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On election day, young Greeks will be voting for Syriza Updated for 2026

As a young person in Greece, I have been hit especially hard by the crisis. Like many others my age, I feel that Syriza is the only party that represents people like me.

Greek legislative elections are due to take place on 25 January. All evidence points to a victory by the Coalition of the Radical Left party, Syriza, which before the economic crisis received 4% of the vote, but is now backed by a large part of the Greek people, especially the young.

Last year Syriza emerged as a clear winner in the 2014 European elections with more than 26% of the vote, thanks to a remarkable upswing of almost 22%.

Its rise can be attributed to how the crisis was used as a means to unleash a neoliberal attack on citizens’ rights, based on pre-existing divisions in society. Young people were among the first victims.

As a young person myself, I am a victim of the crisis too. As architects, my parents were among the first to take a hit. The situation got even worse, as Greece entered the IMF and Memoranda period.

An education in neoliberalism

I got into Athens Law School in 2011, at a time when an extended university reform had been voted in, that would begin the privatisation of Greek higher education. This reform would make it harder for poorer students to continue their studies, especially during this economic crisis.

With the Greek state becoming more conservative under the New Democracy – PASOK government, the de facto abolition of democracy and stories of activists’ torture, arbitrary police acts and immigrants’ murders, I turned to Syriza.

I became a member of the Organization of the Youth of Syriza, the autonomous organization of young supporters. In my view Syriza presents the best alternative to the problems young people in Greece are faced with.

Young workers were the ones hit hardest by unemployment – youth unemployment is over 50%. Those ‘lucky’ enough to find a job, even university graduates, will work for €250-300 a month or even unpaid to ‘gain experience’ or are tied to ‘voucher’ programs.

Young men and women remain financially dependent on their parents, cannot afford a household of their own or to start a family and are often forced to emigrate abroad.

At the same time, students have seen their universities collapse. Under recent governments, free higher education stopped being entirely free, as some of the costs are transferred to students, who often cannot shoulder them.

University degrees are becoming equated with those of private colleges, which teach half of the classes universities do, but have been boosted by the government. Pupils have in turn seen their free time shrink, as high schools increasingly resemble examination centres, with private tutoring thriving at the expense of knowledge and learning.

For these reasons, young students and workers have in the present circumstances no option but to support the only party that takes them into account, aiming at a productive reconstruction of the country, based on them, their strengths and ideas.

Rebuilding democracy in the mother of democracies

Syriza wants to reshape the way the Greek state functions, towards democratization and against the corruption of previous governments.

It wants to provide the necessary room for self-organization initiatives and attempts at a solidaristic and cooperative economy, which we saw spring up during the crisis as a response to unemployment, misery and desperation.

Besides, Syriza is the only party that lent passionate support to every movement and resistance that developed in society during these years, by actively participating in their causes and giving them a voice in parliament, while always respecting their autonomy.

From the 2008 uprising after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, to the Greek ‘indignados‘ movement in 2011, to the locals’ resistance to the environmentally catastrophic gold mining in Chalkidiki, Syriza was there. It was there in the protests against the authoritarian closure of the country’s public broadcaster and in the protests against educational reform pushed by the government.

As Greece’s expected next government, Syriza will seek to realise these movements’ causes and offer protection to vulnerable social groups.

Syriza alone stands against austerity, racism and fascism

Syriza is also alone in advocating a Europe of the people and not a Europe of austerity. The EU seems to currently only care about protecting the powerful at the expense of the working class and young people, who are forced to accept constant work with no right to free time and a decent life, fully subjected to the neoliberal dogma of individualism and competition.

Only Syriza, among Greek parties, wants to move Europe towards real democracy and respect of human rights and away from a ‘fortress Europe’ with drowning immigrants in the Mediterranean, away from bigotry, islamophobia, racism and fascism.

The other political parties in Greece disregard young people, some of them blatantly. Why would young voters trust the outgoing New Democracy government, which led them to unrecorded labour or migration? The same party that now denies them the right to vote, excluding them from the upcoming election: 18 year olds won’t vote, because it is supposedly logistically impossible to add them to the electoral lists in time for the election; citizens living and working abroad won’t be allowed to vote in Greek consulates around the world.

Why would young people vote for PASOK, the junior partner of the governing coalition, which along with New Democracy represents the old and corrupt political establishment and which sent the country to the IMF?

Why should we vote for To Potami, the party that first appeared in European elections last year? It claims to bring new ideas to the table and targets young people, but in reality is funded by and consists of the corrupt political establishment and aligns itself with the neoliberal bloc.

Young people have no reason to support any of these parties, who are responsible for having destroyed their lives, whose sole concern is to implement the European elites’ and markets’ inhumane orders, only selectively altering them to suit their own and their political clientele.

Because the crisis doesn’t only deprive us of our dreams, but also affects us in our everyday lives, seeing our parents’ desperation, who after years of work don’t know if they’ll be able to pay the bills the next day.

This weekend, young people can vote for their dreams

Faced with this social collapse and desperation, young people shouldn’t give in to inaction and misery by abstaining from the election. Equating all political parties without having tried a different alternative is the wrong mentality.

On the contrary we need to seize the opportunity to back a party that wants to give us a platform to participate in decision-making.

