plantation, which was mainly driven by local indigenous communities.

Video: Mika Ganobal, the civil servant who risked his job to save his homeland
- Several years ago, a plantation company nearly broke ground on a plan to clear more than half of the rainforest in Indonesia’s Aru Islands.
- Local residents organized against the project. One of the leaders of the effort to stop it was a local bureaucrat named Mika Ganobal.
- Watch our video profile of Mika below.

Sea turtles continue to swim in troubled waters: report
- TRAFFIC released new data about the prevalence of sea turtle trafficking in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
- The group says at least 2,354 turtles were seized in the three countries from January 2015 to July 2019.
- Tens of thousands of turtle eggs were also seized, mostly in Malaysia.

Analysis: The Tanah Merah project is a bellwether for Jokowi’s permit review
- This week, Mongabay and The Gecko Project revealed an allegation of forgery at the heart of the world’s largest oil palm plantation project.
- Permits underpinning the project, now being used to clear rainforest in the Indonesian part of New Guinea, were falsified, government officials have alleged.
- The case provides a window into how Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s administration is wrestling with the consequences of two decades of poorly regulated plantation expansion.

Revealed: Government officials say permits for mega-plantation in Papua were falsified
- The allegation has been raised internally within the Indonesian government on multiple occasions, an investigation by Mongabay and The Gecko Project has found.
- An area nearly the size of Paris has already been cleared on the basis of the allegedly fraudulent permits, cutting a hole in a vast stretch of rainforest on the island of New Guinea.
- The companies clearing the forest have denied the allegation, insisting their permits are legitimate.
- The case has emerged as world leaders gather in Madrid this week for the 25th UN climate summit, with stemming Indonesia’s forest loss deemed critical if the nation is to meet its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearly extinct vaquita mothers with calves spotted in recent expeditions
- The latest expeditions in the Gulf of California, Mexico, to survey the vaquita, the world’s smallest cetacean, have yielded sightings of both vaquita mothers and calves. This, researchers say, indicates that the mammals are still reproducing despite threats.
- In a survey carried out between August and September, researchers spotted what they say were likely six distinct individual vaquitas.
- During a subsequent expedition in October, researchers say they spotted vaquitas several times, including six different vaquitas in two groups, and three pairs of mothers and calves.
- This news is hopeful, but the mammal’s future is still perilous due to the continued use of illegal fishing nets in its habitat, experts say.

Mozambique’s newly empowered rangers, courts catch up with poachers, loggers
- Mozambique has recorded a measure of success recently against wildlife poachers and illegal loggers, thanks to stronger enforcement.
- Nearly a quarter of the country’s area has been designated as conservation space, helping wildlife numbers recover after a 15-year civil war that decimated animal populations.
- One of the remaining threats to the country’s protected areas is illegal logging.
- In addition to better training and equipment for rangers, the recent introduction of new conservation laws and extensive training of prosecutors and judges is helping deliver swift and heavier sentences for poaching and illegal logging.

Palm owner charged with ordering murder of two journalists in Indonesia
- Five people, including the alleged owner of an oil palm plantation in Sumatra where two journalists were found dead, have been charged with their murder.
- The alleged assailants are accused to being paid $3,000 from the company to kill Maraden Sianipar, 55, and Martua Siregar, 42, apparently in retaliation for their advocacy on behalf of locals engaged in a land dispute with the company.
- The murders on Oct. 29 occurred in the same month that environmental activist Golfrid Siregar was found dead, also in North Sumatra, in suspicious circumstances. At the time he was challenging the police’s failure to pursue a forgery complaint in connection with a permit for a power plant in an orangutan habitat.
- The recent deaths of journalists and activists defending environmental protection have raised concerns among many observers over the state of activism and press freedom in Indonesia.

