“I only worry about my child,” she said, unfolding medical records worn soft from handling respiratory problems. “The doctor told me I had to move. But we don’t have any place to go.”

Morocco’s government has issued 416 permits authorising the import of European waste — clothes, rubber tires, industrial byproducts — burned as fuel in cement kilns across the Casablanca-Settat region, including within 15 kilometers of her home. In 2024 alone, actual imports reached 821,500 tonnes, nearly triple the annual average of the previous three years, a surge consistent with companies racing to ship before the approaching EU export ban. European corporations save over $52 million every year by shipping their waste here instead of processing it at home. 

Fatima doesn’t know all of that, what she does know is that her son can’t breathe, and that some nights the smell reaches dozens of kilometers from the landfill.

An investigation, based on exclusive trade data from the Basel Action Network, customs records, and Freedom of Information responses, found that European countries shipped at least 36,611 tons of waste to Morocco in a single year — 93 percent of it classified as “reusable” despite declared values as low as €0.10 per kilogram, a price that suggests disposal, not resale. 

The Economics of Dumping

Understanding why European waste ends up in Moroccan communities requires following the money. The arithmetic is brutally simple.

Treating waste properly in Europe costs estimated conservatively about $100 per ton. Shipping it to Morocco and burning it in cement kilns costs approximately $36 to $39. For a company processing 100,000 tons annually, the savings exceed $6 million a year. Across the entire waste trade, European corporations pocket more than $52 million annually — calculated from the roughly $62 gap between European treatment costs and Moroccan processing costs, applied across the 821,500 tonnes imported in 2024.

Data obtained from the Basel Action Network (BAN) covering September 2024 through September 2025, reveals how the pipeline operates. In that 12 month period alone, European countries shipped 36,611 tons of documented waste to Morocco, including clothing, plastics, paper, and electronics. The real volume is likely higher; this figure represents only what was officially recorded under waste codes. Shipments reclassified as “secondary raw materials,” “reusable goods,” or “alternative fuel” before leaving Europe drop out of waste tracking entirely.

Spain emerges as Europe’s primary waste gateway to Morocco, handling nearly 80 percent of clothing exports and two-thirds of plastic waste, 73 tons of worn clothing shipped daily from a single country. Spanish waste management companies profit from both low transport costs across the Mediterranean and Morocco’s minimal environmental oversight.

The declared values tell their own story. Romania declares clothing at €0.10 per kilogram. Poland declares identical goods at €1.02, a tenfold difference for the same customs code. Industry sale prices for sorted reusable clothing run between €0.50 and €1.50 per kilogram; Poland’s declaration sits inside that band, Romania’s far below it. 

The gap suggests not just different markets but different goods—genuinely reusable clothing commands higher prices, while low declared values indicate material destined for disposal rather than resale.

According to the European Environment Agency, the fate of used textiles exported from the EU is “highly uncertain,” with material unfit for reuse mostly ending up in open landfills and informal waste streams. 

Ninety-three percent of waste in the Basel data is classified as “worn clothing.” But industry estimates suggest only half or less of such shipments actually reach secondhand markets. The rest becomes Morocco’s problem—feeding the cement kilns at Jorf Lasfar, Morocco’s largest industrial port zone 120 kilometers south of Casablanca, entering industrial facilities across the Casablanca-Settat region, disappearing into a system with no transparency about what happens next.

Major corporate players are embedded in this supply chain. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” (ESF) for cement manufacturers. When contacted, CHIMIREC Maroc denied any involvement in European waste imports and exports, stating it processes exclusively domestic waste. LafargeHolcim’s Ecoval subsidiary is the country’s primary industrial waste treatment provider. Ciments du Maroc, owned by Germany’s Heidelberg Materials, operates a grinding center near the Jorf Lasfar port, a documented entry point for European waste shipments. LafargeHolcim and Ciments du Maroc did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 2016, the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development has issued 416 permits for waste imports, authorizing more than 2.5 million tons of European waste to enter the country. In 2024 alone, imports reached 821,500 tons—nearly a third of the entire decade’s total in a single year, a surge consistent with the approaching EU ban deadline. 

The Moroccan total is larger than the 36,611 tonnes recorded by BAN because the two datasets measure different stages of the same pipeline: BAN tracks European shipments still declared under waste codes — clothing, plastics, paper, electronics — while Morocco’s ministry counts everything that arrives as “recyclable raw materials”. 

The gap between the two figures is essentially the volume reclassified out of the waste category before it leaves Europe. The ministry has described the program as a strategic pillar of Morocco’s circular economy, projecting 60,000 jobs by 2030. The government frames waste as a valuable resource essential for industrial energy, a narrative that obscures the health costs borne by communities like those in Mediouna.

The Loopholes

International law nominally restricts wealthy nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones. The Basel Convention, ratified by over 190 countries, requires “Prior Informed Consent” for transboundary movements of hazardous materials. But that consent, as the convention is written, operates between governments — not between governments and residents who live downwind.

In practice, the regulations contain loopholes large enough to drive a container ship through. 

Reclassified materials require none of these protections. A single word change on a customs form,  from “waste” to “secondary raw material”, transforms a regulated substance into an unregulated commodity.

Trade records obtained for this investigation reveal the scale of the fiction. 93 percent of waste shipped to Morocco is classified as “reusable clothing” or “secondary materials,” but declared values of €0.10 per kilogram suggest these shipments are waste destined for disposal, not genuine merchandise.

According to data collected through a Freedom of Information Request, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) told us that between 2020 and 2023, no Italian waste was registered as having been sent to Morocco “for disposal purposes” — but, in the same response, acknowledged that “small quantities” were shipped during 2021, 2022 and 2023 “for the purpose of material recovery.” 

UN Comtrade records for 2023 show approximately 817 tonnes of Italian rubber waste reaching Morocco that year, worth around $427,000. The following year, in August 2024 alone, Morocco’s Ministry of Energy Transition authorised the import of 20,000 tonnes of waste specifically from Italy. 

This glaring contradiction could be the result of a regulatory loophole in how Europe counts what leaves its ports: under EU law, burning waste in a cement kiln is officially classified as “energy recovery” rather than “disposal” .

Through labeling their exported garbage as alternative fuel for Moroccan kilns or misclassifying it as reusable merchandise at customs, European countries can legally erase millions of tons of waste from their disposal ledgers, outsourcing their pollution while keeping their domestic recycling statistics pristine. 

Cristina Guarda, Italian MPE from the Greens/EFA, confirms that the topic is on the European agenda. “The goal is to reduce the areas where opacity can take root, clarify responsibilities throughout the supply chain, and establish the principle that exports are acceptable only if companies can genuinely demonstrate environmentally sound management, with equivalent and verifiable standards”

The Human Cost

One hundred twenty kilometers south of Casablanca, the industrial zone at Jorf Lasfar stretches along Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Container ships dock at a port with 37-million-ton annual capacity. Cement plants rise in silhouette against the sky. Trucks move constantly between the port and processing facilities, carrying material that began its journey in European cities and will end it in Moroccan furnaces.

The health impacts accumulate invisibly. Communities living near Moroccan cement plants face an excess risk of respiratory disease, cancer incidence and mortality, predominantly affecting the respiratory tract in both children and adults. 

Research consistently finds that people living near cement plants are up to nearly five times more likely to report respiratory symptoms than those with no such exposure. In Morocco specifically, occupational cement exposure has been directly linked to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, one of the leading causes of respiratory mortality.

When rubber tires burn in cement kilns without adequate emission controls, they release dioxins and furans, among the most toxic substances known to science, along with heavy metals including lead, mercury, and cadmium. A peer-reviewed study measuring emissions from cement kilns burning hazardous waste found dioxin levels more than four times higher than baseline (1.57 vs. 6.49 nanograms per cubic metre) — and rising further as more hazardous waste was added to the fuel mix, with emissions rising further as the co-processing ratio increases.

A synthesis by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has documented that where emissions controls on such kilns are inadequate, surrounding communities show elevated rates of respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal illness.

Morocco cannot yet manage its own domestic waste crisis. The Mediouna landfill alone receives 1.2 million tonnes a year and is approaching saturation. In November 2024, the World Bank approved a $250 million programme to upgrade the country’s landfills — a tacit acknowledgement that existing capacity is inadequate before any additional burden from imports. Casablanca cannot absorb more pollution, let alone safely process hundreds of thousands of tons shipped from Europe each year. 

When the government approved more than two million tons of new waste imports from various European countries in August 2024, activist Mohamed Benata of the Environmental Assembly of Northern Morocco called it “incompatible with the spirit of citizenship” and unconstitutional. In 2016, similar outrage over Italian waste imports sparked widespread protests and social media campaigns, forcing the government to suspend the imports. Yet despite this resistance, the waste continues to arrive.

European corporate accountability law, for its part, does not reach far enough to catch what happens after the shipments leave port. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, adopted by the EU in 2024 to oblige large companies to police human rights and environmental harms across their supply chains, stops at the point of sale. 

“CSDDD ends with handing over the goods more or less,” Miriam Saage-Maaß, legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said of the directive’s reach. Whether European exporters bear any legal responsibility for what happens to their waste inside Moroccan cement kilns, she added, “depends on how direct EU exporters are connected to the waste burning.”

“The EU is strengthening controls and obligations,” says Guarda, while mentioning the new 2024 Waste Shipment Regulation that sets out stricter rules on the export of waste to non-EU countries. “But the real leap forward must be cultural and industrial,” she adds. “Circularity cannot become an elegant way to outsource health and environmental impacts to other communities. We need a pathway that reduces the problem at the source, increases producer responsibility and leads to waste management that is consistent with climate and health protection objectives, without creating ‘sacrifice zones’ outside Europe.”

Time is running out, but not for the reasons Fatima might hope. From 21 November 2026, the EU will ban all plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries like Morocco, with no approved-list escape route for plastics. For other non-hazardous waste such as metals and paper, exports will be banned from May 2027 unless a country is on an approved list; Morocco submitted its application to be included by the 21 February 2025 deadline.

Whether that ban will actually stop the flow, or simply push it through new classification channels, is contested. When the regulation was adopted in 2024, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international environmental NGO, warned that its real effect on waste exports would depend on how strictly EU member states transpose and enforce it, and on whether the remaining loopholes are closed. 

One such channel is already emerging inside EU policy itself, in December 2025, the European Commission proposed Union-wide end-of-waste criteria for mechanically recycled plastics, which would allow such materials to circulate across the bloc without being classified as waste at all.

“The longer the chain of parties involved, the shorter the chain of enforcement: controls on thousands of containers travelling through ports are extremely complex. The official data we have on Morocco could be not everything that it’s actually exported, but unofficial flows are undetectable”, says Paola Ficco, environmental lawyer and director of the magazine Rivista Rifiuti.

Back in Mediouna, Fatima remains caught in the middle. While Europe celebrates its recycling milestones and Morocco counts the jobs and greens its image, she and families like hers in Casablanca are plagued by air and soil pollution from domestic and exported waste.

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

The post Toxic Trade: How Europe Exports Its Waste to Morocco and Calls It Recycling appeared first on Untold.

Growing up in a leftist household, I looked at this change in diet as a way in which companies and neoliberal governments were erasing parts of our cultural identity and social cohesion, so I became obsessed with reading the brand names, places of origin, and lists of ingredients of food in the supermarket.

One thing I started noticing in my teens, and has worsened over time, is the limited variety of options. Don’t get me wrong, long supermarket corridors are colorful and filled with over 50 kinds each of bread, cereals, canned soups, chocolate, peanut butter, cookies, ice cream, potato chips, dog food, cheese analogs, frozen meals, and infant formula, but producers are usually no more than three, and ingredients often include things I wouldn’t be able to place in nature. 