Nor should we succumb to violent reaction, as expressed by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which advertises itself as an anti-system party in order to attract the indignant youth, but at the same time backs the government’s selling off of public property.

A Syriza victory, on the other hand, can give back hope both to the youth and to broader society. It can give us the hope which will enable us to raise our voices and actively take part in the country’s political life, from the local level to the unions, from the workplace to the universities.

Syriza can give us back what the previous governments systematically denied us: the ability to fight for our dreams.

Elati Pontikopoulou-Venieri is a senior student at the University of Athens, where she studies Law. She is a also a member of the Organization for the Youth of SYRIZA.

Thanks to Yannis Paradeisiadis for the translation.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

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Inequality does matter – and we must fight it! Updated for 2026

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Since the 1980s, we’ve been told that inequality doesn’t matter. Mainstream thinking has it that you can fight poverty without tackling inequality.

This has been part of an attempt to make poverty eradication easier and more palatable to an increasingly dominant right-wing agenda.

The beauty of separating poverty and inequality is that you can care about ‘the poor’ while not worrying about the need for any of the radical changes which might upset your lifestyle.

You can both be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, as Peter Mandelson1 said, and also care about very poor people getting less poor.

This embracing of inequality has, unsurprisingly, gone hand-in-hand with soaring levels of it. Today the richest 80 people own almost as much wealth as half the world’s population.

The situation continues to get worse. While most ordinary people endure pay freezes and austerity, the world’s richest 300 people became richer by 16% in 2013.

Those who are unhappy with inequality are accused of pursuing the ‘politics of envy’, or as Margaret Thatcher once put it, of preferring that the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich. There are two big problems with this argument.

Inequality matters

The first is that inequality does matter. This is not a matter of serious debate. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), hardly a progressive voice, has issued a warning that rising inequality is threatening economic growth.

This is firstly because rich people are far more likely to spend money in ways that do not benefit the majority of people, such as on luxury imported goods or simply stashing it away in an account in the Cayman Islands. The idea that if you get enough tycoons buying yachts, the jobs created by the yacht building industry will be enough to feed everyone else is a fiction.

Second, inequality warps democracy. It raises the voices and interests of tiny elites above the rest of society. This can lead to perverse results and greater corruption, with laws and policies tailored to the personal interests of tycoons and to the detriment of wider society.

It’s not just the economy that is affected by inequality. Most of the attributes of a decent society – health, education, crime levels, social cohesion – are most present in more equal societies.

Take the USA and Sweden, two countries with similar levels of wealth in GDP per capita terms. The infant mortality rate in the USA is more than double that of Sweden and the murder rate is over three times Sweden’s figure.

This pattern holds up across the world. The charts (see report) show that, in general, countries with high levels of inequality have higher murder rates and lower life expectancy.

The poor are not getting richer

So it’s no wonder that we find that since the big surge in free market, neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s, while the rich have certainly got richer, the poor have, by and large, stayed poor.

Back in 1981, when the free market revolution was just taking off, there were 288 million people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $2 a day (205 million were living on under $1.25 a day). By 2008, this figure had almost doubled to 562 million (386 million on under $1.25 a day).

Of course the region’s population has also increased over this period, but even proportionally, there has been almost no improvement in poverty rates in sub-Saharan Africa since 1981.

Other continents have done a little better but mostly because of the arbitrary measures chosen. Why $1.25? Much anti-poverty work has been geared to getting people from just below, to just above the international poverty line. It has been claimed that if you changed the poverty line from $1.25 to $1.27, most recent poverty reduction gains would be wiped out.

In fact the vast majority of the fall in global poverty since 1981 has come from China, a country that, despite engaging its very own state-led, form of capitalism, has not followed World Bank-led free market policies.

Here in the UK, real wages have fallen since the economic crisis in 2008. But in those same terms, wages hardly rose in the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s either. Almost all of the proceeds of this boom went to a tiny elite. The big winners from this decline in income have been the credit card companies.

Consumer debt has tripled over the last two decades as people borrow in order to make ends meet, reaching £158 billion in 2013. Meanwhile, the proportion of UK income controlled by the top 1% of the population has doubled since 1970 and the top 1% own as much as the bottom 55%.

The corrosive injustice of inequality

Inequality isn’t good for getting people out of poverty, which shouldn’t be surprising. Poverty isn’t about having a certain amount of money, but the lack of those resources we all need for a decent life; food and water, housing and energy, healthcare, education and decent employment.

Poverty is lack of power. And that lack of power is a direct consequence of others having too much power – ultimately too much control over resources. Wealth comes from exploitation of people and the planet’s resources.

This is why even well-intentioned plans to make the poor richer are doomed to failure if they ignore the question of power.

Helping the poor to buy more products or rent more resources from the rich might provide short-term relief, but in the long-term will reinforce the unequal relationship between the two – just as 19th-century American slave owners who decided to treat their slaves better missed the real injustice that they were perpetrating.

The poor will only get richer by radically reducing inequality, which in turn requires confronting power.

This article is an extract from the report ‘The poor are getting richer and other dangerous delusions‘ by Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement).

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I’ll talk politics with climate change deniers – but not science Updated for 2026

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There are many complex reasons why people decide not to accept the science of climate change. The doubters range from the conspiracy theorist to the sceptical scientist, or from the paid lobbyist to the raving lunatic.