Indonesian journalists critical of illegal palm plantation found dead
- Indonesian journalists Maraden Sianipar and Martua Siregar were found dead with stab and cut wounds at an illegal oil palm plantation in Sumatra that they had reported on critically.
- Police have vowed a full investigation, but it’s not clear whether the deaths were linked to the journalists’ work or a long-running dispute with the local community.
- The victims were reportedly part of a community group that had been trying to gain control of the palm crop at the plantation after authorities ruled the company behind it, PT Sei Alih Berombang (SAB), had illegally cleared forested land.
- The deaths of Maraden and Martua occurred in the same month that environmental activist Golfrid Siregar died of severe head injuries that police say resulted from a drunken-driving crash but that his associates have linked to foul play.

Indonesia protests: Land bill at center of unrest
- In recent weeks, Indonesia has seen its largest mass protests since the “people power” movement that forced President Suharto to step down in 1998.
- Among a variety of pro-democracy demands, the protesters want lawmakers to scrap a controversial bill governing land use in the country.
- The bill defines new crimes critics say could be used to imprison indigenous and other rural citizens for defending their lands against incursions by private companies.
- It also sets a two-year deadline by which citizens must register their lands with the government, or else watch them pass into state control. Activists say the provision would deal a “knockout blow” to the nation’s indigenous rights movement.

’Rampant’ fishing continues as vaquita numbers dwindle
- An expedition surveying the Gulf of California for the critically endangered vaquita porpoise has reported seeing more than 70 fishing boats in a protected refuge.
- Vaquita numbers have been decimated in the past decade as a result of gillnet fishing for another critically endgangered species, the totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder can fetch more than $20,000 per kilogram ($9,000 per pound) in Asian markets.
- Local fishing organizations in the region say that the government has stopped compensating them after a gillnet ban, aimed at protecting the vaquita from extinction, went into effect in 2015.

10 takeaways from Indonesia’s grassroots #SaveAru success
- The Save Aru campaign is one of Indonesia’s most successful grassroots movements in recent years.
- The people of Indonesia’s Aru Islands managed to defeat a plan to turn more than half of their archipelago into a massive sugar plantation.
- This month, Mongabay and The Gecko Project published a narrative article about the movement. Here are 10 takeaways from the article.

For one Indonesian fisher, saving caught turtles is a moral challenge
- Sea turtles are protected species under Indonesian law, but continue to be caught and killed for food and ornaments in many parts of the country.
- Official wildlife conservation agencies are typically underfunded, and large-scale conservation programs run by NGOs are far from effective, a conservationist says.
- But in a fishing village on the island of Sulawesi, a lone fisherman is playing his part by buying live turtles accidentally caught by other fishers and usually injured, and caring for them until they heal and can be released back into the ocean.
- Conservationists have welcomed his initiative and intent, but raised questions about his expertise, with some of the more than 20 turtles he has cared for so far dying.

Indonesian villagers fighting planned mine garner national support
- Indonesia’s national human rights commission and the national ombudsman have weighed in on a dispute over plans to mine nickel on the remote island of Wawonii.
- Residents have protested over the plans, which they say threaten their fishing grounds and freshwater sources.
- Local authorities have sent out mixed messages on whether the project will proceed, while the company involved has continued clearing villagers’ land.
- The rights commission has called for a halt to criminal investigations of the land defenders, while the ombudsman has called for all the permits to be scrapped.

Indonesian official at center of licensing scandal charged in new case
- Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency has charged a former district head from Borneo in connection with a port development project.
- Darwan Ali, who was the head of Seruyan district in Central Kalimantan province from 2003 to 2013, is accused of conspiring to inflate the budget to build the Segintung seaport, allegedly causing losses to the state of $1.48 million.
- Investigators also allege that Darwan steered the contract for the project to a developer in exchange for the company’s support for his election campaign.
- Environmental activists say they hope the investigation will lead the way to probing other, more serious allegations against Darwan, who was the subject of a 2017 investigative report by Mongabay and The Gecko Project into a massive scheme to flip permits for oil palm plantations to multinational firms.

