Friends of the Earth’s ability to mobilize people was amply demonstrated when ten thousand people turned out to dance Bollywood-style on the beach in Ostend, Belgium, for a film for our ‘Big Ask’ campaign, organized by Friends of the Earth Belgium and the Belgian Climate Coalition. 

Another successful Big Ask action saw four thousand people ‘flooding’ the Finnish parliament to call for a climate law, in the biggest environmental gathering in Finland’s history. 

While the results of the Copenhagen climate talks in December 2009 were highly unsatisfactory, Friends of the Earth Europe, as part of the Friends of the Earth International federation, also had a strong presence in Copenhagen. One after another, groups of activists from across Europe joined together to form a five thousand-strong human ‘flood for climate justice’, showing the incredible strength of the network. 

Young Friends of the Earth Europe also mobilized many more young activists, encouraging them to make their voices heard in Copenhagen. They held four regional conferences in Malmo, Montpellier, Berlin and Dublin bringing together nearly 200 young people for training and action workshops in the run-up to the global climate talks. 

Friends of the Earth groups in Belgium, Spain and Austria also hosted a tour of climate witnesses, in advance of the Copenhagen negotiations. Beginning in Flanders, the "Climaxi" tour, brought stories from the frontline of climate change. The speakers came from Kiribati in the South Pacific, where rising sea levels are already a serious problem, and from Brazil, where indigenous peoples in the Amazon are struggling against rising water levels and the expansion of mining activities. 

Young people throughout the network also developed and organized their own actions and events in the build-up to Copenhagen, and produced and distributed hundreds of activists’ handbooks with ideas and messages for promoting climate justice. Young Friends of the Earth Netherlands, for example, collected 3,000 messages from the public about their opinion on their government’s action on climate change. They then created a beach where the washed up ‘SOS’ messages could be read (inside 3,000 recycled plastic bottles), and where young activists delivered the messages in person to the Dutch Minister for the Environment.

Friends of the Earth Europe has also been making sure that concerns about climate change are heard loud and clear in Brussels. Friends of the Earth Europe and the Stockholm Environment Institute joined forces to prove that Europe can cut its domestic emissions by at least 40% by 2020, and 90% by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels). Friends of the Earth Europe also organized a preview screening of the climate change film ‘The Age of Stupid’ in the European Parliament, before its official release. It was a unique opportunity to screen a powerful film on the consequences of runaway climate change.

A joint Friends of the Earth Europe and CEE Bankwatch conference on ‘Climate Proofing EU Structural and Cohesion Funds’ also dealt with the climate impact of EU funds, programs and projects. It explored opportunities for de-carbonization in the transport and energy sectors, and discussed the kind of cohesion policy needed in order to deliver low carbon development in the European regions.

A penguin refugee camp built from non-energy efficient appliances was also erected outside the European Commission. The stunt called on European decision-makers to stop caving in to industry pressure and to strengthen energy efficiency proposals so that Europe can meet its environmental and climate change targets.

Four countries also enjoyed performances by the Energy Union tour in 2009. The tour combines climate and renewable energy messages with music from UK group Coldcut into a multimedia show. The tour began in Munich and toured through Pécs, Vienna, Budapest, Košice, Bratislava, and Graz before finishing in Berlin. It continues in 2010.

Friends of the Earth also rejects nuclear power as a solution to climate change. As part of a wide movement including environment organizations, trade unions and churches, 50,000 people marched through the streets of Berlin declaring that it’s time to switch off nuclear power. It was the biggest antinuclear demonstration in Germany since Chernobyl, and sent a clear message to politicians that nuclear power is not a solution to energy security or climate change.

Germany’s 2009 decision to ban the cultivation of Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn MON 810 was a major highlight during the year. The decision made Germany the sixth EU member state to approve a ban. Four of the six countries have never permitted MON 810 cultivation, but France and Germany are particularly significant because they are the first to have banned the crop after it was first cultivated. This was a major blow to the GM industry in Europe. 

Working in close alliance with farmers, consumers and citizen groups, Friends of the Earth Germany played a key role in persuading German politicians to make this shift. The group was also instrumental in coordinating more than 29,000 farmers in more than 190 GMO-free regions and 200 municipalities, who came together as part of the GMO-free regions project.

Resistance to GM cultivation is also growing in Spain, the only European Union country with a substantial area of GM crops. On 17 April 2009, more than 15,000 people joined a protest in Madrid calling for “Agriculture and Food Free from GMOs” which was co-organized by Friends of the Earth Spain and consumer and farmers’ groups and others. 

Friends of the Earth Spain also organized an action on the newly authorized GM potato, which took place in front of the Spanish Parliament, where cooks and ‘executives’ from BASF and Monsanto offered tortillas to those entering the parliament. The GM-free food was definitely more popular! Support in other countries included an action by Friends of the Earth Cyprus in front of the Spanish embassy in Cyprus. 

In a further action in September, Friends of the Earth Spain’s activists - dressed as Spanish maize - fled to the French Embassy in Madrid, fearing contamination from genetically modified maize varieties, the majority of which are grown in Spain. The stunt helped raised awareness of the cultivation of Monsanto’s MON 810 in Europe. This GM maize is banned in France but grown in Spain with little precaution taken against cross-contamination.

Working together with Food and Water Watch and Via Campesina’s European Coordination, Friends of the Earth Europe also produced a groundbreaking film revealing the hidden chain of destruction stretching from factory farms in Europe to the forests of South America. Huge soy plantations are devastating communities, destroying wildlife and worsening the effects of climate change. Meanwhile in Europe small-scale farming that is good for people and the environment is losing out to big business. “Killing Fields, the battle to feed factory farms,” is available in 12 different languages. It challenges the EU to reduce its dependence on imports of soy if it is serious about addressing climate change, the global loss of biodiversity, human rights, and the food crisis.

See the film ‘Killing Fields’ here: www.feedingfactoryfarms.org

Friends of the Earth Switzerland celebrated a similar success in April 2009, after strong lobbying and the collection of 160,000 citizens’ signatures in support of its campaign. The Swiss Parliament responded to calls from environmental organizations for a new law to protect rivers, which favors a closer-to-nature form of river management and the restoration of destroyed riverine habitats, and prevents the highly damaging practices of hydropower plants. Friends of the Earth Switzerland also celebrated an important anniversary: its 100th! 

A decision to build a shopping centre in a green recreation zone in one of the biggest industrial cities in Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk, was overturned after four years of campaigning, negotiating and demonstrating by Friends of the Earth Ukraine. The group worked closely with the local community, providing them with legal information that enabled them to defend their rights and freedoms. Local residents were thus able to reverse the local council’s decision, and save this rare urban green-space.

Plastic bags are also a major threat to wildlife. They take hundreds of years to decompose, and when they do they can release toxic particles into soils and water. They are also swallowed whole by marine animals such as turtles, which mistake them for jellyfish. The Spanish government promised to reduce the use of plastic bags by 50%, following a campaign by Friends of the Earth Spain, who worked with local businesses in Galicia, Sevilla, Mallorca and Eivissa to promote reusable cotton bags.

In coalition with CEE Bankwatch Network, FoE Europe also launched a new map of 55 environmentally destructive and economically unsound infrastructure projects, worth a total of €23 billion, in the ten new member states of central and eastern Europe. 

Much of Friends of the Earth Europe’s efforts around forests and biodiversity are focused on mining, oil and gas, since these sectors have such devastating impacts both on people and their environment in Europe and elsewhere. Damaging activities include, for example, drilling (on- and offshore), platforms and artificial islands in the Niger River Delta, the Amazon River, Congo's rainforests, the Caspian Sea and the North Sea, and the undersea pipeline from Sakhalin Island to an offshore terminal, which is endangering the world's last 100 or so Western Pacific Grey Whales. Thousands of hectares of Canadian boreal forest are also being cut down to make way for oil sands exploitation in Alberta.

Additionally, we challenged false publicity about the potential of jatropha, and other plants that might be used for agrofuel production. In particular, FoE Africa groups and others set out to research the extent to which agrofuels are expanding across Africa, through a literature review, on-the-ground observation, and interviews with government officials, community leaders, local authorities, farmers and farmers’ organizations, civil society groups and academics. The resulting report considers the state of agrofuels production in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It records details, where available, on incoming investment, key companies, case studies, issues relating to land and legal rights, and environmental impact assessments. It also delves into government and state policies on agrofuels promotion and energy self-sufficiency.

The FoE Europe campaign on agrofuels was selected by the European Parliament Magazine as the most effective NGO campaign, specifically because of our high-visibility creative actions organized in collaboration with groups from all our regions. Improvements to our web site, and investments in communications in FoE Europe, allowed us to mobilize 47,000 people in May to participate in a poll by EC President Barroso, which changed the poll from 95% in favor of the EU's biofuels target to 89% against, in just three days.