From those ingredients that sound natural, there’s one that troubles me and is present in all the food items mentioned above: palm oil, a main product from the plant called Elais guineensis Jacq.

Beyond the Package

Oil palm derived ingredients are found in food under many names: vegetable oil, vegetable fat, palmate, palmitate, palm stearine, or stearate acid. In cleaning products, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate, glyceryl, cetyl palmitate, stearic acid, or palmitoyl are often derived from it too.

Healthwise, oil palm derived products aren’t bad, and are used to create nice textures in many items. Even more, palm oil is usually recognized as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. 

So you might wonder, why does this ingredient make you so angry? Are you simply an angry woman? Well, sure, and the world really needs more of us, but I’d also say we have to take all magical ingredients with a pinch of doubt.

That’s why I decided to dig deeper. Beyond my gut feeling or political instinct, I wanted to understand who actually stands to gain from this ingredient taking over our supermarket shelves, and at what cost. Was it improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers? Was it driving local development, or merely feeding a system of industrial agriculture that thrives on cheap land, cheap labor, and even cheaper ecosystems? Those questions led me to look beyond the pretty packaging and start piecing together a bigger, messier picture that connected oil palms to deforestation and land grabbing.

Around 2018, in the spirit of making something powerful out of my anger towards the industrialization of agriculture and food production, and understanding the full chain of actors benefiting from this, I joined a group of people investigating oil palm in Mexico, on the ground and from space, using satellite imagery.

Hidden Costs

Around the world, oil palm’s high productivity and versatility have led to its rapid and consistent increase in demand and production. Plantations are productive for several decades, so they can be understood as long periods of steady, year-long income by farmers. However, this crop is also associated with high rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and significant social, environmental and health impacts to smallholder farmers due to the intensive use of agrochemicals and polluting oil extraction processes. 

In addition, if you’re growing oil palm and at some point decide not to do it anymore, removing the plants is quite expensive – a 2012 study on Malaysian plantations estimated the cost of removing a hectare of oil palm at RM 34,500 (over USD 10,000 at that time).

Furthermore, when we talk about biofuels we usually forget to say that soil is not a renewable resource and, for this purpose, oil palm would most likely be produced as a monocrop in an industrialized way, a practice that does not regenerate the soil.

Initiatives like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) have been trying to regulate production and reduce these impacts, but many organizations have questioned their efficacy and standards.

In Mexico, the first attempts to establish oil palm plantations began in the 1950s, but production and demand only took off in the late 1990s, when the government classified it as a strategic crop–a crop that’s highly competitive in the market and/or important for food security–and a series of policies were designed to promote its cultivation and commerce at the federal or state levels. 

In 2017, the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER) published the National Agricultural Plan for the Period of 2017 to 2030, where they included the recommended market strategies to increase production and satisfy domestic needs, and maps indicating which regions were agro-ecologically suitable for each of the 38 strategic crops. 

In the case of oil palm, the suitability map indicated that 14.2 million hectares of the national territory were suitable for oil palm cultivation, an area almost the size of Nepal.

Unequal Maps

The SADER’s suitability maps were based on maps from other institutions, like the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SAGARPA), the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP), and the Institute for Productive Reconversion and Tropical Agriculture (IRPAT). Such maps are typically publicly available at very low resolutions and use different mixes of data climatic and topographic data (obtained from meteorological stations), edaphic characteristics (obtained from local studies), and cultivation areas (obtained from satellite data).

Observations of the Earth from satellite data, aka remote sensing data, have been used for the identification and analysis of crops of strategic importance, with the purpose of estimating their yields, preventing risks associated with climate change, and identifying socio-environmental impacts. At the moment, commercial satellites can return imagery with a resolution of around 30 cm per pixel every few hours, and software for satellite imagery management, like EarthExplorer or Google Earth have been accessible since the early 2000s, but high-resolution data is typically very costly and affordable only to large institutions and governments. 

Although subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options are more affordable, publicly available data–more likely to be accessible to smallholder farmers–is usually provided at lower resolution, typically 5-500 m per pixel, updated from daily to every few weeks. Also, feature identification and classification can be done manually by humans or with data-driven algorithms to cover larger areas, but results should always be verified against on-the-ground data to avoid confusion between crops and ecosystems. 

For example, distinguishing primary forest from oil palm data plantations is not a simple task. Manual methodologies are typically highly accurate, but unsustainable for large studies, which might explain why SADER gathered data from multiple institutions using different methodologies.

In any case, when agricultural policies rely heavily on remote sensing data, many issues on the ground are obscured, like the full breadth of environmental impacts of a crop’s cultivation, or the desired futures of those working the land. Even more, the lack of, or unequal access to, high-resolution data, raises questions about the adequacy and power imbalances promoted by those policies.

Follow the Data

In 2019, trying to understand the impacts of SADER’s recommendation of turning such a large amount of land into oil palm cropland, we decided to dig deeper into this topic. Afterall, we were city people and maybe farmers were very happy with their job prospects, or using palm oil derived products was the least impactful thing on the environment.

We contacted people involved in oil palm production, like the women farmer organizations “Agua y Vida, Mujeres, Derechos y Ambiente” and “Casa de la Mujer Ixim Antsetic”, and people in academia and the government, and we started looking at all publicly available information about oil palm production in Mexico. Despite abundant governmental data and scientific literature, it was hard to say who was benefiting the most out of oil palm production in the country. 

We didn’t find any publicly available interactive map of oil palm plantations at the national level, which we thought crucial for smallholder farmers and other non-governmental policy-makers to contribute to the design of agricultural policies. 

So we decided to create it.

It took us two years of gathering and analyzing publicly available data on oil palm’s socio-environmental impacts, production and cropland from 2014 to 2019. We followed a semi-automatic remote sensing analysis methodology running Python scripts over publicly available Google Earth satellite images to create our publicly available high-resolution oil palm plantations map, and a report explaining our findings. 

Considering the potential of these mappings, we decided to call ourselves the Observatorio Agroindustrial en México, or OBSAM with the aim of expanding this study to all the strategic crops in the country. 

Our map showed the distribution and expansion of oil palm at the national level. The data had the potential for identifying spatial relationships with transportation and other infrastructure projects, other agricultural programs, or the coverage of governmental sustainable rural development programs.

Expansion and Deforestation

We identified 62,057 hectares (ha) of oil palm plantations, usually close to transportation infrastructure and areas of scrubland, rainfed agriculture, pastureland and secondary vegetation. 

From these, 4,022ha were inside natural protected areas, mainly in the Palenque National Park, and the Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve (EBR) both in the Southern state of Chiapas–researchers, civil society actors, farmers, and media, had long reported this and asked for controlling the crop’s expansion in these areas, but no official response had been given to these concerns. 

In addition, oil palm plantations were found in five terrestrial and seven hydrological regions of importance for biodiversity conservation, as defined by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO). Finally, comparisons against official data for forest cover from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for 2017 and 2018, identified a link between oil palm and deforestation in more than 5,400 ha of forests and jungle.

Our literature review also showed that there were indeed multiple opinions about oil palm’s benefits and impacts around the world, depending usually on the level of access to technology and subsidies, labor force, land ownership, social organizing, and decision-making power of those who grow it. 

In Mexico, technological requirements for its cultivation have led to the replacement of itinerant traditional agricultural methods, like roza-tumba-quema –an itinerary agricultural technique practiced in tropical regions for around 10,000 years where land is cleared (roza-tumba), burnt (quema) and then let to rest for a prolonged period of time, recently modernised to roza-tumba-pica (clear-burn-add organic matter) to prevent wildfires. 

In addition, hard labor requirements have pushed women to do less specialized and lower income jobs, and the lack of a local market has led to economic dependency on gathering and extraction centers, which are not always easily accessible and typically private. 

Even more, around half of oil palm production in the country was carried out by smallholder farmers in communal land, or ejidos, of less than 50 ha, which often exposed them to other impacts observed around the world: land concentration, foreignization and grabbing.

In 2018, the estimated revenue per hectare of oil palm was around MXN 38 (less than USD 2), but production was relatively profitable in places like southern Chiapas, where smallholder farmers are typically landowners and have created cooperatives and organizations that help them access governmental financial incentives.

Food Insecurity

So what kind of information, governmental policies and mechanisms would benefit smallholder oil palm producers, improve production, and limit social and environmental impacts?

Turns out that this was not a revolutionary question, and around the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was also trying to understand this. In 2022, FAO found that around 37% of the world’s land was dedicated to agriculture and over 80% of farms around the world were under two hectares (20,000m2) in size. Such smallholder farmers produced around 35% of the entire world’s food, despite occupying only around 12% of all agricultural land. 

The FAO highlighted the need for detailed data–Earth observations included– that helped understand regional differences in agricultural practices and production, so that policy-makers could design agricultural plans that aligned to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). These goals have the stated aim of bringing “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” by promoting sustainable production, improving the productivity and livelihood of smallholder farmers, addressing inequalities, and guaranteeing food security worldwide. 

The FAO’s data means that 35% of food was being grown in around 4.5% of the world’s land by 2022. Although this might sound like our dreams of food security are easy to achieve, we have to be careful with our steps ahead because there’s a limit to how much of the world’s land is suitable for agriculture. Developing some suitable land might carry severe social and environmental impacts, and not all current agricultural land will remain productive in the future due to climate change and impactful land use.

Elusive Answers

As our findings proved the importance of carrying out the independent monitoring of this crop’s expansion, we decided to continue gathering and analyzing data to verify some impacts reported by multiple independent organizations. This way, in 2023, OBSAM published a second mapping with data from 2016 to 2022 and created a publicly available visualizing tool.

Our improved methodology detected 7,559 ha inside natural protected areas, mainly in the EBR and the Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve in Veracruz, something that had already been reported by peasant organizations but not evidenced in existing mappings. 

This time, to address the lack of verification in situ, the mapping was compared against publicly available data for the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, prepared by the General Coordination of Corridors and Biological Resources (CGCRB) and oil palm producers in the municipalities of Benemérito de las Américas and Marqués de Comillas, showing a large number of errors in the CGCRB archive. Comparisons against official data on forest cover now showed oil palm driven deforestation in 7,317 ha.

OBSAM is now expecting to release a third mapping with data until 2023, to enable the comparison between the three different mappings and identify new, growing and abandoned plantations, which would allow us to understand the paths of deforestation and land use changes. 

We’ve also gathered infrastructure maps and contacted people investigating the corporate side of oil palm commercialization, so we hope to get closer to understanding its relationship with important infrastructure projects and which policies are benefiting which actors the most.

However, many questions remained unsolved and to analyze all strategic crops and offer alternatives to oil palm production we would need to develop closer ties with people in communities located in the vicinity of oil palm plantations, to understand agricultural practices and challenges, develop participatory mapping tools for verification of satellite analysis and identify other datasets to capture what is meaningful and desirable by people on the ground. 

It is still unclear which existing agricultural practices and policies are benefiting smallholder farmers the most, but supermarkets continue to have more and more products containing palm oil derived products, so somebody must be making big profits and we would prefer it if it was them.

*If you want to support our work, or if you’re doing something similar and you want to share your struggles with someone in the same boat, full access to OBSAM mappings is granted under request. We are a group of people addressing data-access inequalities, and supporting smallholder farmers, academic research, and non-commercial enterprises. You can think of this as positive action in land observations and policy-making.

The post Deforestation, Data Gaps, and Small Farmers: Mapping the True Costs of Mexico’s Palm Oil appeared first on Untold.

That silence has enveloped south Lebanon, and it is becoming yet another moral failure of an era defined by live streamed genocides, the death of international law, and pride in war crimes.