‘Weird’ police probe rules Indonesian activist died in drink-driving crash
- Police in Indonesia have ruled the death of an outspoken environmental activist a lone drink-driving accident.
- But former colleagues of Golfrid Siregar, 34, dispute this finding, pointing to several holes in the evidence cited by police, including independent testimony from his family that he wasn’t a drinker.
- Golfrid’s death has prompted an international outcry, with groups such as Human Rights Watch calling for a thorough and transparent investigation into his death.
- Golfrid provided legal assistance for local communities ensnared in land conflicts with oil palm companies, and at the time of his death was involved in a lawsuit over alleged forgery in the permitting process for a controversial hydropower project in an orangutan habitat.

Suspicions of murder in death of Indonesian environmental activist
- Golfrid Siregar, an environmental activist at a local chapter of Indonesia’s largest green NGO, died this week under suspicious circumstances.
- His colleagues have questioned the police narrative of a motorcycle crash or a violent robbery, saying the evidence, including severe injuries to his head, indicate he was killed elsewhere and his body dumped to conceal the crime.
- Golfrid provided legal assistance for local communities ensnared in land conflicts with oil palm companies. At the time of his death he was involved in a lawsuit against the North Sumatra government over alleged forgery in the permitting process for a controversial hydropower project in an orangutan habitat.
- Golfrid’s death is the latest in a disturbing pattern of environmental defenders dying under suspicious circumstances in Indonesia.

Saving Aru: The epic battle to save the islands that inspired the theory of evolution
- In the mid-1800s, the extraordinary biodiversity of the Aru Islands helped inspire the theory of evolution by natural selection.
- Several years ago, however, a corrupt politician granted a single company permission to convert most of the islands’ rainforests into a vast sugar plantation.
- The people of Aru fought back. Today, the story of their grassroots campaign resonates across the world as a growing global movement seeks to force governments to act on climate change.

A newborn dies amid Indonesia fire crisis, as parents fear for their kids’ health
- A newborn child in Indonesia’s Riau province has become one of the latest fatalities of the haze blanketing large swaths of the region as a result of fires burning through Sumatra’s forests.
- Nearly 30,000 people in Riau alone have suffered from acute respiratory infections during this year’s fires, and nearly 310,000 have been affected by eye and skin irritation, dizziness and vomiting.
- Among those reporting worrying symptoms are pregnant women, one of whom said she’d miscarried five years earlier during a similar haze crisis.
- The fires burn nearly every year, emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases that have helped keep Indonesia among the top carbon polluters worldwide and spreading haze as far as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

Wildfires spread to planned site of new Indonesian capital
- Fires raging across Indonesia have flared up in an area of Borneo where the government recently announced would be the site of the nation’s new capital.
- The location had been chosen in part because it was believed to be at low risk from fires and other disasters.
- Haze from the fires has affected local communities as well as a nearby orangutan rescue and rehabilitation center.
- Authorities have arrested two farmers for setting fires on their land, but activists say they were doing so in a controlled manner and with the permission of local officials.

Latin America saw most murdered environmental defenders in 2018
- Colombia was the deadliest of these, with 24 killings in 2018, followed by Brazil with 20, Guatemala with 16, and Mexico with 14.
- These killings are driven primarily by conflicts over mining; other causes include conflicts over agriculture and the defense of water sources.

Indonesian officials foil attempt to smuggle hornbill casques to Hong Kong
- Indonesian authorities have arrested a woman for allegedly attempting to smuggle 72 helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil) casques to Hong Kong.
- The distinctive-looking bird is critically endangered, its precipitous decline driven by poaching for its casque — a solid, ivory-like protuberance on its head that’s highly prized in East Asia for use as ornamental carvings.
- Tackling the hornbill trade will be on the agenda at next month’s CITES wildlife trade summit in Geneva.