FoEI also organized two speakers’ tours (in May and December 2008) for leaders from the South, in order to raise awareness in Europe about the devastating impacts of growing crops to produce agrofuels. We also organized an action in front of the Brazilian embassy in Brussels to protest against their agrofuels policies, in collaboration with La Via Campesina and FIAN (Face It Act Now – for the right to food). The speakers took part in lobby meetings to demand an end to the EU 10% biofuels target, with Members of the European Parliament and representatives of the European Commission. Similar meetings were organized with national parliaments in France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. The visiting speakers also lectured at universities in Brussels, Grenoble, Leuven, Montpellier, and the UNDP University in Namur. They received good media coverage, including through outlets such as Télé Grenoble, Midi Libre, France 3 TV, Planète Libre Magazine, national TV RFO, Radio Campus in Belgium, Panoramica magazine, ANP Netherlands, Agrarisch Dagblad, and Agripress Belgium.

When the Round Table for Responsible Soy (RTRS) met in Buenos Aires, FoEI helped  gathering civil society from producer countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) as well as importing countries in the EU, to protest against the use of ‘sustainable soy’ certification schemes, which are bound to fail because they do not address the overall expansion of monoculture plantations to produce increasing quantities of agrofuels. Similar round-table approaches around the world have completely failed to address the major social and environmental impacts of industrial-scale soy cultivation and actually serve to frustrate real solutions.

Photo credits: FoE Brazil

During the past two years, agrofuels have been a top advocacy priority for the federation, cutting across almost all of our program areas. During this period, more than 35 FoEI groups in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, El Salvador, England Wales & N Ireland, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Malta, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Scotland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, Uganda, Uruguay and US, worked in solidarity to achieve this goal.

accomplishments

We received a lot of press attention and succeeded in helping to shift public opinion on agrofuels, not just in Europe but throughout producer countries. The fact that increasing attention has been paid to food production, because of the global food crisis, meant that we were presented with an important opportunity to raise concerns about competition between crops for food and crops for fuel (although we approached this issue cautiously as we believe that the food crisis is driven by many significant factors, including speculation in agricultural commodities, and false solutions such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and increased dependence on artificial inputs to agriculture).

Our various activities also reinforced national and regional alliances with social movements fighting for food sovereignty and resisting large scale monocultures, raised FoEI’s profile in debates about energy and climate justice, and contributed to the implementation of FoEI’s Agrofuels campaign internationally.

In 2009, FoEI’s advocacy efforts in the area of economic justice contributed to several positive developments in the EU, the OECD, the UN and a number of countries, regarding corporate practices that threaten the environment, human rights, and people's livelihoods. They have variously helped to influence policies and policy dialogue, and to strengthen civil society.

For example, through the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ), which FoEI is a very active member of, the EJRN Program has developed legal proposals for corporate accountability and to improve OECD guidelines. The OECD now plans to revise its guidelines for multinational companies in order to improve them.

The EJRN Program has also been successful in its efforts to persuade the EU to improve its policies and practices with respect to human rights, international trade, and corporate regulation. The EU has finally started research into improving protections for developing country citizens, against the negative impacts of EU-based business.
  
EJRN also developed proposals for the EU and G-20 to regulate both EU lobbying and the financial sector. This included a campaign for the implementation of an EU lobby registry, which has now been implemented, although it only calls for voluntary registration. FoE is now pushing for this registry to be made mandatory, and together with ALTER EU has published research on current low levels of participation in the register and insufficient data quality ("The Commission's Lobby Register One Year On: Success or Failure?").

Friends of the Earth also filed a complaint with the European Commission arguing that the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC), the main lobby group of the chemical industry in Brussels, had falsified its lobby expenditure report. The European Commission agreed with our conclusions and deemed CEFIC's lobby registration inaccurate and in breach of the code of conduct. The Commission temporarily suspended CEFIC and asked it to correct its stated lobby budget.

FoE also won a case with the European Ombudsman, challenging a case of conflict of interest, concerning EU officials that accepted gifts from companies that they were supervising. The EU is now preparing new rules concerning EU officials and conflicts of interest.  

A successful multilingual, easy-to-use cyberaction also saw 381 parliamentary candidates, including 75 MEPs-elect from 16 countries, signing pledges on lobby transparency and ethics, trade policy, financial market rules and corporate accountability.

As part of its ‘Global Europe’ campaign, the EJRN Program continued to support and strengthen civil society organizations representing Indigenous communities and local communities impacted by these policies. In 2009, this included calling for the suspension of the EU-Peru trade negotiations particularly over concerns about human rights violations. FoE also supported a delegation of representatives of Indigenous Peoples from Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, who toured European capitals to publicize the impacts of mining and biofuels. Although the EU-Peru negotiations have not yet been suspended, this collaborative campaign has so far resulted in a commitment from the European Commission that the negotiated Associated Agreement with Peru will not contain any provision which would be detrimental to the rights of indigenous people; and will contain proposals that guarantee that trade and economic development respect the environment, as well as a binding human rights clause.  

A focused effort to persuade Shell in particular to improve its business practices continues to be a priority for the EJRN Program. This has included support to FoE Nigeria in its campaign to expose the harmful nature of gas flaring. Shell's Utorogu Gas Plant and Chevron’s Escravos Gas Plant are the main sources of gas that feed the West African Gas Pipeline Project (WAGP) financed by the World Bank and its private sector insurance arm, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). FoE Nigeria's research and consultation with local communities revealed the harmful health impacts of processing a local cassava snack which is dried directly from the heat emitted from the flared gas. As a result, local residents raised the issue with the government and the campaign contributed to the decision by the Foreign Minister to publicly commit to enforcing the ban on gas flaring as of January 2010. FoE Nigeria has also prepared a lawsuit against ENI, an Italian gas company, for gas flaring.  

Efforts in Nigeria have been complemented by campaigning at the international level. FoEI collaborated with several organizations to publish "Shell's Big Dirty Secret," which documents Shell's continued investment in the dirtiest forms of energy and its position as the world's most carbon intensive oil company. An OECD complaint filed by FoE Netherlands resulted in a commitment by Shell to improve its oil depot in the Philippines and its communication with surrounding communities, but Shell refused to engage on the most crucial element of the case, relocation of an oil depot.

On 3 December the Netherlands-based court case against Shell got under way in The Hague. The case has been brought by three Nigerian communities and FoE Netherlands/Miluedefensie over oil pollution in Nigeria. Shell asked the court to rule that the Dutch court has no jurisdiction over Shell Nigeria, but on 30 December the court held that the Dutch court does have jurisdiction. Given that Shell has now lost this point, an important hurdle has been overcome, and the 'real' lawsuit can begin. This is the first time in history that a Dutch company has been brought to trial in a Dutch court for damages occurring abroad.

In the US, the ShellGuilty campaign launched by FoEI, Oil Change and Platform London, finally saw justice done when Shell was forced to pay US$15.5 million in an out-of-court settlement for its complicity in the 1995 murder of nine Nigerian activists who opposed its gas flaring, under the US Alien Tort Statute.

Among the many national campaigns that fall under the umbrella of the EJRN Program, FoE Uganda's efforts to stop or improve the Bujagali dam has been very effective. Bujagali Electricity Limited (BEL) and the Ugandan government have revized their compensation policies and procedures for communities affected by the construction of a dam on the River Nile that is financed by World Bank and the African Development Bank. Bujagali Electricity Limited is now providing water tanks to communities affected by the dam and those affected by the transmission line have been promised electricity to their homes. FoE Uganda has also succeeded in submitting a legal case against Lafarge group (a mining company) for illegal mining operations in Queen Elizabeth National Park, a 1,978 square kilometer protected area.

Friends of the Earth has also succeeded in getting the world’s largest steel company, Arcelor-Mittal to make some improvements to its operations in India, South Africa, and Liberia. In collaboration with several other organizations including Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance, Karaganda Ecological Museum in Kazakhstan and the Sustainable Development Institute in Liberia, we published a report on the company's operations operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, India, Liberia, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Romania and the Czech Republic. The report, "Arcelor-Mittal: Going nowhere slowly - A review of the global steel giant's environmental and social impacts in 2008-2009," looks at the company's current practices and makes concrete recommendations to management, shareholders, International Financial Institutions and local and national authorities. FoEI also participated in shareholder meetings of ArcelorMittal and a community meeting with the board; and sent a fact finding mission to Liberia, with seven national and European media representatives, to investigate the company’s environmental, social and human rights impacts.

In 2009, the UN adopted the Ruggie Framework for Business and Human Rights, in response to pressure to improve its oversight of corporate behavior, from civil society groups including Friends of the Earth International. In a Joint NGO statement, a group of NGOs including FoEI congratulated the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises, whilst agreeing with him that the “international community is still in the early stages of adapting the human rights regime to provide more effective protection to individuals and communities against corporate-related human rights harms.” The Human Rights Council must now broaden the focus beyond the elaboration of the ‘protect, respect, and remedy’ framework, to include an explicit capacity to examine situations of corporate abuse.

