'Unseen' News and Views
Shark fin soup is well-known. When we hear that 100 million sharks are killed every year by the fishing industry, some people may assume it’s because of shark fin soup. But these assumptions are just not true. Only focusing on shark fin soup crowds out other reasons sharks are in trouble, including a huge global market for shark products like meat and oil.
100 Million Dead Sharks – it’s not all about Shark Fin Soup | Image from GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL.
“We want Thai society to understand that our people have lived in the forest for countless generations. We are not intruders. We are guardians of the forest.”
Prasert Pukad, a representative of the indigenous Karen community gives an interview in Bangkok. © Songwut Jullanan/ Greenpeace
Such was the message that Prasert Pukad, Gip Tonnampetch and Phanomphon Wanakhunsiri gave during a protest at the Government House in Bangkok.
CRATER, Yemen, 25 March 2021 (UNFPA)* — “It was the morning of a normal working day before fighting escalated close to the hospital. I heard a mother screaming at the gate,” midwife Shrook Khalid Saeed told UNFPA this week at the Al Shaab Hospital in the district of Crater, in Yemen.
(UN News)* — Two senior UN officials denounced on Sunday [28 March 2021], “systematic” attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Myanmar and flagged that the international community has a responsibility to protect the people from atrocities.
Following another day of widespread bloodshed by the Myanmar military, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, and Michelle Bachelet, High Commissioner for Human Rights, strongly condemned the Myanmar military’s widespread, lethal, increasingly systematic attacks against peaceful protesters, as well as other serious violations of human rights since it seized power on 1 February.
26 March 2021 (IWGIA)* — Liberalisation of the Indian economy began in 1991. One of the priority objectives was to exploit the natural resources located on Indigenous territories. Anyone calling for respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, implementation of environmental safeguards or exercise of their right to freedom of association and assembly was therefore viewed as suspicious.
The world knows little of the political situation in India. With a conservative regime that considers social protest to be seditious, the Indian state is persecuting Indigenous Peoples and human rights defenders. Tribal communities are the silent victims of growth in the Indian economy. The cases of defender Soni Sori and Jesuit priest Stan Swamy.
27 March 2021 (UNEP)* — Hidden in and around the muddy depths of the Mekong River is a wondrous animal world.
Here you can find catfish that weigh up to 300 kilograms and measure almost the length of a car. You might come across a dolphin that is known to communicate with humans to coordinate fishing expeditions.
Or you could stumble upon something completely unknown: between 1997 and 2014, over 2,000 new species were discovered in the Lower Mekong Basin.
But this critical ecosystem is under immense strain from climate change, toxic farm runoff and scientists suspect, a rising tide of plastic pollution.
Santiago, Chile/Rome (FAO)* – Deforestation rates are significantly lower in Indigenous and Tribal territories where governments have formally recognized collective land rights, according to a new report launched on 25 March 2021.
During my time as an oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, I’ve sat in a tiny boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, watching a fishing boat pull in miles of drift nets. The nets were full of tuna, but there were also dead spinner dolphins, manta rays, thresher sharks and more – a grim demonstration of devastation at sea. I’ve been right up close with some of the biggest fishing vessels in the world, watching as they haul out incomprehensible numbers of fish.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 