Bringing back the fish: Q&A with a repentant blast fisherman
- For years local NGOs and government officials attempted to convince the fishermen of El Salvador’s Jiquilisco Bay to stop fishing with explosives, a practice that not only risks life and limb but also harms marine populations and habitats.
- Ultimately, however, it was a fisherman named Eleuterio Lara, now 69, who conjured up a convincing alternative.
- By dropping tree branches, rocks and bicycle parts into the bay, he was able to create an artificial reef that could support enough life to make line-and-pole fishing a viable option. Soon, officials were investing in more advanced cement structures that could create even better reefs and Lara was convincing his fellow fishermen to ditch blast fishing.
- Mongabay hailed Lara as he was peddling down a dirt road on his bicycle for a conversation about his experience with blast fishing, his inspiration for artificial reefs, and what the future holds for Jiquilisco Bay.

Indonesian governor latest official busted for bribes in environmental case
- Three local officials, including a governor, have been arrested and charged for allegedly taking bribes in a land reclamation project.
- The businessman behind the project in Sumatra’s Riau Islands, who has also been arrested, planned to build a resort and tourism site on reclaimed land in a bay designated as protected.
- Observers say that projects involving land reclamation activities are prone to corruption.

Salvadoran fishermen ditch blast fishing for artificial reefs
- Blast fishing has taken a toll on both the fishermen and marine life of El Salvador’s Jiquilisco Bay Biosphere Reserve.
- Some residents have lost limbs or eyes or suffered bad burns. And populations of mangroves, fish, and critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles have declined.
- Over the last decade, officials have made rooting out the practice a top priority, placing their bets on a creative alternative that a local fisherman suggested in 2009: the creation of artificial reefs to replenish marine life.
- Today blast fishing has declined by 90 percent and the communities are trying to market their seafood as “clean fish” at a premium price.

Was Sierra Leone’s one-month fishing ban enough to replenish fish stocks?
- The Sierra Leone government closed the country’s waters to fishing by industrial vessels during the entire month of April to give flagging fish stocks a chance to rebuild. During that period artisanal fishers were allowed to fish.
- Both industrial and artisanal fishers appeared to support the closure, the first of its kind, amid declining catches and an influx of virtually unregulated foreign fishing vessels.
- Officials declared the closure a success, as part of Sierra Leone’s broader effort to formalize and gain regulatory control of its fisheries.
- However, outside experts have expressed doubt that the move would do much to improve the state of the country’s fisheries.

Chinese nationals arrested in US after smuggling totoaba swim bladders worth $3.7 million from Mexico
- According to a report this week by Quartz, two Chinese nationals were arrested last month in the state of California with $3.7-million-worth of totoaba swim bladders that they had smuggled from Mexico.
- More than 800 totoaba maws were confiscated by Mexican authorities last year in two separate busts of Chinese nationals who were attempting to smuggle the swim bladders out of the country. Also last year, Chinese customs officials confiscated 980 pounds of totoaba maws, estimated to be worth as much as $26 million.
- These enforcement actions are welcome news, Andrea Crosta, executive director of wildlife trade watchdog group Elephant Action League wrote in a commentary for Mongabay earlier this year. But he added that, without further action to directly disrupt the totoaba maw supply chain and the operations of the wildlife crime networks involved in the illegal trade, there is “absolutely no chance” to save the vaquita.

Social media enables the illegal wildlife pet trade in Malaysia
- Conservationists say that prosecuting wildlife traffickers in Malaysia for trading in protected species isn’t easy, as traders have several loopholes to aid their efforts.
- One wildlife trafficker known as Kejora Pets has been operating in Peninsular Malaysia for years, selling “cute” pets to individuals through social media.
- Malaysia’s wildlife act doesn’t address the posting of protected animals for sale on social media, and operators like Kejora Pets appear to avoid ever being in possession of protected animals, allowing them to skirt statutes aimed at catching illicit traders.
- Proposed changes to Malaysia’s wildlife act could offer some relief to besieged populations of protected species by making it easier to prosecute online trafficking of protected animals.