Climate scientists, myself included, and other academics have strived to understand this reluctance. We wonder why so many people are unable to accept a seemingly straight-forward pollution problem.

And we struggle to see why climate change debates have inspired such vitriol.

These questions are important. In a world increasingly dominated by science and technology, it is essential to understand why people accept certain types of science but not others.

In short, it seems when it comes to climate change, it is not about the science but all about the politics.

Risky business

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s differing views on climate science were put down to how people viewed nature: was it benign or malevolent? In 1995 leading risk expert John Adams suggested there were four myths of nature, which he represented as a ball on different shaped landscapes.

Nature is benign and forgiving of any insults that humankind might inflict upon it and it does not need to be managed.
Nature ephemeral. Nature is fragile, precarious, and unforgiving and environmental management must protect nature from humans.
Nature perverse/tolerant. Within limits, nature can be relied upon to behave predictably and regulation is required to prevent major excesses.
Nature capricious. Nature is unpredictable and there is no point to management.

Different personality types can be matched on to these different views, producing very different opinions about the environment. Climate change deniers would map on to number one, Greenpeace number two, while most scientists would be number three. These views are influenced by an individual’s own belief system, personal agenda (either financial or political), or whatever is expedient to believe at the time.

However, this work on risk perception was ignored by mainstream science because science up to now operates on what is called the knowledge deficit model. This suggests that people do not accept the science because there is not enough evidence; therefore more needs to be gathered.

Scientists operate in exactly this way, and they assume wrongly the rest of the world is equally rational and logical. It explains why over the past 35 years a huge amount of work gone into investigating climate change.

However – despite many thousands of pages of IPCC reports – the weight of evidence argument does not seem to work with everyone.

No understanding of science?

At first failure of the knowledge deficit model was blamed on the fact that people simply did not understand science, perhaps due to a lack of education.

This was exacerbated as scientists from the late 1990s onwards started to be drawn into discussions about whether people believed or did not believe in climate change.

The use of the word ‘belief’ is important here, as it was a direct jump from the American-led argument between the science of evolution and the belief in creation.

But we know that science is not a belief system. You cannot decide that you believe in penicillin or the principles of flight while at the same time disbelieve humans evolved from apes or that greenhouse gases can cause climate change.

This is because science is an expert trust-based system that is underpinned by rational methodology that moves forward by using detailed observation and experimentation to constantly test ideas and theories.

It does not provide us with convenient yes/no answers to complex scientific questions, however much the media portrayal of scientific evidence would like the general public to ‘believe’ this to be true.

It’s all about the politics

However, many who deny climate change is an issue are extremely intelligent, eloquent and rational. They would not see the debate as one about belief and they would see themselves above the influence of the media.

So if the lack of acceptance of the science of climate change is neither due to a lack of knowledge, nor due to a misunderstanding of science, what is causing it?

Recent work has refocused on understanding people’s perceptions and how they are shared, and as climate denial authority George Marshall suggests these ideas can take on a life of their own, leaving the individual behind.

Colleagues at Yale University developed this further by using the views of nature shown above to define different groups of people and their views on climate change. They found that political views are the main predictor of the acceptance of climate change as a real phenomenon.

This is because climate change challenges the Anglo-American neoliberal view that is held so dear by mainstream economists and politicians. Climate change is a massive pollution issue that shows the markets have failed and it requires governments to act collectively to regulate industry and business.

In stark contrast neoliberalism is about free markets, minimal state intervention, strong property rights and individualism. It also purports to provide a market-based solution via ‘trickle down’ enabling everyone to become wealthier.

But calculations suggest to bring the incomes of the very poorest people in the world up to just $1.25 per day would require at least a 15 times increase in global GDP. This means huge increases in consumption, resource use and of course, carbon emissions.

It’s easier to deny climate change, than to deny our own ideologies

So in many cases the discussion of the science of climate change has nothing to do with the science and is all about the political views of the objectors. Many perceive climate change as a challenge to the very theories that have dominated global economics for the last 35 years, and the lifestyles that it has provided in developed, Anglophone countries.

Hence, is it any wonder that many people prefer climate change denial to having to face the prospect of building a new political (and socio-economic) system, which allows collective action and greater equality?

I am well aware of the abuse I will receive because of this article. But it is essential for people, including scientists, to recognise that it is the politics and not the science that drives many people to deny climate change.

This does mean, however, that no amount of discussing the ‘weight of scientific evidence’ for climate change will ever change the views of those who are politically or ideologically motivated.

Hence I am very sorry – but I will not be responding to comments posted concerning the science of climate change but I am happy to engage in discussion on the motivations of denial.

Mark Maslin is Professor of Climatology at University College London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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I’ll talk politics with climate change deniers – but not science Updated for 2026

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Climate scientists, myself included, and other academics have strived to understand this reluctance. We wonder why so many people are unable to accept a seemingly straight-forward pollution problem.

And we struggle to see why climate change debates have inspired such vitriol.

These questions are important. In a world increasingly dominated by science and technology, it is essential to understand why people accept certain types of science but not others.

In short, it seems when it comes to climate change, it is not about the science but all about the politics.

Risky business

Nature is benign and forgiving of any insults that humankind might inflict upon it and it does not need to be managed.
Nature ephemeral. Nature is fragile, precarious, and unforgiving and environmental management must protect nature from humans.
Nature perverse/tolerant. Within limits, nature can be relied upon to behave predictably and regulation is required to prevent major excesses.
Nature capricious. Nature is unpredictable and there is no point to management.