What is happening in south Lebanon is not, by any serious measure, a proportionate military campaign. It is the systematic hollowing out of a people from their ancestral land, and an eradication of life from that land itself.

To date, Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023 have killed more than 7,000 people and injured more than 24,000, according to conservative numbers by the Lebanese Health Ministry, with the majority civilians. More than one million people – a fifth of the population – are displaced, while medical workers, journalists, and civilian infrastructure have been systematically targeted.

This mass displacement is not a byproduct of the war. It is its stated objective. Israeli officials explicitly stated in late March 2026 that they were demolishing south Lebanon houses and villages “in accordance with the model as Gaza,” and that 600,000 displaced people would not be allowed to return “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, over 15,000 Israeli violations were recorded by UNIFIL, with Amnesty International documenting near-daily Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon throughout the 15 months period, until March 2, 2026, when Israel formally resumed full-scale war.

A Civilizational Wound

South Lebanon is not simply territory. It is among the most layered, historically dense regions in West Asia. The villages of Jabal Amel carry centuries of Islamic scholarship, poetry, and legal tradition. This is a land that has outlasted empires. Tyre (Sour) is one of the oldest continuously populated cities on earth, an ancient Phoenician port that gave the world its purple dye and the alphabet’s early spread. It has been sacked, rebuilt, and survived Alexander the Great, the Crusaders, and every empire that passed through. On October 23, 2024, Israeli airstrikes destroyed large swathes of the city, with one strike landing 50 metres from the ancient ruins, today the city is under evacuation orders by the Israeli army. 

Then there is Nabatieh,  the beating heart of Jabal Amel, and another city under evacuation orders. Its name is tied to the Nabataean traders who moved between Sidon and Damascus. For centuries it has connected the mountains to the coast, the inland villages to the sea, a crossroads where the whole of the south converged. 

At its centre, the Monday Market stretches back 500 years, a weekly ritual that survived Ottoman rule, civil war, and years of Israeli occupation. By late 2024, roughly 85 percent of the city’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, along with some 300 businesses. Israel did not stop at the ceasefire, what remained was struck again when fighting resumed. A UNDP assessment found that “58 percent of agricultural assets in the Nabatieh district had been destroyed”, the highest proportion anywhere in the south. 

Nabatieh, like other towns and villages in the South, has been destroyed before, in 1978, in 1982, and in 2006. People rebuilt each time. 

What Israeli airstrikes and ground incursions are doing to this landscape is beyond the mass murder of people. It is destroying a world, systematically flattening architecture that predates the state of Israel itself, obliterating millennial olive groves and family homes, forcing the flight of entire communities whose roots run deeper than most nations. When heritage sites, mosques, and village squares are reduced to powder, something is lost that no reconstruction can return.

This is ethnic cleansing: the forced displacement of a population from its ancestral land through systematic terror.

Killing the Land Itself

But Israel’s war on Lebanon does not stop at human communities. It extends into the soil, the forests, the water, the animals, and the very biological substrate of the south. This is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate strategy, and it is documented.

During the 2024 Israeli war, Lebanon lost around 1,910 hectares of prime farmland, 47,000 olive trees, and roughly 1,200 hectares of oak forests, some of the last remaining native woodland in the region. Among the casualties was Harj al-Raheb, the Monk Forest, on the southern edge of Ayta ash-Shaab, a 16-hectare woodland of ecological and cultural richness that had endured for centuries. Satellite images now show white craters where green canopy once stood, alongside extensive bulldozing that stripped the terrain bare. Fire and phosphorus erased in months what has lived there for millennia.

The weapon of choice for much of this destruction is white phosphorus, a chemical substance that ignites on contact with oxygen, burns at up to 800 degrees Celsius, and releases thick toxic smoke. Human Rights Watch verified its use in at least 17 municipalities across south Lebanon. In at least five of those, the munitions were used in populated areas, landing on the roofs of residential buildings. The stated rationale is to burn down fields for visibility. Trees, in other words, are a threat. Forests must be destroyed. Nature itself is the enemy, just as the US military had done in Vietnam using napalm to burn life during their murderous imperial campaign against the country’s national liberation movement. 

More than 918 hectares were hit in 191 documented white phosphorus attacks from October 2023 until the 2024 ceasefire alone, according to data collected by Lebanese researcher Ahmad Baydoun and the environmental group Green Southerners. The long-term consequences remain unknown, but easy to predict. 

Even though Israel shelled Lebanon with white phosphorus repeatedly between 1982 and 2006 in its various wars of aggression, there have been no local studies on its long-term environmental impact, due to lack of resources, political inaction, or the difficulty in accessing samples. The poison persists in the soil; but the science to measure it has been mostly unused.

Then, as if to ensure that whatever survived the bombs and fire could not sustain life, came the herbicides. In early February 2026, Israeli planes sprayed toxic chemical substances across Lebanon’s southern border, covering approximately 8.5 square kilometres of agricultural land, forests, and livestock grazing areas with glyphosate at concentrations up to 50 times higher than standard agricultural use. Lebanon’s agriculture and environmental ministries found glyphosate levels 20 to 30 times above average in soil samples from the affected area. Glyphosate is banned in Lebanon and classified by the World Health Organization as potentially carcinogenic to humans.

The targeted area contained ancient oak, terebinth, and laurel forests that provide habitat for wildlife, alongside olive groves that produce oil and soap, tobacco plantations, and grazing land. As environmental researcher Hisham Younes, founder and president of Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners, puts it: “This spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil. It occurs over land already severely stressed and degraded by the intensive use of white phosphorus, incendiary munitions, and the accumulation of heavy-metal residues from sustained bombardment.” 

The glyphosate is not the beginning of the destruction. It is the finishing blow, applied to a landscape already burned, bombed, and poisoned, ensuring that even if people are allowed to return, there is nothing left to return to. That life will no longer be possible, for humans, plants, and animals alike.

Lebanon’s agriculture minister described the spraying as “consistent with known practices along the border, where such substances are used to create vegetation-free zones, effectively resulting in systematic desertification.” Lebanon’s government-backed environmental report has gone further, formally accusing Israel of ecocide and documenting damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality, concluding that the scale and intentionality of the destruction “constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide.”

Israel’s war, as is the case with previous colonial wars across the world, is one on the land as a living system, on the biological heritage of a civilization, on the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human life alike, waged with chemical weapons, incendiary munitions, and bulldozers, in full view of the world.

The US War Machine

The south of Lebanon is home to communities that have lived in this region for over a thousand years. Entire villages have been evacuated by force and erased. Families have been killed in their homes, in their cars, on roads marked for civilian evacuation.

This is not incidental. Striking the predominantly Shia population of south Lebanon, and Lebanon in general is the goal. When a religious community becomes a military target in the eyes of the aggressor, and in the narratives of much of the regional and international media, we have crossed into the now too common space of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The bombs falling on Lebanese villages are, in a direct and documented sense, US bombs. The aircraft delivering them are US aircraft. The intelligence enabling the targeting has, by multiple credible accounts, has US fingerprints.

The United States has not merely failed to restrain Israel, it has actively armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for a campaign that has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations, UN officials, and international legal bodies, both in Palestine and in Lebanon. Each time a resolution calling for accountability has come before international bodies, the US position has been to obstruct, or sanction international judges, rapporteurs, and any organization that dares speak the truth.

This makes the United States not a neutral broker or a concerned ally urging restraint, but a co-belligerent (together with various other Western and Arab countries). When cluster munitions, bunker-busting bombs, and incendiary weapons are supplied to a military deploying them in densely populated civilian areas and ecologically sensitive forests, the supplier shares responsibility for what follows, including the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ecocide.

One Unhinged Logic

It is impossible to understand Lebanon in isolation from Gaza. What we are witnessing is a single operational and ideological logic playing out across two theaters. In Gaza, the world has watched the near-total destruction of a civilian population with hospitals bombed, aid blocked, famine used as a weapon, with mounting horror and mounting futility. The patterns have become undeniable: this is not warfare constrained by the laws of armed conflict. It is warfare that has discarded those laws entirely and proudly.

Lebanon is the expansion of that logic northward. The same targeting of civilian, medical, and vital infrastructure. The same displacement of hundreds of thousands. The same deliberate erasure of agricultural and ecological life. The same impunity. Having encountered no meaningful international consequences in Gaza, the methods were exported. Why wouldn’t they be? The world demonstrated, repeatedly, that there would be no price.

This is what unchecked military power looks like when it is also diplomatically shielded: it grows, and it finds new applications for the same tools, from bombs to bulldozers to crop-killing herbicides.

The Silence of States and People

What is most disorienting and perhaps most dangerous about this moment is not just the actions of Israel and the United States. It is the silence of everyone else.

For Gaza, Arab states have issued statements of concern that function as moral performance without consequence while they maintained trade and security cooperation as the genocide was ongoing. For Lebanon, it was mostly silence. Most Arab governments offered barely even the performance.

European governments, with a handful of exceptions, oscillated between performative concern and active complicity over Gaza, and extended that into near-total silence on Lebanon. 

Solidarity movements outside the region have fractured along political, sectarian, and national lines. The Shia identity of the majority of the victims has meant limited solidarity in the sectarian environment plaguing the Arab world. Hezbollah’s violent role in Syria has complicated it further. But these are not explanations. Across the globe, Palestine solidarity networks have been almost entirely absent in opposing the ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon. Very few, if any, have mobilized.

Apparently this is not an important story, not compared to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. International media has been comfortable looking away while an entire civilian ecosystem is chemically sterilized and an ancient people are expelled from their land.

The principle that civilians deserve protection from collective punishment does not carry an asterisk that reads “unless their politics or sectarian identity are disagreeable.” 

Beyond Lebanon.

We are watching, in real time, the collapse of the international legal order – with all its deficiencies – that was constructed after 1945 precisely to prevent this kind of impunity. The Geneva Conventions, the Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, these institutions exist because the world looked at the ruins of the Second World War and said: never again, and we will build structures to ensure it. Those structures are not being eroded. They are being actively demolished, with US and Western diplomatic tools serving as the wrecking ball.

If a nuclear-armed, Western-backed state can conduct what legal scholars describe as ethnic cleansing and genocide, with full documentation, in real time, broadcast on every platform, and face no meaningful consequences, then the message is clear: the rules do not apply to the powerful. They never did, perhaps. But the pretense that they did was itself a form of protection, however limited, for the vulnerable. That pretense is gone now.

For Lebanon specifically, the consequences may be generational. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the south creates demographic and psychological wounds that will shape Lebanese politics for decades. A country already broken by corruption, economic collapse, and sectarian divisions is being further hollowed out. The question is not only whether south Lebanon can be liberated and rebuilt, but whether the Lebanese state, such as it is, can survive another existential blow.

What is being asked of the world is not complicated. It requires the application of consistent principles: that civilians may not be collectively punished, that ancient communities may not be erased from their land, that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, and that silence in the face of documented atrocity is itself a moral choice.

The south of Lebanon is burning. Its people are scattered and left alone to face a ruthless war machine. Its forests are ash. Its soil is poisoned.

The world knows. And the world, for the most part, has decided to look away.

History will not be kind to this moment. The question is whether we wait for history’s verdict, or whether some of us, states, institutions, ordinary people with a voice, choose to act before there is nothing left to save.

The post Bombed, Poisoned, and Ignored: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of South Lebanon appeared first on Untold.

“Almost all rivers in Europe have been regulated, impounded, and channelised. In the Alps, the largest free-flowing river section still preserving its natural dynamics lies along the Tagliamento,” explains Professor Klement Tockner, Director General of the Senckenberg Institute for Climate and Biodiversity in Frankfurt.