Goldman Prize winner survives armed attack on Afro-Colombian social leaders
- Last week on May 4, two bodyguards were wounded when armed gunmen tried to storm a meeting of Afro-Colombian activists that included 2018 Goldman Prize winner Francia Márquez.
- The community leaders had been meeting to discuss future actions following a massive land rights protests last month in Colombia’s Cauca region in which one protester was killed by armed forces.
- In March and April, Afro-Colombian activists participated in an indigenous-led protest with 20,000 people against the government’s environmental and social policies.

What we learned from two years of investigating corrupt land deals in Indonesia
- The now-concluded investigative series “Indonesia for Sale” examined the corruption underpinning Indonesia’s land rights and climate crisis in unparalleled depth.
- The series was a collaboration between Mongabay and The Gecko Project, an investigative journalism initiative founded at Earthsight in 2017.
- In this final commentary, we explore how tackling corruption is a vital precondition for Indonesia to meet its climate targets and resolve land conflicts, and the role of government and civil society in doing so.

Indonesia electricity chief charged with bribery over coal-fired power plant
- Indonesian anti-graft investigators have charged the head of state-owned power utility PLN, Sofyan Basir, with bribery in connection to a coal-fired plant on the island of Sumatra.
- Sofyan was responsible for awarding contracts for the $900 million Riau-1 plant, whose construction has been suspended following a raft of corruption allegations and arrests.
- Among those already tried and convicted in the case are a government minister, a member of parliament, and a shareholder in one of the companies awarded the Riau-1 contract; Sofyan himself faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
- Environmental activists have praised the anti-graft commission for pursuing the case, which they say should spur the government to move away from coal and shift toward renewable energy.

Sumatran governor jailed over bribes to award infrastructure projects
- A court in Jakarta has sentenced the governor of the province of Aceh, in Sumatra, to seven years in prison for taking bribes to award local infrastructure contracts.
- Irwandi Yusuf had previously gained a reputation as a “green governor” for his policies championing environmental conservation and sustainable development of the province’s natural resources.
- He was arrested last July for taking a bribe from the head of a district in Aceh to approve infrastructure projects there, and for taking kickbacks from members of his campaign team to farm out government contracts.

Indonesia arrests 7 for allegedly selling Komodo dragons over Facebook
- Indonesian officials have arrested seven suspected members of a trafficking network that sold at least 40 Komodo dragons, along with other rare species, through Facebook and other social media platforms.
- Komodo dragons are found only in Indonesia and are a protected species, which means the suspects could face up to five years in prison and up to $7,000 each in fines for trading the animals.
- Six baby Komodo dragons were seized from the suspects, and are now being cared for by conservation officials ahead of a possible release back into the wild.
- The arrests have highlighted the dominant role of social media platforms in facilitating the illegal trade in Indonesia’s protected wildlife, with up to 98 percent of transactions believed to be carried out online.

Indonesia oil slicks highlight weak enforcement against bilge dumping
- An environmental monitoring group has published reports saying that two ships have been pumping their waste oil out to sea, in a process known as bilge dumping, off the coast of Sumatra.
- The findings are based on a combination of satellite imagery of the slicks, which extend a total of 135 kilometers (84 miles), and tracking data from the ships.
- Activists say these findings highlight just how common bilge dumping is in Indonesian waters, and the lack of enforcement against the practice.
- Officials had not commented on the matter as of the time this story was published.

Sergio Rojas Ortiz, leader of Costa Rica’s indigenous Bribri, slain by gunmen
- Sergio Rojas Ortiz, leader of the Bribri indigenous people, was murdered at his home in the indigenous territory of Salitre in Costa Rica on the night of March 18.
- Rojas, who was a coordinator of the Frente Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas, or the National Front of Indigenous People (FRENAPI), was leading a movement to reclaim indigenous land from non-indigenous settlers — a fight that had resulted in numerous death threats to him and others in the past.
- In a statement, FRENAPI said it placed full responsibility for Rojas’s murder on the government of President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, and demanded “an immediate explanation of this latest incident of blood and violence against the Indigenous people of Costa Rica.”