However – despite many thousands of pages of IPCC reports – the weight of evidence argument does not seem to work with everyone.

No understanding of science?

At first failure of the knowledge deficit model was blamed on the fact that people simply did not understand science, perhaps due to a lack of education.

This was exacerbated as scientists from the late 1990s onwards started to be drawn into discussions about whether people believed or did not believe in climate change.

The use of the word ‘belief’ is important here, as it was a direct jump from the American-led argument between the science of evolution and the belief in creation.

It’s all about the politics

So if the lack of acceptance of the science of climate change is neither due to a lack of knowledge, nor due to a misunderstanding of science, what is causing it?

It’s easier to deny climate change, than to deny our own ideologies

This does mean, however, that no amount of discussing the ‘weight of scientific evidence’ for climate change will ever change the views of those who are politically or ideologically motivated.

Hence I am very sorry – but I will not be responding to comments posted concerning the science of climate change but I am happy to engage in discussion on the motivations of denial.

Mark Maslin is Professor of Climatology at University College London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Reclaim the power! It’s time to deprivatise Britain’s energy Updated for 2026

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What must it be like to manage an oil company? To become the chief executive of an energy corporation and to earn millions a year doing so?

Iain Conn, ex-managing director at BP, knows. He is about to take up the position of CEO at Centrica (which owns one of the ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers, British Gas) in January.

The aptly named Conn will be paid in the region of £2m with added extras expected to raise this to around £3.7 million. One thing’s for sure; he won’t have trouble paying his fuel bill this winter.

The rest of us, however, might struggle. With fuel prices that have risen eight times faster than average incomes, more than one in ten households in England are now living in fuel poverty. Last month the Office for National Statistics released the number of people who died of cold last winter as 18,200.

The World Health Organisation attributes 30% to 50% of these deaths to cold homes. The energy companies would have us believe that there’s nothing they can do about prices but the reality is that they’re pocketing huge profits while failing to pass on lower wholesale prices.

Vast profits on the backs of people, and planet

Collectively, the Big Six made £2.8 billion in 2013, with profits from domestic customers a staggering five times higher than in 2009.

Companies such as Centrica are also reinforcing our addiction to dirty energy, which we still rely on for the vast majority our electricity generation. Centrica owns a 25% stake in Cuadrilla – the first – and one of the largest – companies’ fracking in the UK.

There is something clearly wrong with our current energy system. A utility which used to be publicly owned in this country is making millions keeping people in fuel poverty and deepening our addiction to carbon intensive fuels.

All over the world the story is similar. From the tar sands in Canada and Madagascar, to coal mines in Colombia and Mongolia, fossil fuel extraction is scarring the landscape, displacing communities and contributing to catastrophic climate change.

Yet this is doing nothing to get energy to the people who need it. One in five people globally live without electricity because they are unable to access it and many more go without because they can’t afford it. In Africa only 10% of those living in rural areas have access to electricity.

Although it is the model that is pushed throughout the world by institutions like the World Bank, privatised energy is not helping extend grids to people who lack access to energy or making energy affordable to the poor. The problem is corporate control – energy resources being used to make huge profits while steamrolling over people’s needs.

If we want more communities to be able to access and afford energy within the confines of a carbon constrained world, our current corporate-controlled privatised energy system is failing us. It’s painfully obvious that we need to look at the alternatives. The good news is that there are plenty!

Nationalised

Before Thatcher, the UK had a state run energy system and there are plenty of examples of countries around the world which still have them, such as Uruguay. In other places, privatisation has been such a disaster that energy systems have been taken back into public ownership.

The advantages of publicly owned energy systems are that they tend to have more public accountability and aren’t obliged to siphon off juicy profits for their shareholders.

Municipalised

In Germany there has been a huge move towards local authority run energy schemes as part of the country’s Energiewende, or energy transition.

In Germany this shift, known as municipalisation, has often come as a result of local referenda. In Hamburg, local people voted in September 2013 for their council to buy back the energy grid from multinational corporations E.ON and Vattenfall after campaigners successfully argued that the companies were not acting in the public interest and were delaying the transition to renewable energy.

The city of Boulder in America has also had success in municipalising its energy.

Co-operative

In parts of the world there is a long history of energy systems being run using co-operative models of control and ownership. For instance in Nepal and the Philippines micro-hydro co-operatives supply rural communities with reliable access to energy.

Here communities have collective control over a renewable energy source which could also make use of wind or biomass. A co-operative model more easily enables a project to be run by a community for the community.

Small scale co-operatives can provide an invaluable solution when prospects for grid connection are remote or would cause damage. In developed countries, small-scale cooperatives can also be a democratic way of communities gaining control over energy generation, even when they are connected to regional or national grids.

In Spain, Som Energia (‘We are Energy’ in Catalan) co-operative, was set up in 2011 in response to the lack of green energy options and the high bills of the large energy companies, of which the largest two account for 80% of the Spanish energy market.

Four years after being established, it has set up eight solar roof installations and a biogas plant and is in the process of building Spain’s first community wind turbine. It has 16,000 members who purchase electricity from the co-operative.