For decades, Tockner has studied the Tagliamento, which flows from the Carnic Alps to the Upper Adriatic Sea in northeastern Italy, near the Slovenian border, as a living model of river restoration. Its wide, shifting gravel bed and braided channels preserve the ecological dynamics that once characterised many Alpine rivers. This is what makes it, according to Tockner, “the most valuable river in the Alpine Arc.”

Today, the Tagliamento is under threat. In spring 2024, the regional government of Friuli Venezia Giulia approved plans for a €200 million flood-control barrier between the towns of Dignano and Spilimbergo, as part of its Flood Risk Management Plan. 

“For us, the Tagliamento is identity. It’s the symbol of beauty,” says Valentina Sovran. She is one of the residents of Dignano (Udine) who, in September 2025, travelled to Brussels to submit two petitions calling for the protection of the Tagliamento. 

Strolling on the vast sandy riverbed, where emerging braided channels form small streams and islets, Valentina Sovran and other elder residents recall stories dating back generations, with the Tagliamento always as a protagonist: a grandmother who washed the clothes on the pebbled banks at dusk, the only free moment amid the duties of a large family; a great-grandfather who worked as a boatman before the construction of the bridge of Dignano; or the kilometers walked as young boys from the mountains to swim and play with friends in the gravel beaches.

A Unique Ecosystem Under Threat

The scientific community has also mobilised: Professor Tockner is among the first signatories of an appeal signed by more than 800 international scientists warning that the proposed infrastructure would have a destructive impact on this unique ecosystem. In addition, it would violate multiple EU directives, including the Water Framework Directive, the Birds and Habitats Directives, and the Nature Restoration Law.

The latter, approved in July 2024 as a key element of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, requires Member States to remove obsolete or non-functional barriers and restore free-flowing conditions to at least 25,000 kilometres of rivers by 2030. As Foivos Mouchlianitis from Dam Removal Europe explains, removing barriers improves river connectivity, supports fish populations, and increases resilience to both droughts and floods.

At the time, Italy opposed the measure, together with Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden. Now, member states have until September 2026 to draw up a National Restoration Plan. Italy’s approach, however, has yet to change course. 

The Friuli Venezia Giulia regional government and the Italian Ministry for the Environment and Energy Security have already allocated €30 million for infrastructure works on the Tagliamento and designated the proposed ‘lamination barrier’ as a strategic project for flood risk management, which is especially high in the lower Friulian plain, classified as high risk by the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA). 

So Beautiful, Yet So Frightening

While residents in the middle and upper reaches of the Tagliamento River have organised into various committees fighting to preserve the river’s naturality, the situation downstream is markedly different. 

The Tagliamento in Latisana, 45km south of Spilimbergo, appears as a more regulated waterway. The first row of houses along its banks and the historic port – a key hub of trade with Venice as early as the 12th century – no longer exist; in their place stand high concrete embankments built to protect the town. ‘The Tagliamento is so beautiful, yet so frightening,’ says resident Giorgio Mattassi, now retired, as he walks along the river banks.

“We need substantial infrastructural interventions upstream for our safety,” states Sandro Vignotto, a councillor in Latisana. “We don’t care where or what they are; we simply want the process to move forward.” In 2025, Latisana commemorated the devastating floods which hit the town in September 1965, followed by an even more destructive event the following year. 

“People upstream don’t understand that flooding is a tragedy. It destroys lives, animals, and homes; the economy collapses, and people are forced to migrate,” says Giorgio Mattassi, who experienced the floods of the 1960s in Latisana as a child.

In November 2025, a series of floods, caused by abnormally heavy rainfall, struck a nearby area in Friuli Venezia Giulia, producing an estimated €80 million in damages, two deaths, and the displacement of hundreds of people. 

“We recognise the importance of flood prevention,” says Fabio Masotti, a regular visitor to the Tagliamento. A passionate photographer, he loves observing how the braided channels change course and colour depending on their depth and the sunlight. 

He comes to walk on the riverbed with his children and to go canoeing. “But flood prevention solutions should be nature-based and work with nature, not against it. In our territory extreme weather events are increasing due to climate change, aggravated by excessive urbanisation and the overexploitation of rivers, for example, through aggressive gravel extraction. The Tagliamento provides vital ecosystem services and plays a key regenerative role,” he adds. 

Propaganda and Polarisation

Fabio is one of the most active members of the organisation Noi siamo Tagliamento (We are the Tagliamento). Alongside other committees, they organise events, conferences and public meetings to inform the local population. 

According to them, political propaganda has polarised the discussion around the Tagliamento, pitting residents of the valley against those in the middle course. “For reasons of political opportunism, the Region is pushing for large engineering works that would supposedly protect them permanently from future floods. They want the votes from the valley, since those areas are wealthier and more populated.” Fabio Masotti adds. 

The Tagliamento flows into the Adriatic near some of Northern Italy’s most intensively developed tourist areas, including Bibione and Lignano Sabbiadoro, coastal towns that host millions of visitors every year and rely heavily on seasonal tourism. However, scientists warn that flood protection can never be absolute. Instead, efforts must focus on reducing vulnerability, mitigating potential damage, waterproofing buildings, and relocating where necessary.

After months of stagnation and a lack of transparency regarding the Region’s plans for the Tagliamento, the tender for evaluating alternative project designs, as required by law, will be officially launched in February 2026.

Pirates of Tagliamento

“The priority should be to consider what we call a systemic or integrated solution,” Professor Tockner argues. “Instead of a barrier, alternative solutions could include enlarging the river section downstream of Cornino and increasing natural retention capacity there,” he adds. “You could achieve similar flood control while improving, rather than deteriorating, ecological conditions. Protecting nature means protecting people.”

Professor Marco Petti from the University of Udine, who studied the Tagliamento for decades from a hydraulic perspective, also underlines the necessity of an integrated solution. “As an engineer, I don’t think nature-based solutions are not naturalising the river alone is enough,” he says. “But it would be better to distribute water volumes management along the entire river through smaller, less invasive interventions. Relying on a single mega-structure would be damaging.”

Professor Tockner suggests that designating the Tagliamento as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve could offer a way to recognise the inseparable link between nature and culture. “If we are not able to protect the last free-flowing rivers in Europe,” he warns, “then promoting restoration of degraded ecosystems risks becoming obsolete.”

“In ancient times, the pirates of the Tagliamento would go raiding on rafts,” recalls Fabio Masotti. “Today, we feel a bit like pirates too, adventurers and guardians of our River. We need to fight to protect it. We cannot delegate this responsibility to anyone else.”

*This reporting was carried out with the support of Journalismfund Europe

The post The Battle to Preserve the Last Wild River of the Alps – A Photo Story appeared first on Untold.

Baraka Thomas Mbalakai, 53, is the farm’s namesake––his father established this farm more than four decades ago. At present, they hire day labourers to pick ripe berries every couple of weeks during the harvest season, which runs roughly from June to October or November in East Africa.

There can be a shortage of labor at times during harvest season, he explains, since the cherries all ripen around the same time. Laizer and the other dozen or so women and an adolescent boy at Baraka Farm work from dawn to dusk––nearly 12 hours––and are paid TSh7,500 (~$3USD) a day.

Their remarkably low wages make for a heady contrast to Tanzanian peabody coffee priced at $21.99 per 12 ounce (340 gram) packet in Brooklyn, New York, or a double cappuccino containing roughly 20 grams of coffee going for at least $6 at most third-wave coffee shops in North America.

A Heavy Colonial Heritage

Ujamaa, meaning ‘fraternity’ in Kiswahili––Tanzania’s national language––was the socialist ideology that founding president Julius Nyerere adopted for his country upon independence from the British colonial administration in 1961.

Scholars have described Ujamaa as ‘the most successful [post-colonial] attempt to dismantle the structure of indirect rule; while making strides in social development such as extending life expectancy, had certain catastrophic economic consequences such as declines in food production.

While the baseline of state control of agricultural industries (which accounts for more than a quarter of Tanzania’s GDP, employing the vast majority of the population) finds its roots in colonial control, state interventions continued melding the coffee industry’s  trajectory under the Ujamaa policy’s ‘cooperative economics.’

According to Yustina Samwel Komba, a historian who completed a PhD at Stellenbosch University on the socio-economic history of coffee production in Tanzania, the 1930s  colonial administration promoted cooperative societies under the claimed objective of protecting African coffee growers from exploitation by private middleman traders.

However, Komba indicates how cooperatives were wielded more as a tool of colonial governance rather than a mechanism for producer protection: enabling the state to discipline African producers, regulating production and quality, controlling marketing channels, and securing export revenues.

Rather than dismantling exploitative relations, the colonial cooperative system reconfigured them under bureaucratic state control. In the post-colonial period, these structures inherited and intensified: under Ujamaa, cooperative societies functioned even more explicitly as instruments of state monopoly over coffee production and sales.

Brad Weiss, an associate professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, argues that “The black market in coffee, then, is most effective in taking advantage of the need for ready cash.”

“Those who have access to cash are able to purchase the prospective coffee harvests of their clients who cannot wait for the state’s payments. In this way, control of the annual procedures (and proceeds) of coffee cultivation is cut short in favour of the immediate requirement of money,” he writes.

Only those like Laizer and her colleagues, who effectively hold no buying power, would take on temporary yet critical roles of seasonal coffee cherry picking.

The Birthplace of Coffee

Although Mbalaki is Maasai––one of the most internationally renowned pastoral communities from the African continent–– he has shifted from livestock herding to coffee farming, growing arabica coffee across 2 acres. He has a small green bean processing and roasting facility at his home, is in the process of building a brick and mortar shop, and intends on passing his farm and shop down to his children and grandchildren.

This part of the world is the birthplace of coffee. Around 850CE, a young Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi noticed how his flock became extra sprightly after chewing on the crop. Somali merchants transported coffee east across the Gulf of Aden, where it became a cornerstone drink in Yemeni culture, before spreading throughout West Asia and beyond.

In the east, the bustling, coastal city of Dar es Salaam––Tanzania’s financial hub and largest city in East Africa by population with nearly 9 million people––is in its nascence of coffee drinking culture. Why is it that Tanzanians—the ones who grow the beans (which are mostly exported)––drink so little coffee themselves?

33-year-old Evance Malleo is committed to changing this. The winner of the national 2024 Kahawa Festival (meaning ‘coffee’ in Kiswahili), he is also the founder of Kahawa Studio Hub, an independent coffee shop in coastal Dar es Salaam. The son of coffee farmers from the Kilimanjaro area, he has labored in coffee fields since he could walk.

Yet his parents, like most East African farmers, do not drink coffee themselves, preferring chai. “Why is this the case,” says Malleo, “When Tanzania produces some of the best coffee in the world?”

Together with his wife, Hilda, they believe that by slowly introducing locals to the art of coffee to their community, they can not only bridge the extant cultural gap between foreigners and locals, but also inject orders of magnitude more income into the Tanzanian economy––upwards of 88%, according to Utengule Roasters, which has been roasting for two decades, and growing coffee since the early 20th century.

Wishful Thinking

According to the Tanzania Coffee Board (TCB), which oversees the regulation (e.g. compliance and quality control) of the nation’s coffee production, 70,000-80,000 tons of green beans are produced annually, with local consumption averaging a mere 3% of total production.

Primus Kimaryo, the director general of TCB, is an agricultural economist and has been involved with the board since 1999. Although Tanzania contributes less than 1% of the world’s coffee, the beans are of exceptional quality, mostly exported to Japan and Europe. “We want to increase production from 1.3-1.4 million bags (60kg each) to 5 million over the next 5 years,” he says on behalf of the TCB. They have embarked on their fourth year of arabica seedlings distribution to Tanzanian coffee farmers (400,000 smallholders on plots averaging 1-2 hectares comprise 95% of Tanzanian growers) to help achieve this mission, providing 20 million seedlings.