Illegal gold mining destroys wetland forest in Madagascar park
- Over the last two years, small crews of miners using rudimentary hand tools have made repeated incursions into Ranomafana National Park in southeastern Madagascar, to dig hundreds of shallow pit mines.
- The wave of mining coincides with a steadily worsening security situation in the area, complicating attempts at enforcement and limiting researchers’ ability to quantify the problem.
- In a new paper, authors used satellite imagery to analyze changes in forest cover and drone photography to survey the wetlands in the heart of Ranomafana.
- The area affected is still relatively small, but experts fear the problem could easily become much worse.

Indonesia rescues captive orangutans, but leaves their owners untouched
- Authorities in Indonesia have confiscated two juvenile Sumatran orangutans, a critically endangered species, being kept as pets.
- Possession of an orangutan is punishable by up to five years in prison in Indonesia, but authorities have never prosecuted any pet owners, who tend to be powerful and influential figures, and instead go after the poachers and traders.
- Conservationists say there need to be legal consequences for keeping orangutans as pets, in order to discourage the illegal trade, which involves poachers killing mother apes to capture babies and juveniles.

Police charge Indonesian politician’s brother in deforestation case
- Police in Indonesia have charged the brother of a provincial deputy governor with clearing a protected forest to make way for an oil palm plantation.
- Musa Idishah was questioned by investigators, but released pending the investigation.
- His brother, North Sumatra Deputy Governor Musa Rajekshah, previously ran the company at the center of the investigation, and has also been linked to another corruption scandal.
- Oil palm plantations are a major driver of deforestation on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where they are often carved out of ostensibly protected forests.

Indonesia’s anti-graft agency arrests Borneo politician over mining permits
- Supian Hadi, the head of East Kotawaringin district, is the latest politician to be charged with corruption over the issuance of licenses in the natural resource sector.
- Rather than catch him in the act of taking a bribe, anti-graft investigators used other means to build a case against Supian. They say they have evidence he took bribes in exchange for granting mining permits.
- The anti-graft agency started investigating Hadi after receiving a complaint from the public about his alleged corruption.

Arson attack in Indonesia leaves activist shaken
- Murdani, the head of a local chapter of Indonesia’s largest environmental NGO, was the victim of an arson attack on his home over the weekend. No one was hurt, but his property was badly damaged.
- Murdani believes he was being watched in the months leading up the attack. He had received threatening text messages linked to his advocacy work.
- Murdani thinks his advocacy against sand mining on his native island of Lombok might be the reason he was targeted.

Asiatic black bear cubs rescued from illegal wildlife trade in Vietnam
- Vietnamese authorities confiscated the two female bear cubs from wildlife smugglers in Hai Phong province on January 9, according to Vienna, Austria-based animal welfare NGO Four Paws.
- After spending a night in a hotel, the cubs were taken to a Four Paws bear sanctuary in Ninh Binh on January 10, where they are receiving intensive medical care.
- Authorities do not know who was meant to buy the bear cubs or where their ultimate destination was. It’s likely that the bears were imported from Laos, though they could also have come from a bear farm in Vietnam.

‘Everything’s moving’: Indonesia seeks global pushback on illegal fishing
- Officials in Indonesia, home to one of the world’s biggest fisheries, say their fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing continues to be stymied by the complex web of offshore holdings that own much of the illegal fishing fleet.
- Enforcement efforts have failed to net the owners of these vessels, instead only going as far as punishing the crew caught on board the boats.
- Indonesia’s fisheries minister, Susi Pudjiastuti, has long called for an international consensus to recognize IUU fishing as a transnational crime, putting it in the same bracket as drug trafficking and human smuggling, which would enable greater international cooperation to identify and prosecute owners of illegal fishing boats.