Scaled up

There are questions about the speed at which small scale projects can give communities the energy they need. Larger scale on-grid solutions have the potential to connect more households.

Large scale co-operatives have been very effective in America where they date back to the New Deal, and where 13% of the population use them – the co-ops are united by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA).

In Bolivia, the Cooperativa Rural de Electrificacion (CRE) is the biggest in the world with 276,000 users. Set up in the 1970s it was a small group of community leaders frustrated by the lack of municipal, state and private company willingness to provide services that got it off the ground.

Costa Rica also has large and long-established energy co-operatives that are run by the communities they serve and which function alongside the state energy company.

Gaining democratic control of energy resources is a fundamental part of ensuring our energy system provides for those that need it most and moves away from its destructive addiction to fossil fuels.

While there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to these issues, approaches that give genuine control and ownership of those that they serve have a more likely chance of survival and of remaining truly democratic.

The solutions for reclaiming energy are here. Let’s take power out of private hands.

Petition: Re-nationalise the UK energy sector and end fuel poverty (38 Degrees).

Facebook: Fuel Poverty – Nationalise Gas, Electricity & Water Companies.

Sam Lund-Harket is an activist working with the World Development Movement (soon to be Global Justice Now) campaigning to end corporate control of the energy sector.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

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‘It’s war!’ Peru-Brazil indigenous people pledge to fight Amazon oil exploration Updated for 2026

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Members of an indigenous people living on both sides of the Brazil-Peru border in the remote Amazon say they are prepared to fight with spears, bows and arrows if companies enter their territories to explore for oil.

The Matsés have publicly opposed operations by Canada-based firm Pacific Rubiales Energy for at least five years, but they say that neither the company nor Perupetro, the government body which granted the licences to two oil concessions in Peru, are taking any notice.

“It seems that the [Peruvian] state is a child”, says Dora Canë from the most remote Matsés village on the Peruvian side of the border, Puerto Alegre. “It doesn’t listen. We say no, but it just carries on. It wants to extinguish us.”

“We have told the company no, but it isn’t listening”, says Nestor Binan Waki, another Puerto Alegre resident. “Our patience is running out. We have nothing more to say. The only thing we have is our spears.”

“They should respect indigenous peoples’ rights, but in my view they’re not doing so”, says Lorenzo Tumi, also from Puerto Alegre. “We’ve been saying no for many years. The only weapon we have is to kill one of them. We could kill one of the company.”

Support promised from over the border in Brazil

The Matsés based in Brazil are equally concerned about the concessions – partly because they consider the Peruvian side of the border their territory too and partly because of the potential impacts on the Brazilian side where they live in the protected Javari Valley Indigenous Territory.

“We don’t want the oil company”, says Waki Mayoruna, the head of the remotest Matsés village, Lobo, in Brazil. “If they don’t listen to us, if they don’t understand our no means no, there’ll be conflict that’ll lead to people being killed. That will always be my position.”

“We’ll always fight against the invasion of our territories”, says José Tumi, from Sao Meireles in Brazil. “If they don’t listen, we could fight like we have done in the past, with bows and arrows. We could attack anyone who invades our territory. We’re not afraid of dying.”

“The government is not listening, not respecting, our decision”, says Juan Bai, another Sao Meireles resident. “One day our patience could run out. We have our limits. If they invade the only thing to do will be this [to fight].”

A violent past

Many Matsés stress that previous generations were forced to fight against rubber-tappers, loggers, road-builders and soldiers invading their territories, and that they could do the same again now.

“Before contact [in the late 1960s] there was always conflict in this region”, says Romulo Teca from Puerto Alegre in Peru. “It could come to that again. We are the sons of those fighters. We can defend ourselves with arms like they did. I’ll always fight to ensure no oil companies enter.”

“Our fathers had to defend our territories and fought with other tribes, mestizos and soldiers”, Felipe Reyna Regijo, from Remoyacu village in Peru, told a bi-national meeting held by the Matsés last month. “Why don’t we continue that position, given that we are the sons of fighting fathers?”

The bi-national meeting concluded with the “total rejection” by the Matsés of both oil concessions, and the signing of a statement saying the decision was “unanimous” and stressing the social and environmental impacts of oil operations elsewhere in Peru.

Raimundo Mean Mayoruna, from Soles village in Brazil and president of the General Mayoruna Organization (OGM), says that the Matsés don’t want conflict, but it is possible if their rights are not respected.

“We don’t want this, but if there is a lot of anger it could happen”, he says. “My message to the companies is that they respect our decision and understand we’ve lived here for a long time and want to live in peace. We didn’t come from any other place. We’re from here.”

Empty threats? Or are the Matsés for real?

Many of the most aggressive statements were made by Matsés men wielding and thrusting long spears or carrying bows and arrows – leading one man, Rafael Shaba Maya, a teacher in Puerto Alegre, to remark, “It’s true they will fight. When they say something, they do it.”

That opinion is shared by the former president of the Matsés community in Peru, Ángel Uaqui Dunu Maya, who stresses the potential environmental impacts and the Matsés’s past experience of oil operations in the 1970s when “many people died of illnesses” as a result.

“Yes, in my opinion, it’s certain that [this] is going to create a lot of conflict between the Matsés and the state”, he says. “Why? Because the Matsés don’t want hydrocarbon activities in their territories but the state wants to explore.”

