JAKARTA — Subsidiaries of some of the world’s biggest palm oil companies have been found guilty by Indonesia’s anticompetition watchdog of restricting sales of cooking oil amid acute shortages last year. Indonesia is the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, the most widely used vegetable oil for cooking oil, yet consumers across the country faced long lines and empty supermarket shelves when trying to buy cooking oil for several months in late 2021 and early 2022. Even when supplies were available, prices were multiples of what the product would usually retail for. Amid claims of cartel-like ..read more

Thirty-five years ago on a sweltering April night, Enrique Cárdenas, a biology and natural sciences teacher, watched El Papantón burn. The mountain, which stands 1,939 meters (about 6,360 feet) tall, dominates the horizon of the Mexican community of Juanacatlán. Cárdenas gathered his co-workers, friends, neighbors and relatives to climb the mountain and put out the fire. “Our disappointment was that while we were fighting the fire, in other areas they were provoking it. It was a never-ending story. The same ejidatarios [shared landholders, or members of an ejido] who had been dividing the parc ..read more

MEXICO CITY — The U.S. has opened up the possibility of imposing a trade embargo on Mexico due to its failure to stop illegal fishing in the Gulf of California, where the endemic vaquita has been pushed to the brink of extinction. The vaquita (Phocoena sinus), famous for being the world’s smallest porpoise, has dwindled to around just 10 specimens in recent years, the result of getting caught in gillnets targeting totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is treasured on the Chinese black market. “Despite international protections and commitments, the government of Mexico has failed to stem the illeg ..read more

Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands. But now the Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo people, living in the department of Ucayali, near the border with Brazil, have taken steps to protect themselves from the barrage of threats. They’re in the process of organizing an “Indigenous guard” (La Guardia Indígena) that will carry out patrols across 175 Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon. With the violence worsening and the g ..read more

READER ADVISORY: This story contains images of dead animals that some viewers may find disturbing. LODJA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Disaster struck Héritier Mpo’s tiny NGO in the central Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Aug. 8, 2022. In a single night, a fire destroyed years of judicial documents and computers with digital records he hoped might one day bring illegal hunters to justice. The instant someone sparked that blaze in the offices of APPACOL-PRN in the town of Lodja, the threats Mpo and his family had faced for his work rescuing live primates metastasized from the hypothetic ..read more

The borders between the countries that make up the South American trading bloc Mercosur (or Mercosul in Brazil) have an economic life of their own, where different characters subsist. An important part of the commercial force is connected to the trafficking of goods through these national borders, which maintains a large illegal industry. In the center of South America, the triborder region between the cities of Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil), Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) and Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) is a hotspot for crimes of all sorts. The Paraguayan city of about 250,000 inhabitants is linked to Bra ..read more

KATHMANDU — In a landmark verdict, Nepal’s Supreme Court has directed the government to take concrete steps to implement the country’s conservation laws and seize illegal private collections of wildlife parts. Justices Sapna Pradhan Malla and Til Prasad Shrestha also ordered the government to come up with programs to massively raise awareness about the legal status of private collections, and not incinerate or destroy seized wildlife parts, as the country had previously done, but rather to use such items for educational purposes, preferably in a museum. “This is a landmark judgment in Nepal’s ..read more

In Saint Louis, northern Senegal, farmers have had to buy extra rice for as long as anyone can remember. “Normally, people can only live off the rice they grow for a few months,” according to Abdoulaye Sy, director at the government’s National Agricultural and Rural Advisory Agency (ANCAR). The rest of the time, people buy rice from wholesalers, hoisting 20-kilogram (44-pound) burlap sacks onto communal minibuses or horse-drawn carts for the long ride home. But since officials at ANCAR introduced a new method for growing rice, called the “system of rice intensification” (SRI), yields have more ..read more

Years of law enforcement to tackle rampant snaring and poaching have failed to halt the loss of Cambodia’s last remaining Indochinese leopard population, according to a recent study. The researchers believe that while a few individual Indochinese leopards (Panthera pardus delacouri) may still linger in Cambodia’s forests, the country no longer has a viable population of the subspecies. “Given the current population status and myriad of threats, it is pretty certain that the Indochinese leopard now is functionally extinct in Cambodia,” study author Susana Rostro-Garcia, a scientist with the Uni ..read more

For the last couple of decades, Bangladesh has been taking on several projects with an aim to protect the wild Asian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus), which is critically endangered in the country. However, the conflict between humans and the wild pachyderms, consisting of both migratory and resident population, is yet to be controlled. An example is the recent clashes between humans and elephants which resulted in the death of at least four people and one elephant. On May 6, a wild elephant was found dead in a paddy field in the Jhenaigati area of Sherpur district in northern Bangladesh. Th ..read more