Blog posts on smallholder agroforestry, indigenous communities, and tropical timber.
Traveling through Panama for the first time in 2004, I was amazed at the amount of land dedicated to the cultivation of teak. The increasing global appetite for the valuable wood and decreasing amounts of old growth teak available make teak an attractive investment for investors and project promoters, who plant it by the tens of thousands of hectares.
Read MoreAt the most recent iteration of the UN Climate Change Conference in Warsaw, Poland, negotiators made significant progress on the forestry conservation policy called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+).
Read MoreThe Darien Indigenous Collective Lands held their Congress on the 13-14th of December, hosting nearly 3,000 people from all the Embera Collective Land villages in Darien.
Read MoreLast month we began using cattle to control pasture growth on our Finca #2 in Nuevo Paraiso, Rio Congo.
Our employee Jose "Ino" had been asking us to try this system, known as silviculture, to reduce our maintenance costs and to generate income. So, we decided to try a controlled experiment to see if the cows would control the vegetation without damaging the trees.
Read MoreAs you can see, PlantingEmpowerment.com recently got a facelift.
Our website vendor Squarespace rolled out a new version of their platform last year, an out of the box system that enables publishers, small business owners to manage websites in an integrated way.
Read MorePlanting Empowerment is a sustainable agroforestry company working with indigenous communities and smallholders in Panama.