Brazilian anthropologist Beatriz de Almeida Matos, who has worked with the Matsés for 10 years, says that “without a doubt” they will do “whatever it takes to defend their territory” from anything threatening their way of life and existence.

“It wasn’t so long ago, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were conflicts between Matsés and non-indigenous people in their territories, with deaths on both sides”, she says. “If they’re not consulted and their decisions not respected, they’ll understand dialogue is over and defend themselves by taking up arms again, rather than using the law.”

The Matsés say they were not consulted by Peru’s government before the two concessions were established in 2007 – as is their right under a legally-binding agreement ratified by Peru in 1994 – but Pacific Rubiales claims this right has only applied since 2012.

Billion barrel oil concessions overlap indigenous territories, protected areas

According to Peruvian NGO CEDIA, one of the concessions, Lot 137, includes 49% of the Matsés’s titled community land in Peru and 36% of a supposedly ‘protected natural area’ called the Matsés National Reserve, which they consider their territory too.

The other concession, Lot 135, also includes community land, the reserve, and other areas considered Matsés territory, as well as a huge chunk of a proposed reserve for indigenous people living in what Peruvian law and indigenous organizations call ‘isolation’ or ‘voluntary isolation’.

The eastern boundary of Lot 135 and part of Lot 137 is the River Yaquerana – which acts as the Brazil-Peru border and many Matsés from both countries rely on for drinking water, cooking, washing, bathing and fishing.

Together the two concessions cover almost 1.5 million hectares and have been estimated to hold almost one billion barrels of oil. Some exploration has already been done by Pacific Rubiales in Lot 135, starting in late 2012, which involved conducting seismic tests and drilling wells.

Pacific Rubiales says it “fully respects” the Matsés’s position and is therefore not currently “performing any exploration activities” in Lot 135 and Lot 137, but declined to respond to a question from The Ecologist why it still holds the licences to both concessions.

According to Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental, there are almost 3,500 Matsés – 1,700 of whom live on the Peruvian side and almost 1,600 on the Brazilian side, although movement across the borders is common.

David Hill is a freelance journalist and environment writer based in Latin America, writing for the Guardian, The Ecologist and other publications. For more details see his website: www.hilldavid.com or follow him on Twitter: @DavidHillTweets

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‘It’s war!’ Peru-Brazil indigenous people pledge to fight Amazon oil exploration Updated for 2026

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Support promised from over the border in Brazil

A violent past

Many Matsés stress that previous generations were forced to fight against rubber-tappers, loggers, road-builders and soldiers invading their territories, and that they could do the same again now.

Empty threats? Or are the Matsés for real?

Billion barrel oil concessions overlap indigenous territories, protected areas

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Kenya: a forest people illegally evicted, beaten, imprisoned – paid for by the World Bank Updated for 2026

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When Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, visited Kenya earlier this month, he reportedly urged the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to sort out Kenya’s historical land injustices once and for all, specifically mentioning the plight of the “Sengwer of Cherangani Hills.”

But despite the World Bank having ‘a word’ with its ‘client’, the plight of the Sengwer of Embobut forest has worsened dramatically. An indigenous community is being evicted from their ancestral land in the name of conservation.

I am currently filming a documentary about the Sengwer. As I write this I am sitting in a small town on the edge of Embobut forest. On Sunday 23rd November, I was heading up into Embobut from a settlement called Tangul which sits on the edge of the contested forest area.

Following my camera assistant and translator Elias Kibiwot, we had planned to film a young Sengwer woman called Ellen visiting her friend who, after her home was repeatedly burnt by the government’s Kenyan Forest Service (KFS), is living in a tree trunk.

Kenya Forest Service brutality and extortion

As we walk through Tangul we notice that a crowd of Sengwer has assembled outside a few huts and tiny kiosks. Directly above them, on a hill overlooking Tangul, is the ominous KFS encampment – a constant reminder for the community that they are being watched.

A distraught teenage girl stopped us, and said: “Eight people where arrested in the forest yesterday, two school children and six elderly including my mother.”

Elias spoke to them in Sengwer, and then informed me that four were released including the children after paying the KFS bribes of 500 Ksh each for the children and 2,000 Ksh for each elderly person.

I have been back in Embobut for 12 days so far and approximately 20 people have been arrested, fewer than half of whom have gone to court, while the rest paid bribes to the KFS to be released. It’s hard to see how these policies conserve the forest.

The teenage girl continued to tell her harrowing story: “The KFS came yesterday morning, and kicked open the door. My mother woke up suddenly. She was told to lay down on the floor. My father wrestled with a guard until a magazine fell from his gun then he ran away.

“Some of the KFS guards were shouting ‘Shoot, Shoot!’ Then the other ones blocked the door and they beat on my mother. They rained punches and kicks on her.”

The woman who was beaten is called Margeret Suter. We learned that she and three others were being held at Kapsowar Police Station on the South Eastern Side of the forest. Elias and I jumped on motorbikes for a buttock clenching journey and I tried in vain to protect my seriously sunburnt nose.

We stopped at least five times for the driver of my motorbike to pump up the slow puncture on his completely bald front tire. People passing paused to take photos of the Pink ‘Mzungu’ standing on the side of the road. “This is African life”, Elias told me, laughing.