“Consumption is directly linked to income and livelihood,” he continues. If Tanzania’s standard of living can be boosted, the culture of coffee drinking may likely also grow, Kimaryo believes.

“But besides promoting mainstream coffee consumption, we are also working to expand into niche markets such as fairtrade, organic, rainforest friendly in alignment with Voluntary Sustainability Standards”, Kimaryo explains.

Kimaryo’s optimistic beliefs that simply increasing coffee consumption may be a marker of a more equitable Tanzanian economy, hides the unavoidable colonial shadows behind coffee making that trajectory anything but straightforward.

“Colonialism was as much about making the centre as it was about making the periphery,” Weiss quotes anthropologist John Comaroff, “Just as Haya (a Bantu ethnic group in northwestern Tanzania) farming communities use coffee to negotiate their local position in a global economy in ways that have been constrained, but never simply determined, by the forces of the global market, so, too has the presence of coffee.”

Weiss writes about how colonial and neo-colonial relations in Tanzania are inextricably intertwined. “Coffee is the original therapy for the micro-management of bourgeois personality,” he argues. “Coffee further permits these attitudes, motivations, and dispositions to be objectified in the capitalist reconstruction of time, as ‘coffee breaks’ become means of temporal reckoning that are routinized in labor practices.”

“Using coffee to mark and make time in this way thereby fulfils a capitalist fantasy, providing a respite from work undertaken for the sake of work itself––and thus the direct conversation of ‘leisure’ into ‘productivity’––made possible through the medium of a highly desired, commodified stimulant,” Weiss continues.

Deforestation, Climate Crisis, and Tariffs

The messiness of US tariffs has complicated business and logistics. Coffee from Brazil, constituting 30% of the global market, was being tariffed at 50% by the United States in July 2025, which ground US purchases of Brazilian coffee to a halt.

Other coffee buyers, notably China, seized this opportunity. “This forces the bags of coffee to move via different routes,” Kimaryo explains. “We’re going to see a lot of side selling, smuggling. Brazilian coffee might be rebranded as Peruvian coffee when it’s still from Brazil, just to navigate the new constraints.”

Meanwhile, erratic rainfall patterns and temperature from rapidly accelerating climate change impacts coffee shrubs particularly hard. As the most traded commodity on earth, and a major export cash crop for Tanzania, an understanding of how to cope with drought and warming trends will be critical to sustaining production.

Climate change has also heralded an onset of higher infestation rates of snails and borer pests.

And with growing demand for coffee, both locally and globally, the need for land increases. The result is that across the continent, human activities––such as coffee cultivation––are driving the decline of forests, which in turn catalyze damages to ecosystem services and subsequent economic and social benefits from the environment, particularly for low-income communities.

The post From Tanzanian Farms to Trendy Cafés: The Unequal Cost of Coffee – A Photo Story appeared first on Untold.

The air grew particularly suffocating between September and October 2025, when local authorities reported 122 cases of intoxication and asphyxiation caused by toxic fumes. Gas leaks from GCT’s facilities are widely blamed. 

On 15 October, the civil movement Stop Pollution mobilized 40,000 residents for a mass demonstration, followed by a general strike called by the national trade union UGTT, which drew more than 130,000 participants. The city of Gabès has around 150,000 citizens. 

The last protest took place on 17 December 2025, the anniversary of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution.

The Little Tunisian Chernobyl

Phosphate, one of Tunisia’s key natural resources, is largely destined for export. In 2023, Tunisia ranked as the world’s tenth-largest exporter of phosphate fertilizers, earning 61.7 million US dollars. The main destinations were Bangladesh, Brazil, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Phosphate fertilizers are widely used in intensive agriculture to boost crop yields. The practice can lead to the accumulation of toxic heavy metals such as cadmium in both soil and crops. And if these are the risks downstream, the dangers upstream are far greater. The combination of extractivism and export-oriented production has compromised Gabès as a whole, to the point that it is now dubbed the “Little Tunisian Chernobyl.” 

Today, the gulf the city overlooks is polluted by phosphogypsum, an industrial by-product of phosphoric acid production. It is generated by treating phosphate rock—extracted from the Gafsa mines, 150 kilometers from Gabès—with sulfuric acid. Studies have shown that phosphogypsum contains high levels of uranium and radium, both radioactive elements.

Dying Meadows of the Sea

According to a 2021 study by Oréade-Brèche on biodiversity loss in Tunisia, every ton of phosphoric acid produced generates between four and five tons of phosphogypsum. Over the past 25 years, an estimated 70 million tons of phosphogypsum have been discharged into the Gulf of Gabès, contaminating sediments across roughly 60 square kilometers. 

Marine flora and fauna have borne the brunt of this pollution. Combined with rising sea temperatures driven by climate change, the contamination is causing the progressive disappearance of Posidonia oceanica, a Mediterranean seagrass that serves as a vital refuge for fish species, crustaceans, and mollusks. 

Posidonia also plays a crucial ecological role: it helps prevent coastal erosion and oxygenates seawater by absorbing CO₂. These seagrass meadows account for 10% of the ocean’s carbon storage capacity—twice as much per square kilometer as terrestrial forests. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Gulf of Gabès hosted the largest Posidonia meadows in the Mediterranean; today, phosphogypsum discharges are estimated to have destroyed around 90% of them. In their place, the invasive alien algae Caulerpa has taken hold.

The disappearance of Posidonia has dealt a severe economic blow to small-scale fisheries, causing losses that exceed the added value of Gabès’ phosphate-processing industry.

Once known for its rich fisheries, the sea off Gabès is now grappling with a drastic decline in fish stocks. Pollution has coincided with industrial trawling by large fishing vessels, progressively stripping artisanal fishers of their livelihoods. 

Suffocating Protests

Moreover, as a 2018 European Commission study on the economic impact of industrial pollution in the region illustrates, there is a correlation between rising cases of chronic bronchitis and asthma in the neighborhoods of Ghannouch, Chott Essalem, and Gabès city, and the pollution generated by GCT’s activities.

Air pollution from sulfur dioxide, ammonia, fine particulate matter, and fluorides lies at the root of the region’s cases of intoxication and asphyxiation. According to the European Commission, concentrations of these substances near the GCT plant far exceed both Tunisian and international standards. 

Confronted with this reality, the people of Gabès began to raise their voices. Already in 2012, a group of residents founded Stop Pollution, a social movement demanding the dismantling of GCT’s polluting facilities. Since then, the group has organized protests, raised awareness, and informed the public on issues related to energy transition.

In 2017, the movement achieved its first major breakthrough: then–prime minister Youssef Chahed approved a plan to dismantle the six phosphate-processing units in Gabès and rehabilitate the sites in line with international standards. Yet the decision was never implemented. Instead, the government reversed course entirely.

Last March, the restricted Ministerial Council decided to raise phosphate production from under 3 million tons a year to 14 million by 2030, including expanded transport and processing capacity. The move comes amid a surge in global fertilizer prices. The plan also sets the stage for a pilot unit to produce green ammonia in Ghannouch. 

In 2024, Tunisia signed six memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with several European multinationals for the production of green hydrogen. The national green hydrogen strategy sets an annual production target of 8.3 million tons by 2050, with 6.3 million tons intended for export to Europe. This strategy has been supported since 2022 by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GiZ) through the project “Green Hydrogen for Sustainable Growth and a Low-Carbon Economy in Tunisia (H2Vert.TUN).” 

The exported hydrogen would be transported via the SoutH2 Corridor, which will connect Tunisia and Algeria to Italy, Austria, and Germany.

Environmental obstacles were swiftly sidestepped: phosphogypsum was removed from the list of substances classified as hazardous to human health.

Meanwhile, Gabès continues to suffer. On 17 October last year, Gabès’ citizens filed a petition before the Gabès First Instance Tribunal requesting the immediate closure of GCT’s polluting units. The preliminary hearing was scheduled for 23 October; however, the examination of the case has been postponed several times. 

The next hearing is expected to take place on 12 February. Assisted by the regional section of the Bar Association and the Regional Council of the Medical Association — which will present health data collected in Gabès — Stop Pollution and the people of Gabès have launched an unprecedented legal action. As Amir Ammar, a PhD student in Law, states in Village de la Justice, this is the first class action that “directly targets a major industrial actor (and a public one at that) in order to stop environmental harm in Tunisia.”

To understand what the people of Gabès endure each day—and how upcoming industrial projects could worsen the environmental crisis—we spoke with Aziz Chebbi, researcher in international law and political science, and activist with Stop Pollution.

Nadia Addezio: How have residents’ health and the state of the environment in Gabès changed over the years? 

Aziz Chebbi: Since 1972, since the Groupe Chimique Tunisien began operating in the Gabès region, the area has suffered environmental damage across three fronts: air, land and sea. First, marine pollution: phosphogypsum waste is discharged daily into the waters of Chott Essalem in Gabès. These discharges have had a direct impact on the livelihoods of local fishers, many of whom have lost their jobs and been forced to abandon a profession passed down through generations.

Then there is soil pollution: heavy metals in the land around Gabès have severely compromised local agriculture. The region’s emblematic oases have been deteriorating steadily, and farming activities have been deeply affected for more than 50 years. Finally, air pollution has taken a dramatic toll on residents’ health. The area records very high cancer rates, as well as frequent fainting episodes among students, especially in September and October.

Pollution across these three fronts devastates daily life in Gabès, undermining people’s health, their economy, and their dignity. Every day, residents simply aspire to breathe clean air and live in an environment that respects human dignity, as guaranteed by the principles of the Tunisian Constitution.

Between 2012 and 2017, numerous grassroots mobilizations helped secure a government decree—issued on 29 June 2017—ordering the dismantling of the polluting plants in the Gabès region. However, the decree was never published in the Official Gazette by the then-President of the Republic Béji Caïd Essebsi. As a result, the authorities failed to acknowledge the scale of the harm caused by the GCT and neither acted on nor upheld that decision.

Unfortunately, from 2017 to today, no government has shown real political will to enact or advance this measure. No significant progress has been made, leaving residents in a constant state of waiting for a sincere political commitment to environmental justice in Gabès.

NA: How did you respond to the government’s decision to revive phosphate production and remove phosphogypsum from the list of hazardous substances? Do you have any direct dialogue with the government or with the GCT?

AC: For years, the government has failed to consult civil society organizations or citizens when drafting its decisions and administrative decrees. In March 2025, it adopted a measure stating that phosphogypsum would no longer be classified as a hazardous substance, paving the way for its “valorization” and for the creation of a pilot plant to produce green ammonia. Faced with this decision—which we consider extremely worrying—we organized several demonstrations.

Because the announcement came during Ramadan, we held a protest in Tunis in April 2025, followed by a large march in the Gabès region in May. At the same time, we published statements and held several press conferences to spark public debate about these government decisions. We also carried out awareness campaigns among Gabès residents to explain the environmental and health risks associated with these policies. 

These efforts culminated in September 2025, a period marked by numerous fainting incidents among students and by heightened toxic emissions from the GCT’s facilities. More and more citizens are adopting our narrative and mobilizing with growing determination toward our shared goal: the complete dismantling of these polluting plants.

NA: The paradox is that the GCT provides jobs. What do GCT workers think? 

AC: In reality, GCT workers are themselves residents of the Gabès region, with children who attend local schools. During recent demonstrations, we noticed a significant development: a growing number of workers—through their unions or individually—support our actions and take part in mobilizations on the ground. Recently, there have even been fainting incidents among workers inside the GCT itself.

NA: As you mentioned, there is now talk of a possible green transition for the industrial hub. Among the proposed projects is the production of green ammonia, part of Tunisia’s national energy strategy and its plans for green hydrogen. How is this project perceived in Gabès? 