The EJRN Program was also very successful in strengthening the impact of hundreds of community individuals and activists across the world, including through:

• Friends of the Earth's Third Annual Latin American Sustainability School, which trained 40 activists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala,  Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.   

• The Asia Pacific Workshop on Economic Justice and Strategic Planning for Campaigns, which trained 25 activists from Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste. 

• Community exchanges between communities in Central America affected by climate change (120 individuals attended), between communities throughout Latin America affected by agribusiness (150 individuals), and between communities in Africa affected by Arcelor-Mittal's mining operations. 

• Supporting FoEI representatives to attend EU conferences on corporate social responsibility, transparency with respect to lobbying, and meetings with members of the European Parliament. This included a delegation of FoEI representatives from Central American to the European Parliament, to testify to the behavior of European companies in Latin America.

• On-going technical assistance for civil society organizations in the South campaigning against harmful corporate practices. This assistance has facilitated joint North-South work on many European companies including Stora Enso, Shell, Arcelor Mittal, Monsanto, ENI, and Wilmar. 

Many other publications and other communications materials have been published including:

• "Global Europe: The tyranny of ‘free trade’ the European Way," which examined the negative consequences of Europe's shift away from a social-liberal foreign policy discourse to an approach that puts economic motivations front and center.  

• "Poison Fire," a video documentary exposing oil and gas abuses in Nigeria and featuring FoE Nigeria volunteers.

• "Would you Bank on Them?" a report on the biased composition of La Rosiere group, that advised the EU on policies to address the financial crisis, which was published in collaboration with SpinWatch, Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobby Control. 

• "A Captive Commission, the role of the financial industry in shaping EU regulation," a report on the biased composition of EU advisory groups in the financial sector. The findings of the report formed the substance of a FoE complaint to the EU Ombudsman. 

• "Public money for fossil fuels in the EU and in three EU member states," by Friends of the Earth, Oil Change International and PLATFORM.

• In the US, a written presentation was submitted to the Obama Administration committee reviewing Investor Protection Agreements, at the beginning of 2009.

• In addition, research and preparation of the upcoming publication "Calling the EU’s Bluff: Who are the real champions of biodiversity and traditional knowledge in the EU-Central American and EU-Community of Andean Nations Association Agreements?" was completed.

The EJRN Program working areas are:

• Global Europe. The objective is to expose the negative impacts and the corporate bias of the European Union’s ‘Global Europe’ agenda, and to counter trade and investment agreements that are likely to harm men and women and the environment. The ATALC region is very much involved in the Global Europe campaign, as is Friends of the Earth Europe, which has called on the EU to suspend trade negotiations with Peru and Honduras, especially after the killings of Indigenous People in Peru, and the military coup in Honduras. These violent events are indicative of the harmful effects that the EU’s Global Europe agenda can have on indigenous and local communities.

• Corporate Power: The objective is to expose and counter corporate crimes and their social, environmental and human rights impacts, specifically on women and men’s productive and reproductive activities. This campaign also aims to counter corporate influence over governments and institutions including international financial institutions, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In particular, it seeks to develop and advocate for legal measures that give rights to women, men and communities, to protect themselves against corporate power. 

The EJRN Program is very much engaged in collaborative work with the other FoEI Programs. Cross-cutting areas, include the following:

• With the Forests and Biodiversity Program, EJRN is driving the Campaign against Plantations, currently focused on ATALC and some FoE Europe groups, and soon to include the African and APac regions. EJRN’s contribution is to contribute to the Plantations campaign by exposing and countering the role of relevant corporations, trade and investments; and to foster activities that enable communities to resist. 

• With the Resisting Mining Program, the EJRN is supporting concrete campaigns to stop the mining activities of certain companies such as Shell, Holcim and Arcelor Mittal.

• With the Climate Justice and Energy Program, EJRN is focusing on Climate and Finance, particularly building a common position at the federation level, including on carbon markets and the Clean Development Mechanism. EJRN is also involved in efforts to build the Movement of Victims and People Affected by Climate Change in Latin America (MOVIAC); and exposing and rejecting World Bank involvement in climate change, including through policies and programs to promote Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) and its Climate Investment Funds (CIFs).

• With the Food Sovereignty Program, EJRN is working to create a joint campaign against agribusiness companies worldwide. 

• Similarly, the EJRN Programme is contributing to the Agrofuels Campaign by exposing and countering the role of corporations, trade and investments.

Coordinators and participants

Co-coordinator: Sebastián Valdomir, FoE Uruguay, sebastian@redes.org.uy 

Co-coordinator: Anne van Schaik, FoE Netherlands, anne.van.schaik@milieudefensie.nl (until Sept 2009)
Corporates Campaign Coordinator: Paul de Clerck, FoE Netherlands, paul@milieudefensie.nl

The EJRN Steering Group includes:

• For ATALC: Grace García (FoE Costa Rica), Mario Godínez (FoE Guatemala) as alternate; 
• For Africa: Bobby Peek (FoE South Africa); 
• For Europe: Asad Rehman (FoE EWNI), Charly Poppe (FoE Europe) as alternate; 
• For the US: Karen Orenstein (FoE US); 
• For Asia Pacific: Hemantha Withanage (FoE Sri Lanka)

Groups that participated actively in the EJRN Program during 2009 included Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, EWNI, FoE Europe, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, México, Mozambique, Netherlands, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leona, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Uruguay and the United States.

Photo: FoEI's Angry Mermaid Award targeted the worst corporate lobbyists around climate change in Copenhagen, December 2009. Naomi Klein and FoEI's Nnimmo Bassey helped to deliver the award at the ceremony.

FoEI has also consolidated the joint work with social movements and organizations around Agribusiness. This will allow the Federation to strengthen their resistance strategies, as well as the promotion of solutions, throughout the joint fight with our allies.

FoE groups have produced materials (documented studies, briefings, fact sheets and websites in different languages, and short films) and have made strategic use of the internet for media outreach and advocacy work to fight corporate control over food systems. This corporate control includes monopolistic technologies such as the production and commercialization of GMOs, agrofuels, industrial fishing and aquaculture. For example:

• FoE EWNI’s Food Chain Campaign and report “What's feeding our food?” (December 2008), which highlights the environmental and social impacts of the intensive livestock sector.
• FoE Australia’s Real Food Campaign.
• FoE Uruguay’s influential research work and publications on agribusiness such as: “Agronegocios Ltda. Nuevas modalidades de colonialismo en el Cono Sur de América Latina”; and their documentary: Soberanía Alimentaria en marcha. Recuperación del Molino Santa Rosa.
• The report “Malaysian palm oil - green gold or green wash?” (October 2008), which reveals that Malaysian palm oil exported for use in food, biofuels and cosmetics is far from 'green', contrary to claims by Malaysian palm oil producers.
  

These materials are helping to mobilize people; they help European consumers to make informed choices; help to ensure that social and environmental issues are taken into account by companies; mobilize the public and decision-makers to support changes that will help to build a more equitable North-South relationship in a key area affecting biodiversity, food security and poverty reduction; and contribute to the debate about Europe’s overall levels of consumption.

The EU is one of the world’s biggest importers of agriculture commodities, to supply a range of needs, from the food on our plates to animal feed for our livestock. In addition, in response to demands to reduce dependence on oil imports, and in order to minimize climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions, EU and national energy policies are now resulting in the rapid increase of a new commodity – agrofuels.

This has raised new and complex challenges for developing countries that are expanding agricultural production to meet Europe’s demand. In 2008, FoE groups in Europe (Austria Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, England Wales & N Ireland, Estonia, France, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain) developed a campaign called “Feeding and Fuelling Europe” to raise public awareness in the EU about the impacts of the food commodities trade, on food security, rural livelihoods and the environment in developing countries. The campaign provides opportunities, solutions and recommendations for citizens, policy makers and industry. The work is coordinated with national campaign activities aimed at fighting agribusiness and promoting food sovereignty in FoE groups in Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines), Africa (Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).

Friends of the Earth is developing its Food Sovereignty Program in close conjunction with allies, including La Via Campesina. We attended the High-Level Meeting on Food Security in Madrid (26-27 January) where Via Campesina and FoE Spain’s joint actions outside the conference got excellent coverage in the Spanish media, and Henry Saragih from Via Campesina was eventually invited to speak on behalf of civil society in the final plenary session. The response from the conference was striking: the applause was deafening and continued for a full two minutes despite repeated attempts by the Chair to move on to the next agenda item. 

Critically, the meeting ended without consensus on a new 'Global Partnership', which was in line with civil society proposals. However, the official website is less clear about this outcome and presents a non-negotiated and non-adopted 'Final Statement' that still talks about a new Global Partnership. In general we were extremely disappointed to find that proposed solutions to the food crisis still include pesticides, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and fertilizers.