Beaten by KFS, then arrested by police

We arrived at Kapsowar and I followed Elias into the police station, filming with my small and discreet Go Pro camera, as the three Sengwer men and one woman were brought out from a large metal door.

As Margeret was led out of the cell, I realized I had filmed her on my previous visit to the forest. The left side of her face was visibly swollen. It was clear to me that she has been punched in the face, a face that I have looked at on my computer since August.

She looked scared and on the verge of tears. Elias asked the police officer, “Why are you confining a beaten woman without her seeing a doctor or letting her make a statement?”

The policeman, who smelled of alcohol, said, “They didn’t complain when they were arrested.”

Elias directly addressed Margeret Suter, asking, “Didn’t you tell them the KFS beat you?”

“I told them but they didn’t listen”, she said.

At this point, I chimed in and explained that she could have concussion and should therefore see a doctor before spending another night in a police cell. My concerns fell on deaf ears as we were asked to leave the police station.

Criminals – for being on their own land

The next morning we took another buttock bashing ride in a ‘Matatu’ to the town of Iten, home of Kenyan champion marathon runners and the Elgeiyo Marakwet County Court. We watched the four Sengwer being led from the back of a police van and into the courtroom. It was another six hours until the case was actually heard.

The Sengwer were called one by one into the dock and asked how they plead. The prosecutor explained that they are “charged with illegally being in Embobut Forest which is state property.” The judge asked each one of them how they plead. The Sengwer lawyer tried to speak, but was silenced by the judge, who told him to let the defendants speak for themselves.

Three of the Sengwer pleaded guilty, including Margeret, who begged for mercy to be released so she could return to take care of her children.

A fourth man, Kereoi Lobela, defiantly pleaded not guilty: “I’m a Sengwer and I was in my ancestral land.” Kereoi was released on cash bail of 3,000 Ksh and must return to court to hear his case on 8th December. The other three were sentenced to community service. As I write this Margeret is probably scrubbing the floors of an Iten courtroom.

Outside the courtroom, I asked James Gachoka, lawyer for the Sengwer, why three of them pleaded guilty. “They are ignorant of the law and don’t speak Kiswaili [the national language] so they were using an interpreter, and they are scared”, he said.

“There is a high court order which was issued in 2013 forbidding the KFS from burning homes and evicting Sengwers from the forest. They have been ignoring this order. So you have one arm of the Government saying they are protected and another arm oppressing them. We have a contempt of court case against the KFS being heard in Eldoret on the 4th of December.”

KFS divide and rule

But the KFS is doing more than just burning homes and arresting people. They are also dividing the community. They have been recruiting and paying ‘forest scouts’, local Sengwers who have been named ‘sell-outs’ by the local community.

They are using these forest scouts to find displaced Sengwers living in tree trunks and hideaways that the KFS have trouble locating.

A few days ago I tracked down a forest scout named Patrick and asked him if he is conflicted about what he is doing. “I used to be a teacher in the forest school, teaching baby class, middle class and top class”, he told me.

“But the KFS burnt the school and now I am scouting for them on a three month contract because I have five children that I want to send to school.”

I asked how the rest of the community acts towards him. He said, “The thing that people need most is company. Right now its a lonely life.”

World Bank complicity?

In March 2007, the World Bank funded a programme called the Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP) overseen by the KFS – designed to enhance “institutional capacity to manage water and forest resources, reduce the incidence and severity of water shocks such as drought, floods and water shortage in river catchments and improve the livelihoods of communities participating in the co-management of water and forest resources.”

But on 10th June 2011, the project was restructured and the development objective was redefined to “improve the management of water and forest resources in selected districts.”

Approved by the World Bank, this amendment completely removed the modest protection afforded to the Sengwers under the project. The programme led to forcible evictions of the Sengwer as over 1,000 homes were torched and they were forced to flee their homes, driven out by the KFS.

In 2013 a request for an investigation was made by representatives of the Sengwer to the World Bank’s Inspection Panel – the body responsible for overseeing grievances filed against the Bank.

In October they issued a report stating that although the World Bank had not followed some of its safeguards, it was not responsible for the evictions of the Sengwer – despite the Bank funding the KFS to the tune of around US$64 million between 2007 and 2013, a period in which evictions took place every year except 2012.

REDD is the new Green

The situation the Sengwer find themselves in is also linked to a UN initiative called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which “is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development.”

However Friends of the Earth is concerned that REDD could “foster an ‘armed protection’ mentality that could lead to the displacement of millions of forest-dependent people.” This seems well-founded in the case of the Sengwer.

The No REDD in Africa Network has similar concerns: “A false solution to climate change, REDD+ is emerging as a new form of colonialism and economic subjugation, and is a driver of land grabs so massive that they may constitute a continent grab. We must defend the continent from carbon colonialism.”

My attempts to get an interview or a response from the KFS have so far failed, and it’s not looking too likely that they will agree to talk to me. I will hopefully get a chance to interview a representative of the World Bank, and I will ask them how they feel about the current actions of their former client.

I can’t help but wonder if the boots that kicked Margeret Suter in the back on Saturday morning were bought with World Bank money that only finished flowing at the end of last year.

It seems like a shame that the World Bank funding was not used to educate, involve and engage the Sengwer in a community-led conservation initiative instead of being used to evict them and buy new weapons.

Defiance

Tomorrow morning, I will meet Margeret Suter in Tangul and follow her back up into the forest as she returns to her home on the glades at the top of the Cherangani Hills.