AC: There are two essential points on this issue. The first concerns our refusal, as a social movement, of any new installation within the Groupe Chimique Tunisien complex. Establishing a new entity on that site would mean completely disregarding the citizens’ core demand: the environmental rehabilitation of the Gabès region.

The second point concerns the national green hydrogen strategy, which includes the production of green ammonia. We view this strategy as a neo-colonial dynamic, imposed by GIZ, and designed exclusively to meet German energy needs. 

Berlin is seeking to externalize its energy production to countries in the Global South—Namibia, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt—turning them into suppliers of green energy. Producing green ammonia requires green hydrogen, which demands vast amounts of water and renewable energy. It is an extremely energy-intensive process. Tunisia does possess abundant natural resources such as sun and wind, but these resources should meet our own energy needs, not feed German power grids.

Moreover, Tunisia currently has no real domestic demand for green hydrogen within its industrial sector. If, in the future, industries arise that require it, the decision should be made collectively, through a participatory process involving citizens, experts, and civil society, based on a transparent assessment of benefits and risks. It should not be dictated by a strategy conceived in ministerial offices in partnership with a German cooperation agency that has no stake in Tunisia’s needs or priorities.

This project is therefore not an opportunity but a real threat: it risks worsening the environmental crisis in Gabès, particularly through the seawater desalination projects required for green hydrogen production. The discharge of brine into the sea will have severe consequences for marine biodiversity and for numerous local species already weakened by decades of industrial pollution.

NA: What will be the collective’s next steps?

AC: So far, the public authorities have shown no reaction. In the face of this governmental silence, we will continue our mobilizations and maintain our demand for the dismantling of the polluting facilities in the Gabès region. Residents fully support our actions and share our demands. Every time we call for mobilization, the population responds. We will go all the way to obtain a clear political decision and a concrete response from the authorities, one that meets the legitimate expectations of the region’s inhabitants.

Gabès could be a paradise on earth: the oasis system that surrounds the sea, the mountains and the desert is an exceptional national heritage that must be preserved and valued. Alternatives do exist. Agricultural development, ecological and community-based tourism, and activities linked to the sea can offer new, sustainable job opportunities.

The GCT, by contrast, brings nothing but harm and threats to the environment and health of the Gabès region. The current jobs tied to this industry can be replaced by local, sustainable and non-colonial economic alternatives.

The post Gabès Is Suffocating: Breathing Under Phosphate, Protest, and Green Colonialism appeared first on Untold.

This is the primary industry for 80% of Lamu residents, yet declining marine ecosystems and the controversial Lamu Port-South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET), a massive oil pipeline and infrastructure project connecting South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda, have posed serious threats. Daily catches declined from an average of 40 kg to 10kg, and sometimes none at all.

Aswif, a captain in his fifties, says that he has turned to giving dhow (a traditional boat) rides to tourists over recent years although he had been fishing since boyhood. “There are simply no more fish to catch,” he says.

Pollution and the Weight of Extraction

Lamu has been on the frontlines of the global plastic pollution issue: waste management on the island is nearly nonexistent, according to UNESCO, plus heated controversies over oil pipeline developments. Employment rates are dismal, with less than 33% of youths (ages 18-34) working; most work in agriculture, yet the sector has the lowest labor productivity according to the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis.

Across Kenya, settler colonialism continues to haunt the present: low-income locals are systemically marginalized and excluded for the prioritization of upper echelon interests, often with a foreign tilt.

Lamu lacks any form of door-to-door waste collection, unlike other urban areas in Kenya––yet tourists and mainland investors have been found to be significant waste contributors.

Researchers argue that plastic pollution equates to waste colonialism, where capitalist cycles of production and consumption manifest as ecological imperialism, costs that are disproportionately borne by island villagers.

James Waikibia, a Nairobi-based plastic waste campaigner, believes that phrases such as waste colonialism––perhaps holding merit––can be overhyped, used by civil society to look for grants. “It should not detract from the government’s responsibility––their inefficiency and lack of interest in addressing foundational issues” he says.

In the absence of any official system to address the problem, individual action is filling the gap. Earth Love, founded in 2019, is one such attempt. The project emerged from local frustration with Lamu’s worsening waste crisis and the absence of public infrastructure, offering a space where people can work directly with the land.

Regeneration in a Ruined Landscape

For 30-year-old Abu Bakar, born and raised in Lamu, the shift began during the pandemic. After years working as a fishing-boat captain, he visited the site and was struck by its unlikely potential. “The place was looking crazy,” he recalls. “You don’t expect a dumping site to be a place where you can plant [fruits and vegetables].” Clearing the land took more than a year. What followed convinced him that restoration—however slow—was possible.

Bakar now works in regenerative agriculture and in the local biochar trade, converting “bones” like coconut shells and tree trunks into carbon-rich material that strengthens soil health. Three years on, he has become a permaculture consultant, despite financial barriers that stopped him from completing his water-engineering diploma. “I’d like to think that I’m someone who is curious and can learn new skills,” he says. “And I hope that through this work others will have the same spirit.”

As residents of Shela, a village nestled on southeastern Lamu, trickle into the organization’s grounds with baskets of waste––at times loaded on the backs of donkeys––the handful of employees begin the sorting process, separating glass bottles from cuttings from palm and banana trees. The former will be repurposed into construction materials or household decor, while the latter will be composted into both dry and wet fertilizers.

Still, progress is fragile. Residents bring glass and green waste for sorting, but long-ingrained habits are hard to shift. “It can feel like we are taking one step forward but two steps back,” he admits. Sometimes garbage bags appear at the shamba’s gate instead of the proper drop-off point. “There is progress, but sometimes I feel depressed,” he says. That same morning, someone had dumped a tractor-load of construction debris on a public footpath. Staring at the mess, Bakar shook his head. “People need to learn that this is not okay–that they shouldn’t treat the land like this.”

At the Roots

Some researchers have dubbed Lamu the cradle of Swahili civilization. Besides its intricate and amalgamated history––trading grounds for the Arabs, Chinese, and Portuguese since the 15th century––it mediated economic and social interactions between the African mainland and Indian Ocean world for nearly 500 years beginning in the 14th century.

To this day, elements of the island’s long, winding history are evident in both its habits and architecture: many of the homes on Shela feature traditional Swahili architecture, constructed from mangrove timber and coral stones, replete with inner courtyards and verandas, decorated with intricately carved wooden doors.

41-year-old Khautar Abdulaziz, a homemaker in Shela, believes that Lamu reflects Kenya’s broader waste problem. Its insularity as a small island exacerbates the far reaches of plastic pollution, which harms everything from fishing to the marine ecosystem altogether.

“In the past, older people managed solid waste by burying it, burning it, or reusing items like clay pots and baskets,” explains Abdulaziz. “In recent years, things have changed because of the increase in plastic and other non-bio degradable materials. Now, [the volume of] waste has grown, and managing it has become much harder.”

Bakar hopes that through his work with the community, he can share a sense of self-resilience with other Lamu residents, such as growing their own food rather than importing everything at a marked-up cost from the Kenyan mainland. “I don’t want to be the only person who knows this,” Bakar emphasizes. “My goal is to spread this knowledge.”

Colonial Legacies, Plastic Economies

Abdulaziz sees a more rooted cause to Lamu’s current waste dilemma. “I believe the source of the waste problem is mainly the increase in plastic use, population growth, and poor waste disposal practices,” she says. Furthermore, increasing numbers of tourists, with the infrastructure and businesses to accommodate them are overloading inadequate waste management systems.

To Waikibia, the plastic pollution campaigner, a root cause is misplaced priorities–the national focus is on building roads and large-scale foreign investments. “The government has failed to invest in modern infrastructure to recycling companies by cutting down on taxes, educating the public about littering, or the dangers that come with the toxic chemical fumes from burning waste.”

He refers to the plastic bag ban that was enacted in 2017: “Everyone was proud of it, there was a sense of moving in a positive direction.” While this proved that things can be done, plastic is everywhere, in everything––it all needs to be managed better.”

In villages such as Shela, high poverty levels mean that residents buy food and household items in small quantities packaged in plastic sachets. And when it comes to waste disposal, it’s out of sight, out of mind.

“In Lamu, they are not even dumpsites––just open places where people throw their trash. When the rains come, or the wind blows, it goes everywhere––but that’s where we need intervention and sensitization––understanding that these are all actions that will come back to bite us,” Waikibia explains. “You see waste leaking into the environment because it’s not a priority.”

The post “No More Fish to Catch”: A Kenyan Island’s Fight Against Plastic Pollution and the Burden of Colonialism appeared first on Untold.

For a fleeting moment, it felt like homecoming. Then the stillness was shattered. Police vehicles rumbled in, officers fanned out, and the temporary shelters were pulled down. What began as a quiet meal in the forest was now a flashpoint in one of India’s longest and most contentious struggles – the fight over who truly belongs in its protected jungles.

Between tigers and the state

The Jenu Kurubas, whose name literally means “honey gatherers,” have lived in the forests of Karnataka for centuries. For them, honey collection, bamboo cutting, shifting cultivation, and medicinal foraging are not merely economic activities but cultural traditions passed down through generations. 

Families have shared the forest with its fiercest inhabitants, including tigers, elephants, leopards, and bears. After all, the animals and trees are their chief deities.

But beginning in the 1970s, as Nagarhole was declared a wildlife sanctuary and later a protected tiger reserve, this coexistence came under threat. Hundreds of Jenu Kuruba families were displaced, some for the creation of the Kabini Reservoir, others for the state’s expanding conservation ambitions in the following decade. 

Many were moved into resettlement colonies at the forest’s edge. And several other families ended up as bonded labourers in the nearby coffee plantations.

What they gained in tin-roofed housing, they lost in autonomy and subsistence. Agriculture proved difficult, and wage labour precarious. Cut off from the forest, their diets changed, livelihoods shrank, and social bonds frayed.

Jenu Kuruba’s is part of a larger problem when the Indian government scaled up its tiger conservation efforts in the past decades and designated wildlife parks under strict regulations. Either through negotiations or by force in some cases, they’ve been evicting the forest-dwelling tribes.

“There was an orchestrated effort in portraying us, villagers and tribals, as poachers,” said J C Thimma, a Jenu Kuruba tribal leader who has been at the forefront of the resettlement campaign.

“On the other hand, we have seen plenty of episodes where poaching has significantly increased as soon as the tribals move out of their lands in this region. There’s a clear-cut nexus between wildlife poachers and the state’s forces,” added Thimma.

The irony is not lost on the tribes. While they were pushed out of their ancestral lands in the name of conservation, luxury resorts, safari tracks and tourist infrastructure sprouted inside the same reserves. For the Jenu Kuruba, this reinforced the sense that their exclusion was less about ecology than about who gets to profit from the forest.

A violation of laws

A senior forest officer based in Nagarhole told UntoldMag on condition of anonymity that the tribe’s resettlement campaign is gravely misplaced, assuming that they will win.

“I do have a lot of sympathy for the Jenu Kuruba. I try to help them in whatever way possible. But I can’t see how they can win this fight of resettlement. In simpler words, they’re fighting against the might of the entire Indian state, judiciary, and forest departments from the local level to the national stage. It’s a fight they can’t win, for sure,” said the government official.

“The colonial forest regime was dismantled with the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in 2006. The new act overrides older laws like the Indian Forest Act of 1927 and even parts of the Wildlife Protection Act. Legally, tribal rights are protected – the real problem is not the law, but the state’s persistent disregard for it, and the lack of judicial oversight,” said CR Bijoy, an expert in natural resources conflict and governance issues.