The 17th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) in May, in New York, saw important progress on food sovereignty however, when the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter's proposals included the right of peoples to access land and define their own food policies, as well as the principles that the government should support the least protected (including rural) people and implement production models that do not contribute to climate change. The UN Special Rapporteur’s position strongly echoes the new production model that La Vía Campesina and FoEI have been promoting for years, although it does not yet go far enough: people also need to have the right to define and control their own food and food production systems. A successful side event on GMOs and the food crisis was also held during this event.

Together with the EJRN Program, the Food Sovereignty Program is also starting to build a new global campaign challenging agribusiness. This lengthy undertaking is being undertaken in conjunction with Via Campesina and the World March of Women, and is a follow up to the Food Sovereignty Forum, which took place in Nyeleni, Mali in February 2007.

The plan is to build up from the regional sphere to the global. To this end, we have started organizing regional forums to launch the regional processes; from these we can then decide where to concentrate forces in our struggles for food sovereignty, how to strengthen our coordination and our joint campaign efforts. To date regional food sovereignty forums have been held in Paraguay (21-23 August) and Nigeria, with representatives from different regions of FoEI and strategic allies present at each. The meeting in Nigeria focused on Opposing Land Grabs, AGRA and Non-Ecological Agriculture, and took place in Abuja, Nigeria, 20-23 October. AGRA is an organization that focuses on the Green Revolution, and it represents agribusiness in Africa at its worst.

In April 2009, when FoEI activists from around the world were in Amsterdam for internal strategy meetings, FoEI and FoE Netherlands also co-hosted a public discussion on "Food sovereignty versus certification: the soy case in the Netherlands," with politicians, academics and members of the Dutch farming community.

In-line with the program’s objective to expose industrial corporate-led agriculture and promote food sovereignty, Friends of the Earth, together with Food and Water Watch and the European Co-ordination of Via Campesina, also produced a groundbreaking film, "Killing Fields: the battle to feed factory farms," which investigates the impacts of growing soy in South America to feed factory farms in Europe. Few people realize that a hidden chain of destruction stretches from factory farms in Europe to the forests of South America – where huge soy plantations are wiping out wildlife and making climate change worse. To make way for soy plantations, thousands of people are being forced from their land and with it, losing their ability to grow their own food. Indigenous People are being evicted and forests are being cleared. Many of the soybeans are genetically modified and massively increase the use of pesticides – resulting in the poisoning of rural communities, water sources and the natural environment.

As part of its collaborative approach, FoEI has been increasingly involved with the International NGO/CSO Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), participating in the drafting committee of the IPC’s "Eradicate Hunger" document, and in the Steering Committee of the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum that paralleled the FAO Summit on Food Security in Rome, 16-18 November 2009. As soon as the summit was announced, social movements, NGOs and other civil society organizations started a dialogue with FAO to organize the parallel civil society forum, which included some 500 farmers, Indigenous Peoples, rural youth, women and others. The forum addressed the hunger crisis affecting over one billion people and nearly one sixth of the world's population. FoEI was also involved in preparations for activities in parallel to the 3rd Session of the Governing Body on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, in Tunisia, in June. FoEI has been invited to join the IPC’s international facilitation group, which has been formed to work on the FAO process for the adoption of voluntary guidelines on land and natural resources tenure. This group will also be a space for reflection and articulation on land rights and land grabbing.

The struggle for a GM-free world also remains a priority for the food sovereignty movement and Friends of the Earth International continues its campaign against the GM industry. Working against GMOs includes struggling against soy monocultures and the dominant model of production. We are campaigning to stop GM food aid, and to increase land available to family farmers and for rural agriculture.

In 2009, we published our annual research report on GM crops," Who Benefits from GM Crops? Feeding the biotech giants, not the world’s poor," which focused on the importance of democratic decision-making in food production and distribution, and raised questions about the ability of GM crops to contribute to poverty reduction, global food security or sustainable farming.

Friends of the Earth groups and allies are also maintaining pressure on the GM industry at the national and regional levels. This has had a particularly marked impact in Europe. At the beginning of the year, the European Commission issued proposals for two new varieties of genetically modified (GM) maize to be grown in Europe despite ongoing safety concerns. In a proposal sent to EU member states, the Commission also said it wanted to force Greece, Hungary and France to drop their national bans on a similar GM maize. But the European Commission was defeated when member states voted on this issue, with many member states holding fast with their position on GMOs. Civil society organizations were clearly instrumental in this.

In Hungary, for example, Friends of the Earth, along with other civil society organizations, farmers’ organizations and politicians held a demonstration to keep Hungary free of genetically-modified organisms and demonstrators dispatched representatives to every EU foreign representative in Budapest to ask other European countries to vote against the Commission’s proposal. FoE Spain and other Spanish civil society organizations coordinated a hugely successful action against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), with more than 100 actions and protests across the country. 8,000 people also took part in a national demonstration in Zaragoza, the capital city of the GM maize-growing region. With support from FOE Europe, FoE Spain also organized actions and sent letters to the Spanish Embassies in the EU.

This European resistance received a further boost in April, when Germany banned Monsanto's GM maize MON810 as allowed under EU law (known as the ‘safeguard clause’). Germany joins Hungary, Greece, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Poland and Italy who all effectively have bans in place. The German decision is based on new scientific research, which shows that the crop damages ladybirds, butterflies and daphnia magna (water organisms). This was a huge success for FoE Germany and other environmental and agricultural organizations, who have worked hard for this outcome for many years. Furthermore, 73% of Germans polled in April said they would favor products labeled as being GM free.

In July 2009, a scientific analysis commissioned by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Europe showed that an opinion by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which advocated the safety of the only genetically modified (GM) crop grown in Europe, was fundamentally flawed. The report revealed serious mistakes and omissions, which completely undermined EFSA’s conclusion. The report was submitted to a public consultation on Monsanto’s MON810 maize, and the groups called on the European Commission and EU countries to reject the authorization of this crop.

In a related action organized by FoE Spain in September, activists dressed as Spanish maize fled to the French Embassy in Madrid to seek asylum, fearing contamination from genetically modified varieties, which are being grown in Spain without any precautions against contamination. FoE Cyprus has also been active, hosting a lecture on GMOs, and speaking at a seminar designed to educate teachers about organic food and its benefits, organized by PASYBIO (the Cyprus Organic Farmers Union).

Other national campaign successes and activities in Europe in 2009 included the following:

• On 6 March, during an extended session on food safety and regulation in the Georgian Parliament, Georgia’s Minister of Agriculture unexpectedly supported citizens’ demands to declare Georgia a GM-free country. This is an abrupt change in the political discourse, after many years of campaigning by FoE Georgia and other Georgian NGOs, and a significant public victory.

• In its Renewed Programme for Government, published on 10 October 2009, the Irish Government declared that it “will declare the Republic of Ireland a GM-Free Zone, free from the cultivation of all GM plants.” This will make it the ninth country in the EU to prohibit the cultivation of transgenic plants.

• A protest outside the head office of WWF-Netherlands with a weeping panda, a Monsanto circus director, and various people in white overalls spraying ‘Roundup’, protesting against WWF’s support for the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) proposal to certify GM Roundup Ready soy as 'responsible'. Another action followed days later outside the head office of Ahold, which is a prominent member of the RTRS, in response to RTRS’s newly agreed criteria for ‘responsible’ soy, which will allow the continued expansion of soy and even certify GM soy. 

There have also been strong FoE campaigns against GM crops in other regions. For example:

• In Mexico, Friends of the Earth Mexico organised a festival event in the square Plaza de Mexicanos in San Cristobal, to mark World Food Day on 16 October. 

• In Nigeria, Friends of the Earth launched a campaign against field trials of the so-called ‘super cassava’, which is engineered for enhanced levels of Vitamin A. FoE Nigeria has published a detailed report arguing that the trials would be a breach of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which Nigeria has signed. 

• In Paraguay, the Paraguayan Senate has been discussing a new law on agrochemicals, which would dramatically increase the environmental, health and other social impacts of soy and other crops in Paraguay. Several key clauses of the existing law would be weakened, such as the requirement to have vegetation barriers and to warn surrounding communities in advance of spraying. Also, as the new law would be easier for soy growers to comply with, their crops – including GM crops – could be more likely to acquire Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) certification, which calls for adherence to national laws. Friends of the Earth and others, including small farmers’ movements, several Ministers and the World Health Organization have all strongly opposed this proposal.

The Food Sovereignty Program is also starting to develop its work around climate and agriculture, together with the CJE Program. It is important to analyze and expose the links between climate justice and agriculture including emissions from long distance transport of food for international trade; the impacts of changes in land use; the impacts of industrial agriculture on climate; and the impacts of agrofuels production. In addition, we will report on the impacts of false solutions to the climate crisis on food sovereignty, expose the impacts of climate change on women, and analyze and report the increasing control of agribusiness transnationals in the UN’s climate change negotiations.

