Anne Petermann, Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project was in Durban South Africa from September 5-12 for the Civil Society Alternative events organized in parallel with the XIV World Forestry Congress.

Petermann attended the XIII WFC in Buenos Aires in 2009 where she critiqued it with regular blog posts.  This time around she will be blogging from the Civil Society Alternative Programme about the campaigns globally by organizations, Indigenous Peoples, activists, farmers and others to protect forests from the menace of industrial tree plantations. The corporate-dominated WFC and its host, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization insist on calling industrial timber plantations “forests” even though they bear zero resemblance and perform none of the social or ecological functions of forests.

Read blog posts here, or follow Petermann on twitter, for analysis from Durban.