“There are several cases in various courts where the courts have shown immense concern for clearing the forest encroachments without questioning whether the data on encroachment has been generated only after completion of the FRA implementation,” Bijoy added. “In Tamil Nadu, the Madras High Court had actually revised its earlier order banning grazing in forests to limit the ban to Protected Areas, when grazing is a specific right under the FRA.”

“What we see in Nagarhole is not mere high-handedness but gross violation of laws. State forces are enforcing eviction in direct contravention of the FRA,” said Bijoy.

Theoretical rights and practical struggles

India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 was meant to undo the injustices meted out to tribals by recognising the rights of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. It explicitly protects them from eviction until their claims are processed while allowing both individual and community ownership of forest land.

On paper, the FRA is a landmark legislation. However, in practice, its implementation has been fraught with resistance from forest departments and conservation lobbies. Of the five million claims filed nationwide, about half have been rejected or remain pending. Karnataka’s record is no better. Thousands of Jenu Kuruba claims are stuck in bureaucratic limbo.

The May incident in Nagarhole was, therefore, not just a symbolic return but a test of the FRA itself. By setting up shelters inside the forest, the community sought to enforce what they believe is already legally theirs. The police dismantling of those shelters laid bare the gap between statutory rights and state practice.

The Jenu Kuruba story is part of a larger nationwide struggle to balance conservation with justice.

This tension is playing out across India. In 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of tribal families whose FRA claims were rejected, sparking uproar until the order was stayed. In the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, communities are waging similar battles to remain on ancestral land inside tiger reserves. 

Meanwhile, the federal government showcases ambitious tribal welfare programmes. The Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan, launched in 2024 with a ₹790 billion (USD 9billion) budget, promises infrastructure and livelihoods in 63,000 villages. Initiatives like Eklavya Model Residential Schools seek to bring modern education to tribal children. Yet, as activists note, these schemes rarely address the fundamental issue: the right to live in forests. Without that, development projects risk becoming hollow gestures.

What is at stake?

The confrontation in Nagarhole has implications that extend far beyond the forest’s borders. For the Jenu Kuruba, it is about survival, dignity, and cultural continuity. For the state, it is about defending a conservation model rooted in the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, which empowers relocations for the sake of intact habitats. For India more broadly, it raises questions about whose vision of nature prevails.

Conservationists argue that human habitation in tiger reserves leads to deforestation, poaching risks and animal conflict. But a growing body of research suggests otherwise. Indigenous communities often act as stewards of biodiversity. Honey collection, fire management and sustainable harvesting practices of groups like the Jenu Kuruba may, in fact, strengthen forest resilience.

If the community succeeds in asserting its place within Nagarhole, it could inspire similar acts of reclamation across the country. If it fails,  through evictions or police crackdowns or other judicial letdown, the message to millions of forest-dependent people will be clear. Their rights will exist only on paper that does not translate into reality.

Political stakes are also rising. With nearly 300 million Indians dependent on forests for their livelihoods, any move perceived as trampling tribal rights risks fuelling unrest. Past interventions by bodies like the federally empowered National Human Rights Commission have shown that the government can be compelled to provide rehabilitation and redress. Whether such accountability emerges again in Nagarhole remains uncertain.

For now, the Jenu Kuruba continue to return to the forest, however precariously. Shivu Jenukuruba Appu, 29, a thin-framed, long-haired leader, told UntoldMag that the community is determined to fight until their campaign reaches its logical conclusion.

Even as the police dismantled their shelters, Shivu said: “The authorities are not even allowing us to bury the dead bodies of deceased Jenu Kurubas in our ancestral funeral grounds. This is our basic right. Still, we’re not abandoning this fight at any point. We are not going anywhere.”

At dusk in Nagarhole, the forest quiets, and the outlines of abandoned shelters blend into the trees. The Jenu Kuruba may have fewer roofs over their heads at night, but their resolve remains unbroken. Their fight is not only for land but for recognition. The acknowledgement that India’s forests are living homes, where people and wildlife have coexisted for generations.

The struggle, decades in the making, is far from over. And what happens here, in the shadow of the tiger, may determine not just the fate of one tribe but the future of India’s conservation story itself.

The post Whose Forests? Jenu Kuruba Tribes Fight for Ancestral Land and Forest Rights in India appeared first on Untold.

On December 20, 2024, from the Casa Rosada, the Argentine government launched its ambitious Nuclear Plan, presented as the cornerstone of its strategy to transform the country into a global node for artificial intelligence. The scene was carefully staged: flanking Milei stood Reidel himself—president of Nucleoeléctrica Argentina S.A.—and Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently embroiled in controversy over his diplomatic role in the bombing over Iran. 

Libertarian paradise of minimal ethical constraints

Although there is little information available, the plan appears to be straightforward: power the growing demands of AI data centers with nuclear energy and offer tech giants unbeatable conditions—cold climate, skilled talent, and lax regulatory frameworks—to establish their infrastructures here. 

The chosen reactor, the ACR-300, is a modular Argentine design developed by the state-owned company INVAP, more efficient and economical than traditional large-scale reactors. The plan also includes developing an uranium value chain for export. Everything seems to point toward a high-tech, modern, and energy-abundant Argentina. 

The Nuclear Plan promises the construction of these modular reactors within five years. Yet in reality, not a single brick has been laid—nor does Argentina currently possess the necessary equipment to achieve such an ambitious goal. Nuclear experts have publicly ridiculed the proposed timeline as pure fantasy, condemning the project as a populist illusion—one designed to legitimize the ongoing dismantling of Argentina’s scientific infrastructure.

The tech guru behind this project is Reidel, who currently heads NA-SA, Argentina’s state nuclear operator, and manages three active plants. Though trained as a nuclear physicist at the prestigious Balseiro Institute, his career has focused on finance—including JP Morgan Chase—rather than atomic research. Argentine nuclear experts attribute the plan’s unrealistic goals to Reidel’s financial background over his scientific experience.

Beyond the spectacle, what was revealed was a doubly paradoxical wager: on one hand, a return to the nationalist developmentalist imaginary through atomic energy; on the other, an attempt to inscribe this project within the deregulated, extractivist, and subordinated logic of the new libertarian regime. Reidel puts it bluntly: Argentina’s comparative advantage lies not only in its resources or human capital but—above all—in its political willingness to eliminate regulations. 

In his view, Argentina’s true asset is its capacity to offer itself to the world as a libertarian paradise—a sacrifice zone with low wages, scant labor and environmental protections, and minimal ethical constraints around AI development. This would position it above other hubs like the European Union, shackled by its environmental and labor laws, or China, where the state maintains ironclad control over data. 

What is presented as innovation is, in reality, an acceleration of dependency: energy for export, foreign servers on domestic soil, and skilled labor stripped of strategic autonomy. 

This project does not represent a break with the Global South’s technological subordination but its renewal in new forms. Far from building digital sovereignty, Argentina risks cementing its role as a peripheral link in the data economy: an energy generator and provider of favorable conditions for others to process, control, and monetize artificial intelligence. 

As with the old extractive enclaves, value addition happens elsewhere. Milei’s gamble, disguised as modernity, repeats the old cycle of dependency, now updated with the buzzwords of cloud computing, algorithms, and computational efficiency.

The Algorithmic Chainsaw

The tensions of this model quickly surface. While a “quantum leap” in nuclear energy is announced, the same government defunds public education, paralyzes scientific research, and fires thousands of workers from the state innovation system. 

The ferocity of the attack against universities, science, and research is so brutal that critics call it “scientificide,” alienating even the very scientists who patented the ACR-300 reactor and the workers at INVAP. This chainsaw policy, as some label it, paradoxically dismantles decades of accumulated capabilities—the very foundations that feed the techno-utopian fantasy of turning Argentina into the world’s fourth AI hub and could make local technological development possible.

This AI fantasy of Milei’s government isn’t limited to energy. In June 2024, Milei met with executives from Google, Apple, Meta, and OpenAI to import a “State Digital Reform” model based on implementing Google Distributed Cloud. The plan incorporates the use of big data, machine learning, and algorithmic development for public services, spanning education to healthcare. However, in the context of mass state layoffs, this reform appears less like modernisation and more like algorithmic dismantling.

AI emerges here as the perfect instrument for a reactionary utopia: the self-destructing state, replaced by supposedly “objective” algorithms that eliminate conflict, politics, and democratic deliberation. This reactionary anti-statism lies at the heart of Javier Milei’s discourse, who described his presidential role with the phrase: “I love being a mole inside the State. I’m the one destroying it from within.” 

This is more than mere techno-solutionism—it’s a systematic ideological drive to dismantle any social space tied to concepts like social rights, economic regulations, public policy, or democratic deliberation.

Perhaps nowhere was the underlying logic of these techno-utopian fantasies clearer than in the statements of Damián Reidel himself when, before an audience packed with businessmen and investors, he let his unconscious slip: After mentioning Argentina´s multiple advantage for AI investitions, he concluded that “The only problem is that Argentinians populate it,” adding, “…but we’re taking care of that.” 

Far from being a bad joke, the phrase symptomatically reflects the ideological core of the plan: turning the country and its people into a sacrifice zone for subaltern techno-utopian fantasies.

Lithium Dreams and Subaltern Nightmares

This techno-utopian vision is intimately tied to the old extractivist dream, which Milei shares with liberals and much of the Latin American centre-left. In this extractivist imaginary, lithium occupies a privileged place as the new fetish of the post-fossil era. This white, crystalline material enables the miracle of batteries capable of storing high energy densities in portable devices. 

Because of this, it embodies capitalism’s fantasy of infinity, promising to keep the machine of consumption, accumulation, and speed running at all costs, even after fossil fuels vanish and the climate collapses. Once oil reserves are depleted within the next 50 years, lithium-ion batteries suggest that business can continue as usual, without incurring the ecological costs or making any concessions.

Around 2011, the narrative of the so-called “Lithium Triangle” gained popularity as a new El Dorado that would bring abundance to countries plagued by endemic economic crises. The Lithium Triangle is the region encompassing the salt flats of Hombre Muerto in Argentina, Uyuni in Bolivia, and the Atacama Desert in Chile, which holds approximately 70% of the world’s lithium reserves. There, mineral extraction is wrapped in an aesthetic of purity: vast white expanses, evaporation ponds, flowing water, crystalline dust, and deserts devoid of people.

Against black, dirty oil, lithium is presented as a white and clean alternative. Although lithium is extracted from rocks through open-pit mining with monumental water usage, the image presented when discussing this mineral is the crystalline, sterilised, desert-like landscape of the salt flats, suggesting a harmonious fusion of technology, capitalism, and nature. 

But behind this pristine imaginary lie less shiny realities: massive water consumption in arid zones, territorial disputes with local and indigenous communities, and production that, despite resource abundance, doesn’t represent a market comparable in scale to oil.

In Argentina, Milei’s government has pushed a radical deepening of the extractivist model. The 2024 Land Law and the Incentive Regime for Major Investments (RIGI) consolidate a legal framework that subordinates territorial and environmental rights to the interests of transnational capital. 

Designed with blatant short-term logic, this legislative package creates an exceptional regime for mining and energy projects exceeding $200 million, offering unprecedented benefits: thirty-year tax stability, currency exemptions, and a 10-point reduction in profit taxes.

The mechanism is as simple as it is alarming: companies have a four-year window (two initial, plus two extendable) to join this system, freeing them from virtually all constraints. The result is mining without effective oversight, explicitly renouncing extraordinary rents and prohibiting any policy that might limit investors’ absolute control over production. 

This isn’t just about economic incentives—it’s the deliberate construction of extractive enclaves disconnected from the national economy, perfectly aligned with the libertarian ideology that led Milei to declare during his campaign: “A company has the right to pollute a river if it so decides.”