The first steps in this process were the development of an analysis of the role of GMOs in climate change, and a seminar at the Klimaforum09 in Copenhagen in December. On 11 December, a major event on "Food, Energy Sovereignty and Climate Justice" (which also included several presentations on REDD) was also co-organized in Copenhagen, by Friends of the Earth International, the Global Forest Coalition, Via Campesina and the World March of Women.

Developing strategic relationships and alliances is a priority for the Food Sovereignty Program, especially with Via Campesina and the World March of Women, and has been a focus throughout the year, including in preparations for and actions at the Forum Against Agribusiness in Asuncion, the Conference against Land Grabbing and AGRA in Abuja, the Global Action Day against Monsanto on 16 October, and events in Copenhagen in December. This has included a number of joint letters and statements, including:

• Preparing and coordinating a statement from FoEI and Via Campesina within the framework of the 17th Session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development: "Food sovereignty: A new model for a human right" (May).

• Civil Society open letter to FAO regarding the High-Level Expert Forum on "How to feed the world in 2050" (September). 

• An open letter to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with regard to their participation in AGRA.

Other key meetings that the Food Sovereignty Program has participated in include:

• The High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All, Madrid (January)
• CSD Intergovernmental Preparatory Meeting (February)
• 17th Session of the UN Division for Sustainable Development (May)
• Activities prior to the WTO Ministerial Conference, Geneva, (November-December), and the
• Trade to Climate Caravan, Geneva to Copenhagen, organized by the Trade and Climate Change Working Group of Our World Is Not For Sale and other organizations prior to COP15 (December). 

The Food Sovereignty Program’s main working areas are:

• Resistance to land grabbing and agribusiness
• A GM-free world, and 
• Climate and agriculture. 

Internal cross-cutting themes include:

• The promotion of food sovereignty and solutions; and 
• Gender

Collaboration with other programs and campaigns:

• With EJRN and Agrofuels - resistance to land grabbing and agribusiness, including Stora Enso.

International Co-coordinators

• Martín Drago, FoE Uruguay, martin.drago@redes.org.uy
• Kirtana Chandrasekaran, FoE EWNI, kirtana.chandrasekaran@foe.co.uk

Regional Coordinators:

• For ATALC: Caludia Jerónimo, FoE Guatemala, and FoE Paraguay as alternate
• For Africa: Marianne Bassey (Nigeria) and Sicelo Simelane (Swaziland) as alternate
• For Asia Pacific: Choony Kim (South Korea)
• For Europe: Helen Holder (FoE Europe) and Kirtana Chandrasekaran (FoE EWNI) as alternate

Groups that participated actively in 2009:

Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, El Salvador, EWNI, France, Georgia, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Paraguay, Spain, Uruguay, and members of the Feeding and Fuelling Europe project in Europe. 

The Nyeleni Forum was crucial in helping FoEI to frame its Food Sovereignty Program, continue to build its strategic alliance with La Via Campesina, and act more strongly at both the grassroots and international levels. In 2008, around 30 FoEI member groups from Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, El Salvador, England Wales & N Ireland, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritius, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, Nigeria, Paraguay, Philippines, South Korea, Spain, Swaziland, Uruguay and the USA actively participated in FoEI’s Food Sovereignty Program, and worked in solidarity to advance the food sovereignty agenda globally.

accomplishments

In 2008, FoEI's Food Sovereignty Program was able to:

• advance the food sovereignty agenda globally
• strengthen the fight for a GM-free world
• focus on the links between industrial agriculture and climate change
• link trade to food sovereignty and defend territories and land rights from agribusiness
  

An excellent example of our work to empower communities is the Movement of Victims Affected by Climate Change in Central America (MOVIAC) initiative, which continued in 2009. As part of this, more than a hundred representatives of Central American movements, organizations and networks, met in June, in El Salvador. MOVIAC is an invaluable and inspirational component of the Affected Peoples Campaign. Many other FoEI member groups are now inspired to create similar national and regional grassroots movements with affected communities.

FoEI’s work with affected communities also included the Climate School: Building and Mobilizing Climate Justice, which took place on 24 March 2009, in Medellin, Colombia, within the framework of the actions against the Inter-American Development Bank’s 50th Anniversary Annual Meeting, also in Medellin. In addition, a series of community exchanges between communities in Central America has enabled 120 individuals to live in and exchange experiences with other communities challenged by climate change.

FoEI has also focused on developing and deepening key alliances, in order to contribute to building a diverse, effective and global movement for climate justice and energy sovereignty. For the CJE Program this has involved working closely with key social movements such as La Via Campesina and the World March of Women, throughout the year. In particular, we agreed to cohost a joint assembly at Klimaforum09 in Copenhagen, to advance the design of a political agenda that would allow us to move forward in mobilizing and organizing the defence of land. Additionally, we enhanced our cooperation with other coalitions and strategic alliances including Indigenous Peoples’ organizations, Jubilee South, the Global Forest Coalition, Jubilee South, the Durban Group, REDLAR and others.

Key moments in the evolution of these alliances in 2009 included:

• An event, "Talks between Environmentalists and Indigenous Peoples," at the World Social Forum, 31 January 2009, Belem do Para, Brazil. Organized by FoEI and the Global Forest Coalition, these strategic talks between Indigenous Peoples and environmentalists, with over 100 participants, allowed us to advance in the establishment of political agreements and strategic actions to build climate justice and to fight against the exploitation of nature.

• "Environmentalists and Indigenous Peoples united for Climate Justice," at the Foro Andino, in Colombia, 18-19 March 2009. Organized by Friends of the Earth, this event also strengthened the developing relationship between environmentalists and Indigenous Peoples from the Andean region including the U`wa, Wayuú, Nasa, Misak, Quichua and Aymara. The focus of the meeting was the impact of climate change on Indigenous Peoples’ lands and the need to move forward with a shared strategy and joint actions for climate justice.

• The 5th REDLAR Mesoamerican Conference, Boquete, Panama, 22-25 April 2009. FoE was able to promote the idea of combining Energy Sovereignty, Climate Justice and buen vivir  (literally ‘good living’) to the 264 representatives from Mesoamerica and other areas of the continent. This latter concept is central to the social movement and Indigenous Peoples in America, and is referred to as Abya Yala.

• 1st Continental Summit of Indigenous Women of Abya Yala and the 4th Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala, in Puno, Peru, 27-31 May 2009. Together with over 5,000 attendees, Friends of the Earth participated in talks, workshops and meetings at both summits. This was an excellent opportunity to contribute to the establishment of the concept of buen vivir and to strengthen ties and move forward with strategies for climate justice.

• Friends of the Earth also participated in the Asia Pacific Peoples’ Solidarity for Climate Justice organizing meeting, to contribute to preparations for the week of civil society activities that took place in parallel to the Bangkok UNFCCC intersessional meeting, 28 September to 9 October 2009.

• At the 1st International Climate Justice Tribunal, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 14-16 October 2009, FoEI presented a case about sugarcane cutters in South-western Colombia to the tribunal, contributing to the debate on environmental crimes, the climate and environmental debt. This case was the direct result of an international mission for the verification of agrofuels in Colombia, which FoEI organized in July 2009, with the participation of more than 40 international delegates. The mission visited five regions in Colombia which have been severely impacted by the expansion of sugar cane and palm oil to produce agrofuels.

• The months preceding COP-15 in Copenhagen involved extensive and improved collaboration with social movements - especially Via Campesina and the World March of Women - and other civil society organizations, around plans for Copenhagen, including the joint Klimaforum events, mobilizations and media work. FoEI also participated in Climate Justice Action preparations, and organized and participated in a Climate Justice Now! strategy meeting in Bangkok in October.

In 2009 FoEI's campaigning on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations involved the production and distribution of a substantial number of policy proposals and analyses in the run-up to COP-15 in Copenhagen. A new and rapidly developing focus in this respect is climate finance, a cross-cutting campaign being run with FoEI’s Economic Justice Resisting Neoliberalism (EJRN) program. We developed a robust position paper in collaboration with campaigners from the EJRN campaign, which formed the foundation for much of our campaigning before and during Copenhagen. FoEI also began to contribute to the climate finance debate within the climate justice movement. Nearly 10,000 copies of our climate finance materials, "Financing Climate Justice: Ensuring a Just Agreement on Climate Change," and "Financing Climate Justice: Summary of Demands and Ethical Criteria Matrix" were distributed in Copenhagen, in English, French and Spanish. FoEI’s ethical criteria matrix provides governments with a set of criteria for judging climate financing mechanisms proposed during negotiations.

Thousands of copies of our 2008 publication "REDD Myths: a critical review of proposed mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries" were also re-printed and distributed in Copenhagen, as was "Voices from communities affected by climate change." In addition, 5,000 copies of the popular FoEI newspaper, "Climate Justice Times," were also distributed.  