Looking through footage that I shot in August, I come across a clip of Margeret talking to gathered crowd of Sengwers. She said:

“I’m very happy to see the Sengwer from the different areas gathered from so far so that we can join together today. We don’t have anywhere to go. We will never leave Embobut. We will keep practicing our culture, the way we always have.”

Dean Puckett @Deanpuckettfilm is a British documentary filmmaker known for The Crisis of Civilization (2010) and Grasp the Nettle (2013). He is currently in Kenya working on a film about the evictions of the Sengwer indigenous people from their homes in the Cherangani Hills.

Support the making of the film via Kickstarter. Dean writes: “We have already reached our minimum target! I asked for the bare minimum I needed to get back to Kenya and film for one more month. Any additional money will be used to edit the film, sound mix, create music and all of the other things that a documentary needs. So please continue to contribute if you can and share if you feel like it.”

This article was originally published on REDD Monitor. Read more about the evictions of the Sengwer, in previous posts on REDD-Monitor here, and more about Puckett’s work in the Embobut Forest here.

Other articles about the Sengwer on The Ecologist.

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The Soil Association’s mission is organic – and it always will be! Updated for 2026

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Since the 1940s the Soil Association has campaigned for food and farming systems that support the health of our people and environment.

This work is just as relevant now as it was back then. We want to see a future where good food, organic food, is accessible to everyone and where we farm in a way that supports biodiversity, improves animal welfare and addresses climate change.

Though there is always more to do, we are making progress towards achieving this vision.

Last month, four of the Soil Association’s 17 Trustees resigned following the rejection by their fellow Trustees of a motion challenging our three-year old strategy, ‘The Road to 2020‘. Our strategy focusses as strongly as ever on organic food and farming, and also reaches out to broader audiences.

We are sorry these trustees felt unable to support our initiatives to work with non-organic as well as organic farmers, and with many other people in schools, hospitals and society more widely. We think the challenges facing our food systems today are so urgent that we need to work with all who are interested in finding solutions that are in line with our founding principles.

Transforming Britain’s food culture

Food, and how we produce it, is an entry point into people’s lives and health. It helps develop an understanding of our connection with the natural world, as well as being critically important in its own right.

We understand the pressures facing consumers today. Far from eschewing the term organic, we are working to change perceptions, by ensuring that many more people routinely eat better food, including organic, in schools and hospitals for instance.

We work with schools across the UK transforming food culture with great school meals, children growing and cooking food, and even holding their own farmers markets in partnership with local farmers and growers.

Our Catering Mark is transforming an industry previously driven by cost, not quality, and everyday hundreds of thousands of people in nurseries, schools, workplaces, hospitals and care homes people now eat fresh, healthy and locally sourced meals. At silver and gold Catering Mark award these meals now all include organic.

This work couldn’t be more important. Earlier this year, the Department of Health identified hospital food as a clinical priority for the first time and the Hospital Food Standards Panel recognised the Catering Mark as a scheme that improves food in hospitals for patients, staff and visitors.

We are working with an increasing number of hospitals to improve food served, including Nottingham University Hospital Trust whose meals have a minimum 15% spend on organic ingredients.

Our commitment to organic food and farming is as strong as ever

Organic farming has many of the answers that can help with some of the big challenges of the future such as climate change and the crisis now facing our soils. Organic farmers and growers are the true pioneers and heart of the organic movement and we remain absolutely committed to supporting them and continuing to grow the organic market.

We also know if we are to see real change in the world we need to work positively with all farmers – organic or not – sharing the research and knowledge of organic farming techniques, and learning from them too.

With World Soils Day on Friday (5th December) and the UN International Year of Soil in 2015, it’s a good moment to reflect that the health of our soil is critical to all farmers, not just organic ones.

So it was inspiring to see more non-organic farmers than ever before at our annual Soil Symposium last week, sharing ideas how to improve our soil and produce the very best food we can.

Through our Duchy Originals Future Farming programme we are supporting innovation in organic and low input agriculture, and helping farmers develop practices to improve productivity while caring for the environment and animal welfare.

Most farmers don’t have this ‘us and them’ attitude We are all trying to make a living the best we can, working together to find solutions to the issues facing agriculture in the UK. We would like to think we can find solutions which bring the farming community and wider society together – that doesn’t mean we won’t sometimes disagree, but we want to work constructively wherever possible with as many people as possible.

Farming must be fair, humane, healthy and ecologically based

We need to move beyond just telling others they are wrong; we need to share ideas and solutions to some of the big challenges facing our food system today. We want the Soil Association to become much more relevant to a lot more people – the public, farmers, businesses, schools and the public.

I want us to become better known for what we are for, rather than for what we are against. Our goal is to ensure that all farming and food is grounded in the organic principles – fair, humane, healthy and ecologically based – even if not all of it will be ‘certified’ organic.

I hope that this has made it clear that we remain completely committed to organic farming and to growing the market for organic food as the current ‘gold standard’ for good food.

The Soil Association was founded to research and disseminate the links between the way we manage our soils, and the impacts on human and environmental health.

Nothing could be more important, and our remaining trustees are fully committed to our approach, as laid out clearly in ‘The Road to 2020‘.

Helen Browning is Chief Executive of the Soil Association.

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