Beyond the Libertarian Techno-Utopianism

The combination of AI and extractivism—nuclear energy to power data centres, lithium to feed batteries—forms a model of subordinated modernisation. The rhetoric of technological leapfrogging coexists with the hollowing out of the very state and scientific capacities needed to sustain it. 

There is no autonomous AI development without investment in education, science, industry, and public policy. And there is no just energy transition without regulation, redistribution, and planning. In this context, Milei’s government embodies in extreme form a tension that cuts across Latin America: the contradiction between the promise of technological modernity and the structures of dependency it reproduces. 

The paradox cuts deep: cries of “energy sovereignty” serve only to tighten the chains of geopolitical dependence, while proclamations of a “digital revolution” erect new corporate enclaves. Lithium, reactors, and AI as mirages of progress – dazzling facades obscuring a reality of growing inequality, poverty and ecological ruin. 

As Latin America becomes a testing ground for this toxic triad of libertarian economics, authoritarian governance, and technological fetishism, the path forward demands nothing less than reclaiming technology from exclusionary visions. True innovation must be democratised, harnessed not for corporate plunder but for liberation – aligning technological advancement with social justice, environmental stewardship, and genuine political freedom.

The post Silicon Pampa: How Milei’s Techno-Libertarian Dream Turns Argentina into a Data Colony for AI and Lithium appeared first on Untold.

A crowd has gathered in front of the KNDS weapons factory in Anagni — though nobody calls it that. Locals refer to it as the “ex Winchester,” named after the rifles and guns that were produced there from 1965 -the year of opening- until 2001. 

The crowd is protesting against an industrial plan by the Italian government and local authorities to place a new weapons factory in an area contaminated for more than a century by chemical and military industries. The Sacco Valley, where Anagni is located, is forced to fight an intersectional struggle: against weapons, for the environment, for health rights, and even for peace in Palestine.

Over the past twenty years, Anagni has become a centre for military waste management, in an area that has grown increasingly economically depressed. 

A diverse crowd

The people gathered there come from many different backgrounds politically and socially: Local representatives of trade unions, the left-wing Communist Refoundation Party, and the parliamentary Five Star Movement.

Different generations are united in this fight, too. In front of the factory gates stand people who remember when the industrial district was still prosperous and profitable for entrepreneurs. Then there are those who began fighting for an alternative model of development between the 1990s and early 2000s — now in their fifties — and many in their thirties, a generation increasingly seeing emigration as their only viable option. The Sacco Valley has made them pay the price for decades of unsustainable development. Unlike their grandparents, they have never known real prosperity. Many of them are unemployed.

“A predatory investment”

The Winchester factory received generous European financing of 24 million euros. This funding is part of the ASAP (Act in Support of Ammunition Production), part of Rearm Europe, the European plan that has invested more than 800 billion euros in weapon supply and production. KNDS, a German-French joint venture in the defense sector, has owned the ex Winchester for four years, since the merger between Nexter and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann happened in 2021. It’s a joint-venture at 50-50% between Berlin and Paris: the Krauss-Maffei was established in 1863, and was one of the main producers of tanks and bombs during World War II. Nexter is a French group, fully owned by the French agency for State participations. They both want heavier governmental investment in European defense.

This investment, according to Alberto Valleriani – the president of the environmentalist collective “Safeguard of the Sacco valley”- is predatory: “These are highly-automated productions. KNDS is telling us ‘we will invest, to create workplaces’. They lie. By doing so, they aim to divide our society: citizens against citizens, citizens against workers and so on.”

What Anagni needs, according to Valleriani and other protesters, are heavy investments in public health and industrial reconverting. Dialogue is needed, too. “Dialogue with the management of the factory doesn’t exist. We cannot enter there. And even the local administration cannot talk to them”, adds Valleriani. I experienced the same thing: I wrote an email to Bruno Pirozzi, the director of the factory. He didn’t reply.

“There is something dystopian even in the work organisation in KNDS. The engineer and the workers are split in two groups, to avoid any contact and avoid strike. The same applies for the other factories around KNDS: the schedules are made to avoid any meeting in the aftermath of day work”, many people tell me. “This is how KNDS prevents strikes”. 

Emanuele Ricchetti, member of the collective Madeinterraneo APS -a group of activists born for the inclusion of the immigrants in Anagni-, explains to me that they are trying to engage in a dialogue with the workers inside the factory towards the trade unions’ representatives. “It’s vital for us to dialogue with people who spend 8 to 10 hours a day in the factory. Willing or not, we need a confrontation”.

Fear of explosions

In front of the gate there’s Lorenzo, too. He’s an activist, and he explains to me what are the fears of the protesters: “the risk of accidents during the transportation of the nitrogelatine and the ammunition is really high. And we have a highway just close to the factory: what if there was an explosion?”

This scenario is not concrete just outside the factory: in 2007, an incident inside the KNDS of the town of Colleferro, few kilometers away from Anagni, killed an employee and injured 13 others. “There were other incidents in the following years, but just the one happening in 2017 was covered by a press release. Most of them were hidden by the management”, Valleriani tells me. Antonio Caporilli, another activist, adds that they heard about two others in 2014 and 2024 by the workers of the factory, but no official statements were released by the enterprise.

But that’s not the only problem. “In case of an incident, we have a backup plan: we should go to the hospital in Anagni. Shamefully, it has been closed since 2012”, Lorenzo tells me. The emergency plan was elaborated in 2012, and there has been no updates since then. The other hospitals in the area (Colleferro and Frosinone) are heavily underfinanced. And so, an effective emergency plan seems difficult to elaborate, for the moment. 

Health issues

But weapon production is not the only problem the population is facing. “In my personal experience, it is hard to find a family with no siblings that developed tumors. We know what’s going on and it affects the collectivity, directly or not”, Francesca Fiorletta tells me. She studies medicine in Rome. “The most frequent illness is breast cancer. Then, many develop similar issues with their testicles, liver – or ovaries, according to epidemiologists”. The project SENTIERI, from the health institute in Italy, documented an increasing mortality caused by tumors to stomach, liver and lungs. 

The contamination in Anagni affects the blood, too. The monitoring project Indaco found severe blood pathologies for people aged 0-19 years. Here, the water consumption is limited, because of the severe pollution. But still, many people have their own well, because of a certain “rural wisdom”, which puts self-sufficiency as a key value.

By looking at the fields behind the factory, one cannot think that this is a highly polluted area, but the toxic particulate matter -a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air- is a serious issue, too. “Someone who lives in Anagni has 67% more possibilities to develop heart issues, compared to the national average”, Francesca tells me. Same for asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

“Many people in the area suffer from thyroid issues, 21.4% of the general population, according to the epidemiological monitoring program INDACO in 2022. They figured out that they had some pathology only in old age,” Francesca tells me. In fact, Anagni is one of the most contaminated areas within the SIN (National Interest Site): having more accurate and localized data would be crucial for preventing cancer here.

“2.4% of the population developed auto-immune illnesses, according to INDACO. The incidence increases especially for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and intestinal inflammation”, adds Francesca. “I see this everyday: as a student and a future doctor, I always try to be updated about what’s going on here. I need to be ready, one day my turn to assist the community will come”. 

A century of death factories

The Sacco Valley, the area where Anagni is located, is deeply contaminated because of a long chain of bad decisions. The area, especially the neighbouring town of Colleferro, witnessed an intense industrial development between from 1912 until the 1980s. “My father worked as a labourer in the factories in this area”, Valleriani tells me. “It was a great means of social redemption, at that time”.

Fiorletta’s family experienced the consequences of this firsthand: “We are not originally from here: my great-grandparents arrived from Tuscany in the 1940s, to work at the factory”. That’s why all her neighbours haven’t an “Anagnine” surname: they are mostly of Southern Italian ancestors. 

Her great-grandfather started immediately to work in the weapon plants, her mother in the chemical industry. Their story is deeply melancholic: when her grand-mother was two, her great-grandfather died because of an incident at the ex-Polveriera, a factory producing gunpowder in Anagni. It was owned by the Bombrini-Parodi-Delfino, the first industry of weapon production, established in 1912. “He was cleaning the basin for the production of the explosive. They didn’t follow the security protocol, and my grandmother received a pension that wasn’t enough to survive”. It was 1943. The great-grandmother, too, lost a finger during her work. 

But the area of Colleferro and Anagni was a center of massive and complex industrial development, starting from the 1950s. Italy itself heavily invested in subventions to this district. That’s why the chemical almost entirely replaced the military industry.

But, since the end of the 1980s, the industry started to run slower. However, pharmaceutical, military and chemical industries continued to dump their industrial wastes in the river Sacco and to bury them. It was mostly lindane, an insecticide. “I remember, up to 2000, seeing some white foam in the river. Nobody really cared”, Valleriani tells me. In 2005, some analysis of the milk produced in that area found a massive concentration of ß-HCH (Beta hexachlorocyclohexane), a cancerous molecule.

Anagni became a Site of National Interest (SIN), an area where an environmental emergency is declared by the national government itself. What this meant first, was limitations on water consumption -water is one of the main means of contamination, both by skin contact and drinking- as well as for meat and cheese consumption. 

“Now, there are many industrial appetites”, Valleriani tells me. “And they are backed by the local politics, which wants to reduce the area of the SIN”. To be fair, the area after Anagni is less contaminated than 20 years ago. The agricultural industry, another lobbying force in the area, asked for a redefinition of the SIN as well. “We are not opposed to this, in principle. But this should be done carefully”, Valleriani says. Anyway, Anagni will not be affected by this redefinition: the level of contamination is still one of the highest in the area. 

“Recently, another foam phenomenon was recorded in Sgurgola, around 10 kilometers away from the town, along the Sacco River. That’s because people dumped waste unpunished, especially from the industrial area in Anagni”, Valleriani tells me. “Nobody is accountable. You cannot check what’s the origin of the pollution, once it’s in the river”.

Installing a weapon factory in the area can potentially cause new contaminations in the soil. “To be fair, we’ve never recorded such contamination. But we can’t verify anything directly- factory access is restricted. And, if inspection permits arrive weeks later, it’s easy for everything to appear in order for an inspection”, Valleriani tells me. 

The nitroglycerin and nitrogelatin themselves, if not properly disposed of, can heavily contaminate the aquifers. In a situation where the water consumption is already limited, one can ask how all of this can get worse.

Palestine matters

Three weeks later, I come back to Anagni. This time, the committee organised a sit-in for Gaza in the center of town. I am in the Ousmane garden, a green area of more than three hectares, with an incredibly beautiful view of Anagni historical center and a valley at the bottom of it. It’s named after a volunteer who died because of a workplace accident.

I meet many different people, some of them were in front of the KNDS factory during my previous visit. There are readings of poetry from Palestinian authors. But the link between Gaza and Anagni is not just symbolic.

“We have good reasons to believe that KNDS exports weapons to Israel. We are considering this hypothesis, even if we haven’t yet found definitive proof,” Andrea Caporilli, an activist from the No War committee, tells me. “Officially, these are defense weapons. But it’s not hard at all to convert them to offensives. We think the ammunition is used by the oto-melara guns, which are part of the equipment of the Israeli navy”. 

There is also the Galix system, which KNDS exports also in Sudan, according to Amnesty International. The Sudanese war is one of the most violent conflicts in Africa, and to have information about what’s going on there is almost impossible.

“We know for sure that Leonardo [the Italian state-owned weapon enterprise], one of the main KNDS clients, exports weapons to Israel”, Ricchetti tells me. “So, to claim that we are exporting weapons to Israel it’s not impossible. This worries us: the wars are less and less between two armies. The main victims are civilians, attacked by states. We don’t want to be accomplices of war crimes happening in Gaza.”

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