The joint efforts of FoEI and key allies has helped to ensure that a number of governments, such as Bolivia, have officially voiced their concerns about the potential negative impacts of UNFCCC, World Bank and national policies to finance Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), especially if REDD is used to support plantations and is funded through carbon markets. As a result of lobbying by FoEI and allies, the UNFCCC’s REDD draft reflected these concerns. A key element in this effort was a side event on the potential impacts of REDD on Indigenous Peoples’ rights and biodiversity and the risks of GE trees, on 3 June, parallel to the meetings of the Subsidiary Bodies to the UNFCCC in Bonn. This was co-organized with the Global Forest Coalition and the International Alliance on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forest. Many FoEI member groups have also been informed and thus enabled to participate in national REDD policy discussions currently underway.

During the year we also produced a video trilogy, "Towards Solutions on Sustainable Energy Practices". In addition, we distributed and publicized a Friends of the Earth Europe Study entitled "The 40% Study: Mobilizing Europe to Achieve Climate Justice," which shows that domestic emissions cuts of at least 40% in Europe by 2020 are both feasible and affordable.

This research, combined with our advocacy activities, also allowed us to be particularly effective in persuading governments in many countries in the global North to introduce binding climate change laws that will help to reduce those countries’ carbon emissions. This was especially the case in Europe where FoE has focused on its Big Ask campaign: France, Scotland and the UK passed climate change laws setting emissions reductions targets, and it seems likely that similar laws will soon be passed in a number of other European countries including Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland and Slovenia.

Other member groups have also been very active on climate change. In March 2009, for example, FoE Japan organized an international workshop on climate change impacts and solutions faced by developing countries, with presentations from the Japanese government, the World Bank and several international organizations. FoEI’s involvement focused on showing how climate change and its false solutions are a result of the current neoliberal production and consumption model.

Although Copenhagen was an abject failure, it was a key moment in the intergovernmental debate on mitigating and adapting to climate change, because of the urgent need to agree and develop a successor to the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol before it expires in 2012. FoEI took a team of 400 activists to Copenhagen: some of them were engaged in lobbying and advocacy work within the Bella Center, whilst others were focused on the daily mobilizations and alternative events, including the Klimaforum, which were so important to ensuring governments heard the critical voices of civil society.

From the talks in the Klimaforum, demonstrations on the streets, and actions in the conference centre, the message was loud and clear: any climate agreement must be based on climate justice. This was an important development: before Copenhagen the term ‘climate justice’ was much discussed in civil society meetings but more-or-less unknown elsewhere. During Copenhagen on the other hand, it began appearing frequently in the mainstream media.

We promoted the development of many actions/spaces for campaigning and mobilizing during COP-15 and Klimaforum09. This included FoE Europe’s work developing the Flood for Climate Justice, an extremely successful demonstration which more than 5,000 people from many countries participated in. The event also involved mock carbon traders trying to sell carbon offsets to protestors, and a fake carbon stock exchange. It ended in front of the Danish Parliament with the creation of a massive human banner reading “Offsetting is a false solution.”

FoEI also drew public attention to our positions and alternatives for sustainable livelihoods through both traditional and new creative media activities and actions. During Copenhagen, we posted 37 blog entries and 9 videos on FoEI's You Tube channel, and 300 high-quality images on Flickr. Prior to Copenhagen, we created a website to feature the Angry Mermaid Award which included an animation story on the effect of corporate neglect of climate change on communities in the South: the website had 23,851 views. In Copenhagen's Klimaforum09, we presented an interactive Climate Capsule installation with videos, photos and drawings from around the world. We also conducted outreach on climate change during the international tour of the rock band Radiohead, and produced the graphic novel "Speechless" about the history of economic globalization.

A further key objective for the CJE program is to stop World Bank pollution of the climate debate. During 2009 we continued to monitor and conduct advocacy around the World Bank’s framework on clean energy investment and the emission-trading schemes promoted by IFIs. In September we organized a public forum on climate debt alongside the Intersessional Meeting on Climate Change in Bangkok, and a public forum on climate change and financing. FoEI was co-organizer of an international meeting on Financing Strategy and Climate, along with other networks and organizations including Jubilee South, Focus on the Global South, and Oilwatch. FoEI also supported the production of the FoEI Asia Pacific (APac) region’s first climate publication, "Climate Impacts of the ADB's Business: How the Asian Development Bank Finances Climate Change."

FoE also participated in the civil society campaign to stop governments subsidizing the climate-wrecking fossil fuels industry. In April 2009, we published Public Money for Fossil Fuels in the EU and three EU Member States, to identify the many sources of public investments in harmful industries. In 2009, both the G-20 and the UN made agreements to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, which will have a positive impact on policies regarding renewable energy.

Some FoE groups are also focusing on private finance and its role in driving climate change. FoE Netherlands, for example, has conducted research into systems for measuring carbon footprints, which was presented during a Banktrack meeting for private banks in Washington. The Climate Working Group of banks involved in the Equator Principles is now organizing workshops to develop and implement such a methodology. The outcome of our activities is that among these banks the question is not 'whether' or 'why' they should measure carbon footprints, but 'how'. FoE Netherlands has also convinced private banks in the Netherlands to commit to improving their energy-related investment policies.

The Climate Justice & Energy Program working areas are:

• Energy sovereignty
• Climate and finance / Carbon and forest markets
• UNFCCC (including REDD), and
• Stopping World Bank pollution of the climate debate.

Cross campaign areas include:

• With the Forests and Biodiversity Program - the REDD campaign
• With the Forests and Biodiversity Program, the Food Sovereignty Program, and the EJRN Program - Agrofuels
• With the EJRN program - Financing and Climate, particularly building a common position at the federation level, including on carbon markets and the Clean Development Mechanism

Coordinators and participants

In 2009, the co-coordinators of the Climate Justice & Energy (CJE) Program were:

• Hildebrando Vélez and Irene Vélez, FoE Colombia
• Joseph Zacune, FoE EWNI
• Stephanie Long, FoE Australia
  

 The CJE Steering Group included:

• For ATALC: Eduardo Giesen, FoE Chile,
• For Europe: Sonja Meister, FoE Europe,
• For Africa: Michael Keania Karikpo, FoE Nigeria
• For North America: Karen Orenstein, FoE US

Groups that participated actively in the CJE Program in 2009 included: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Belgium (Flanders and Brussels), Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, England, Wales & N Ireland, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay and the US.

climate justice and energy

Our Climate Justice and Energy (CJE) Program’s overall objective is to build a diverse, effective and global movement for climate justice. In 2009, FoEI continued our close collaboration with key social movements, especially La Via Campesina, and the World March of Women, and the new Movement of Victims Affected by Climate Change in Central America (MOVIAC). New links with indigenous networks and movements were also fostered at key events during the year, and FoEI collaborated with many other networks including Climate Justice Now!, Asia Pacific Peoples’ Solidarity for Climate Justice, and Climate Justice Action.

The CJE Program’s goal is to ensure that rich industrialized Annex I countries had committed to needed emissions reductions, and to financing and transferring technology to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. We published a substantial number of policy proposals and analyses in the run-up to the COP-15 UNFCCC in Copenhagen, in December 2009. This included an ethical climate finance criteria matrix, which provided governments with a set of criteria for judging climate financing mechanisms proposed during negotiations.

FoEI took a team of 400 activists to Copenhagen, who variously engaged in lobbying and advocacy work, and organizing and participating in alternative events and daily mobilizations, including our hugely successful Flood for Climate Justice mobilization. The joint efforts of FoEI and key allies helped to ensure that a number of governments, including Bolivia, officially voiced their concerns about the potential negative impacts of UNFCCC, World Bank and national policies to finance Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD).

Although the results of the Copenhagen summit were extremely disappointing, many FoEI member groups in the global North have been very effective in persuading their governments to introduce binding national climate change laws, which will help to reduce those countries’ carbon emissions. This was especially the case in Europe where France, Scotland and the UK passed climate change laws setting binding emissions reductions targets. It seems likely that similar laws will soon be passed in a number of other European countries including Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland and Slovenia.

During 2009 we also continued to monitor and conduct advocacy around the World Bank’s framework on ‘clean energy investment’ and the emissions trading schemes promoted by the international financial institutions (IFIs). In 2009, both the G-20 and the UN made agreements to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, which will have a positive impact on the development and spread of renewable energy technologies.

food sovereignty

FoEI’s Food Sovereignty Program aims to halt the corporate control of food, and stop the spread of genetically modified organisms: it defends the right of people to determine and control their own food systems. In 2009, we attended the High-Level Meeting on Food Security in Madrid where Via Campesina and FoE Spain’s joint actions outside the conference got excellent coverage, and Henry Saragih from Via Campesina was eventually invited to speak on behalf of civil society in the final plenary session. The response from the conference was striking: the applause was deafening, and the meeting ended without consensus on a new 'Global Partnership', which was in line with civil society proposals (although the official website is less clear about this outcome).

The 17th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) also saw important progress on food sovereignty when proposals from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food included peoples’ right to access land and define their own food policies, and the need for governments to support the least protected people and implement food production models that do not contribute to climate change. This position strongly echoes the positions of Vía Campesina and FoEI, although it does not yet go far enough.