Brazil: Bolsonaro supporter works to imprison Dorothy Stang’s successor
- Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro is reportedly considering logger and politician Silvério Fernandes to head the Xingu, Pará, branch of the Brazilian Institute for Settlement and Land Reform (INCRA). Fernandes and other ruralists have accused Father José Amaro Lopes de Souza of serious land reform-related crimes.
- Father Amaro is the successor of U.S. missionary Dorothy Stang, murdered in 2005. Amaro says he committed no crime, though admits to supporting landless worker settlements in Anapu, Pará state. Father Amaro was charged and imprisoned earlier this year and held in proximity to the man convicted of organizing Stang’s murder.
- Land conflicts in Anapu began in the 1970s when Brazil’s military government invited outsiders to occupy land there, with the provision that they could keep it when they produced crops or livestock. Few succeeded, and the land reverted to the state. Later, agrarian reform communities were established which Stang supported.
- She was killed in 2005. Land conflicts simmered after that, with violence erupting after 2015 when the nearby Belo Monte dam was finished and unemployed workers, allegedly prompted by loggers, poured into Anapu to claim land. If Fernandes gets the INCRA title, he’ll hold sway over workers’ settlement policy in the Xingu region.

Indonesian court throws out lawsuit against green expert’s testimony
- A court in Indonesia has thrown out a lawsuit against an environmental expert whose testimony was instrumental in the conviction of a governor over a mining scandal.
- The governor, Nur Alam, had sued Basuki Wasis, an environmental degradation expert, over his assessment of the damage caused by illegal mining resulting from his improper issuance of mining licenses.
- It’s the second lawsuit Basuki has faced and overcome in connection with his role as a government witness in environmental cases. Fellow expert Bambang Hero Saharjo faces a near-identical lawsuit, which is also widely expected to fall flat.
- The judges in Basuki’s case emphasized the need to protect the testimonies of expert witnesses, to allow them to do their job without fear of a legal backlash.

Virtual meetup highlights networked sensor technology for parks
- To encourage communication between the conservation community and technology developers, the WILDLABS platform began a series of virtual meetups earlier this month.
- Speakers in the first meetup represented three groups developing and deploying networked sensors for improving wildlife security and reducing human-wildlife conflict.
- The three tech developers described lessons they’ve learned on meeting the needs of rangers and reserve managers, using drones to fight poaching, and adapting technology to function in remote areas under difficult conditions.

Five wildlife conservationists held by Iran could face the death penalty
- Four conservationists arrested for suspected espionage in Iran in January face charges of “sowing corruption on Earth.”
- The charges stem from the team’s use of camera traps to track the Asiatic cheetah, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guard contends that the accused were collecting information on the country’s missile program.
- If convicted, the conservationists could be sentenced to death.

Peru cracks down after environmental defenders’ murders
- Peruvian police have arrested 12 members of a gang believed to be involved in the murder of four environmental defenders in the Chaparrí ecological reserve.
- The community-run reserve has in recent years been the target of a sustained campaign of land grabs, deforestation and arson.
- The land grabbers appear to be counting on a planned reservoir in the area to boost the value of the land for agricultural use.
- The Peruvian Congress has established a committee to look into the problems there, as threats and attacks against the community persist.

Chainsaw Massacre: Protected areas in danger in Brazil’s state of Rondônia (commentary)
- Eleven reserves are on the chopping block in Rondônia, as legislators in the notoriously anti-environmental state move to revoke protections in the coming weeks.
- The 11 protected areas total 3 percent of the state’s total area. Four are desginated as “sustainable development reserves” with traditional communities that would lose their land rights. This would likely increase land conflicts in Rondônia, which already has the highest rate of rural murders of any Brazilian state.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

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