The struggle for a GM-free world remains a priority, and includes campaigns against soy monocultures, genetically modified (GM) food aid, and the dominant model of production. FoEI is campaigning to increase land available to family farmers and for rural agriculture. In 2009, we published our annual research report on GM crops, "Who Benefits from GM Crops? Feeding the biotech giants, not the world’s poor," which challenges the ability of GM crops to contribute to poverty reduction, global food security or sustainable farming.

Friends of the Earth groups and allies are also maintaining pressure on the GM industry at the national and regional levels. This has had a particularly marked impact in Europe, where European Commission efforts to allow two new varieties of genetically modified (GM) maize to be grown in Europe, and to force Greece, Hungary and France to drop their national bans on a similar GM maize, were overturned by member states. Civil society organizations were clearly instrumental in this. This resistance received a further boost in April, when Germany banned Monsanto's GM maize MON810. This was a huge success for FoE Germany and other environmental and agricultural organizations who have worked hard for this outcome for many years. There have also been strong FoE campaigns against GM crops in many countries, including Mexico, Nigeria and Paraguay.

FoEI is also starting to build a new global campaign challenging agribusiness, with Via Campesina and the World March of Women. In 2009, this included regional food sovereignty forums in Paraguay and Nigeria. Together with Food and Water Watch and the European Co-ordination of Via Campesina, we also produced a groundbreaking film, "Killing Fields: the battle to feed factory farms," which investigates the impacts of growing soy in South America to feed factory farms in Europe.

agrofuels

FoEI’s Agrofuels Campaign aims to stop the production, trade and consumption of agrofuels, by raising public awareness about its negative impacts on local communities and globally. In 2009, the campaign focused on strengthening local communities’ defence of their territories, and exposing ‘false solutions’ to the climate and energy crisis. A prerequisite for this was compiling FoEI members’ research, reports, and national and regional positions.

The Agrofuels Campaign integrates FoEI’s ongoing campaign against deforestation caused by oil palm plantations. 2009 was particularly notable because of the World Bank’s suspension of its investments in oil palm plantation companies. A coalition of local and international NGOs, spearheaded by the UK organization Forest Peoples Program and including FoE Netherlands, had previously filed a complaint with the International Finance Corporation (IFC)'s internal watchdog, the Compliance Advisory Ombudsman office (CAO), about a series of loans to palm oil giant Wilmar International. A joint report by three NGOs (FoE Netherlands, Kontak Rakyat Borneo and Gemawan) had examined Wilmar's plantations in Sambas, West Kalimantan, Indonesia, and found that the company was working with dubious licenses, and was entangled in land rights conflicts and illegal logging activities. This complaint triggered an audit by the CAO, which concluded that the IFC had violated its own procedures, and that commercial interests had overruled the IFC's environmental and social standards.

FoEI groups from Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea also joined forces to develop and propose a mandatory code of conduct for Malaysian palm oil companies operating in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. They received positive responses from Malaysia’s Human Rights Council and the Opposition Party, who accepted that Malaysian palm oil expansion has created adverse impacts. Friends of the Earth also filed a complaint with the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) against the Malaysian Palm Oil Council for falsely advertising that palm oil is the "only product able to sustainably and efficiently meet a larger portion of the world's increasing demand for oil crop-based consumer goods, foodstuffs and biofuels." The ASA ruled that this statement was misleading, as was the Malaysian Palm Oil Council’s claim that palm oil contributes to alleviation of poverty. In November 2009, we also filed a grievance with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) against the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, for violating the members' Code of Conduct and continuing to mislead the public and make unsubstantiated claims about the production, procurement and use of palm oil.

A process of capacity-building on agrofuels, land rights and monoculture was also initiated in Central America. We helped to coordinate different groups and communities wanting to work together on agrofuels. A video on Monocultures, Land and Agrofuels in Central America was created by FoE El Salvador with communities’ support. FoEI also organized an international delegation to gather evidence on the impact of agrofuels in Colombia.

Friends of the Earth’s aim of reaching a broader public was also substantially achieved through the broadcasting of footage from our commissioned film, "Lost in Palm Oil."

Lobbying efforts in Europe remain focused on challenging the EU’s target of 10% of all road transport fuel coming from ‘renewable’ sources by 2020, with a majority likely to come from agrofuels. Key to this is increasing Europeans’ awareness of the impacts of agrofuels and about potential alternatives. This included the publication of "Biofuels: handle with care," an analysis of EU biofuels policy with recommendations for action, in November 2009.

forests and biodiversity

FoEI’s Forests and Biodiversity Program campaigns against illegal logging and deforestation, and works with communities and local people to uphold their rights to manage their forests. We also expose and oppose the negative impacts of monoculture plantations of crops such as sugar cane, palm oil and soy, planted to produce agrofuels.

The Forests and Biodiversity program’s focus on strengthening and promoting sustainable local initiatives means that some of its key activities and successes occur at the national level. For example, in Uruguay Friends of the Earth successfully halted construction of the controversial pulp and paper mill proposed by ENCE who had been planning to invest US$1,500 million. In Malaysia, Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit to save a water-catchment forest on the Jerai mountain in Kedah from a quarry project that has been illegally approved by the state government. The Indonesian President identified illegal logging as a form of entrenched corruption, saying that he appreciated the efforts of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth which have been active in criticizing the forest management of his government.

The Forests and Biodiversity Program is also focused on challenging and changing intergovernmental policies that already or potentially could contribute to the destruction of forests and biodiversity, For example, it participated in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s High-level Working Group on the 2010 biodiversity target and post-2010 target(s), and successfully persuaded governments to incorporate a number of key paragraphs into the final 2010 Biodiversity Targets.

Collaborative side and parallel events during intergovernmental forums, including meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Copenhagen, and the World Forestry Congress in Buenos Aires, were also successful in raising civil society’s concerns and challenging government perspectives. FoEI also produced a video about the performance of Finnish pulp and paper company Stora Enso in Uruguay, and created a photo exhibition on the impacts of cellulose/logging corporations in the Southern Cone of South America, which was exhibited at the World Forestry Congress.

The program also participated in the 2009 World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, co-hosting a workshop on plantations, market mechanisms and false solutions, with the Global Forest Coalition; and published "Community-based Forest Governance: from resistance to proposals for sustainable use."

economic justice-resisting neoliberalism

The Economic Justice-Resisting Neoliberalism (EJRN) Program’s objective is to build sustainable societies by building people’s power and dismantling corporate power, stopping corporate-led neo-liberalism and globalization, and challenging the institutions and governments that promote unequal and unsustainable economic systems.

For example, through the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ), which FoEI is a very active member of, the EJRN Program has developed legal proposals for corporate accountability and to improve OECD guidelines. The OECD now plans to revise its guidelines for multinational companies. The UN has also adopted the Ruggie Framework for Business and Human Rights, in response to pressure to improve its oversight of corporate behavior from civil society groups including FoEI. The EU has also started research into improving protection for developing country citizens, against the negative impacts of EU-based business.

The EJRN Program also developed proposals for the EU and G-20 to regulate both EU lobbying and the financial sector. This included a campaign for the implementation of an EU lobby registry which has now been implemented (although it only calls for voluntary registration so far). FoE also convinced the European Commission that the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) had falsified its lobby expenditure report, and the Commission temporarily suspended CEFIC as a result. Additionally, FoE won a case with the European Ombudsman concerning EU officials that accepted gifts from companies they were supervizing. The EU is now preparing new rules on conflicts of interest.

In 2009, FoE’s ‘Global Europe’ campaign called for the suspension of the EU-Peru trade negotiations, particularly over concerns about human rights violations. FoE also supported a delegation of representatives of Indigenous Peoples from Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, who toured European capitals to publicize the impacts of mining and biofuels. Although the negotiations have not yet been suspended, this collaborative campaign has so far resulted in a commitment from the European Commission that the Associated Agreement with Peru will not contain any provision which would be detrimental to the rights of indigenous people; and will contain proposals that guarantee that trade and economic development respect the environment, as well as a binding human rights clause.

A focused effort to persuade Shell to improve its business practices continues to be a priority for FoEI. This has included support to FoE Nigeria in its campaign to expose the harmful nature of gas flaring, which contributed to the Nigerian foreign minister publicly committing to enforcing the ban on gas flaring as of January 2010. Efforts in Nigeria have been complemented by campaigning at the international level: FoEI collaborated with several organizations to publish "Shell's Big Dirty Secret," which documents Shell's continued investment in the dirtiest forms of energy and its position as the world's most carbon intensive oil company. An OECD complaint filed by FoE Netherlands resulted in a commitment by Shell to improve its oil depot in the Philippines and its communication with surrounding communities.

In the US, the ShellGuilty campaign launched by FoEI, Oil Change and Platform London, finally saw justice done when Shell was forced to pay a US$15.5 million out-of-court settlement for its complicity in the 1995 murder of nine Nigerian activists who opposed its gas flaring, under the US Alien Tort Statute.

On 3 December the Netherlands-based court case against Shell got under way in The Hague. The case has been brought by three Nigerian communities and FoE Netherlands/Miluedefensie over oil pollution in Nigeria. Shell asked the court to rule that the Dutch court has no jurisdiction over Shell Nigeria, but on 30 December the court held that the Dutch court does have jurisdiction. Given that Shell has now lost this point, an important hurdle has been overcome, and the 'real' lawsuit can begin. This is the first time in history that a Dutch company has been brought to trial in a Dutch court for damages occurring abroad.

The EJRN Program was also very successful in strengthening hundreds of community individuals and activists across the world, including through the Third Annual Latin American Sustainability School, and community exchanges in Latin America. Many other publications and communications materials were published during the year.

resisting mining oil and gas

FoEI’s Resisting Mining, Oil and Gas Program is a new FoEI program, and groups are concentrating on planning joint campaign work and mapping FoEI’s current work with communities. Some international activities are also underway however, and these included a number of actions against Canadian open-pit mines on 22 July, in countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico and Thailand, to mark the Global Day of Action Against Open Pit Mining. Another important event was the "Conference on Extractive Industries: Blessing or Curse? Impacts of the Oil and Gas Industry," held by FoE Europe in Brussels in October.

Some FoEI groups already have established campaigns on mining, oil and gas, resulting in some important national developments and successes. In December 2009, for example, FoE Hungary celebrated the introduction of a landmark ban on the use of cyanide in mining. FoE Philippines has filed an Alternative Mining Bill, intended to introduce a new mining policy to regulate the exploration, development and utilization of mineral resources. Many FoE groups, including in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Philippines, Ghana, Hungary and Costa Rica, are also working on an on-going basis with local communities affected by mining.

Testimonies from mining communities also feature strongly in FoEI’s new media projects, as do videos on tin mining in Indonesia, and oil pollution in Nigeria, both of which can be seen on YouTube. FoEI also embarked on an ambitious project to create a series of video testimonies by women affected by large-scale metal mining.

Friends of the Earth member groups continue to work on issues related to water, defending water territories for the benefit of communities and biodiversity. We work together with local communities in protecting the right to water, and opposing privatization of water and ‘development’ projects that pollute rivers and that use large quantities of water. Finally, we mobilize the public to vote for new laws and regulations that keep water in the public domain and uphold water as a human right.

Gender

FoEI’s gender program focuses on deepening our understanding of why the feminist perspective is critical to the FoEI federation. Such an understanding can shed light on the ways in which the current neoliberal economic model affects men and women differently, both in terms of its social and environmental impacts. It also reveals the self-perpetuating nature of the patriarchal society. For FoEI, a fuller comprehension of the harsh realities faced by women in different countries and regions across the world will help us construct better and more effective campaign strategies, and change the way we ourselves act. A document on how to work from a gender perspective has already been completed and circulated internally.

Together with allied social movements including La Via Campesina (LVC) and the World March of Women (WMW), we aim to support women to resist, transform and mobilize, both at the local and international levels, to bring about the world they want to live in.

In 2009, we focused on integrating a gender analysis into our programs on Food Sovereignty and Economic Justice-Resisting Neoliberalism (EJRN), and to support the inclusion of a feminist perspective into the EJRN Program’s analysis of the global financial crisis. FoEI was also invited to participate in WMW’s Second Regional Encounter in the Americas, in August 2009, in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Gender campaigners also supported the production of video testimonies from ‘Women Re-sisters’, women resisting mining, some of which can currently be viewed on the FoEI YouTube channel.  Friends of the Earth also participated in La Escuela de Formación de Dirigentas (a school for future women leaders) organized by the Coordinadora de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC) and Via Campesina del Cono Sur, in Paraguay, in July 2009.

Friends of the Earth Uruguay/REDES has been particularly active in promoting FoEI’s focus on gender, in terms of supporting the international coordination of this complex and cross-cutting issue, providing conceptual contributions, and engaging actively at the national level. In June 2009, this included publication of a book that considers the impacts of forest monocultures and soya on the displacement of rural populations, with a special emphasis on the consequences for human rights and gender relations. FoE Uruguay also drafted numerous papers on food sovereignty and gender concerns including a report on the role of rural women in the defense of food sovereignty, based on investigation and interviews with women from la Red de Grupos de Mujeres Rurales (the Network of Rural Women).

In 2008, we conducted many activities to support the development of our member groups, as we understand that the strength of FoEI lies in the strength of our member organizations, their capacity to win victories at the local and national level, relate their struggles in a global context, and act in solidarity with fellow member groups in other countries and across regions.

Our Membership Support Fund seeks to pool resources and share them across FoE member groups for the following objectives: network development, capacity building, strengthening national campaigns, and increasing participation in international campaigns.

In 2008, we distributed 1.22 million Euros to 35 of our members: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, El Salvador, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nepal, Netherlands, Nigeria, Palestina, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Togo and Uruguay.

In addition to this fund, other membership support activities in 2008 included facilitation and accompaniment of regional development, particularly in Asia Pacific and Africa. FoEI provided strategic support and facilitation assistance during regional meetings and in setting up regional structures, as well as one-on-one support to member groups in those regions to encourage their participation in the international federation. 

Other areas of membership development are the facilitation of relationship building among member groups across regions; helping to overcome language barriers through timely translations; creating spaces for sharing experiences, such as exchanges and gatherings; and ensuring that member groups are present in the federation and don't fall off the map.

Peru’s government lacks the capacity to adequately supervise or monitor the project, or to ensure its revenues fund sustainable development. Moreover, the gas is to be exported, rather than used to enhance Peru’s energy security. This makes the project’s developers (Hunt Oil of the USA, Pluspetrol of Argentina, Repsol of Spain, and others) its main beneficiaries, leaving Peruvians to suffer the costs.

Working to oppose the Camisea Gas Project since 2005, Friends of the Earth Peru / Asociación Civíl Labor has sought to inform the public about their social, environmental and cultural rights in the face of Camisea’s development. They also aimed to expose the Peruvian Government and Interamerican Development Bank’s (IDB’s) flawed appraisal of the project, and to raise social and environmental standards for the companies involved.

what happened: FoE Peru is facilitating a coalition of Peruvian NGOs, called Citizen’s Action on Camisea (Acción Ciudadana – Camisea; www.accionciudadanacamisea.org), to pressure the state, international financial institutions (IFIs) and companies involved to raise the project’s standards. The first months of FoE Peru’s project consisted of research and analysis, leading to  reports on: affected Indigenous peoples’ vulnerability; Peru’s fossil fuel policy; and national energy security. This information was presented to the IDB during an August 2007 public hearing on human rights in Lima.

FoE Peru also carried out a public education campaign throughout 2007 in Cuzco, located in the region where Camisea gas is to be extracted, during the period that new loans were being negotiated for Camisea’s second phase. FoE Peru sought to inform the public about the advantages of using natural gas domestically (rather than exporting it), and why gas is preferable to more costly and polluting oil. Their media and arts campaign pressured local authorities to undertake a cost-benefit analysis on gas use in Cuzco.

what is changing: The campaign generally increased awareness about Camisea Phase II, both nationally and internationally. Parliamentarians, IDB officials, Peruvian engineers and civil society said that they benefited from FoE Peru’s information. In Cuzco this translated into local people wishing to gain control over Camisea’s gas, and to see Peru’s national oil and gas policy reflect social and environmental imperatives.

FoE Peru also ensured that the voice of local communities was heard, by reflecting their opinions in proposals to the IDB, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, the Peruvian state and the companies involved. Importantly, this work resulted in the condition that a Peruvian Environment Ministry be created, and a commitment made to undertake studies to safeguard national energy security. Citizen’s Action on Camisea, coordinated by FoE Peru, is now a recognized and respected entity which participates in various high-level fora, including IDB Hearings and parliamentary meetings.

The Congressional committee tasked with investigating Camisea integrated parts of FoE Peru’s reports into their Pipeline Audit. The group’s reports were also used at an October 2007 hearing at the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights. However, this commission will likely fail to extend precautionary measures to protect affected Indigenous peoples, to denounce irregularities on pipeline audits, or set conditions for the IFI loans extended to build Camisea Phase II.

Through this project FoE Peru developed a series of new allies, and a deeper understanding and analysis of the importance of using natural gas domestically in the southern region. The project also strengthened their capacity to carry out advocacy campaigns, fortified their alliances with local groups across the country, and built the capacity of civil society to deal with emblematic cases like Camisea.

what we learned: Due to an unforseen political situation which led to demonstrations and strikes in Cuzco, FoE Peru had to postpone its public awareness campaign there. This was a lesson on the importance of flexible planning in the face of a changing political context.

with thanks to our funders: the c.s. mott foundation