Chile

The Chilean forestry sector seems to accept no limits to the expansion of its monoculture pine and eucalyptus plantations. On the one hand it has turned to repression and lies to face local opposition. On the other, it has extended its operations to other countries, such as Argentina and Uruguay, where it has installed plantations, timber industries and pulp mills, thus increasing its impact on other environments and populations.

GM trees are not a result of evolution. They are the result of decisions taken at institutional and corporate levels for their development and deployment. Companies, research institutions and universities work together closely on this. Companies fund university research departments, and influence what type of research is carried out.

Plant pollination takes place in different ways. One way is done by bees, butterflies, humming birds and bats. Another type of pollination is caused by wind blowing through plants that have their reproductive cells in open flowers. This happens with coniferous trees (for example, pines). For fecundation to be effective, these trees have to produce an enormous amount of pollen that the wind blows away and distributes, passing it from plant to plant and covering great distances.

Twenty-two months after the beginning of its construction and almost five years behind schedule, the Valdivia mill started operating in the Lakes Region. The announcement was made on 30th January by Alejandro Pérez, General Manager of Celco (Celulosa Arauco y Constitución, forestry subsidiary of the Angelini group), who called this project a “historical investment”.

Over the past few years, private conservation has covered close to a million hectares in the South of Chile, surpassing the forest areas under regulated community land tenure, and making it comparable to the previous expansion of pine and eucalyptus plantation companies, today exceeding 2 million hectares.

Pachamama is a Quechua term, which stands, basically, for Mother Earth. The Quechua, an Indigenous People living in a large part of the Andes, believe that the Earth is a mother which cares for people as if they were her children.

On 12 December, the Matte (CMPC companies), Angelini (Arauco) forestry groups and a number of Chilean and US environmental NGOs signed an agreement (see http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Chile/article2.html ) whereby the companies have agreed to conserve the areas of native forest existing on their properties – representing 2.8% of the total surface of the native forests in the country – and not replace them by tree plantations.

Lying to the population is one of the tools most commonly used by governments and forestry companies all over the world to impose the model of large-scale monoculture tree plantations. Chile has wide experience in this type of deception. However, increasingly people are becoming organized to struggle against the unjust government policy which favours the companies and to defend the true Chilean forests.

Presently, the Chilean Patagonia is threatened by a mega-project to be carried out by the Canadian transnational company Noranda Inc., a long-standing mining company that proposes to build one of the largest aluminium reducing plants in the world in the pristine region of Aysen. To give an idea of the dimensions of the damage that the construction of this aluminium plant (known as "Alumysa") will cause, the zone where it is to be installed together with the related works, need to be described.

In these times of increasingly fast processes linked to technological development, we are also witnessing an equally vertiginous loss of natural resources due to over-exploitation enabling a way of production, consumption and lifestyle that closes a vicious circle.

The Mapuche held off European incursions onto their land for centuries. Now, relegated to reservations --called "reductions"-- most Mapuche work as impoverished farmers or field hands or live as a marginalized minority in Chilean cities. However, they are fighting back. "Our objective is the recuperation of the territory of the Mapuche people," Ancalaf, 40, said in a jailhouse interview with journalist Héctor Tobar of the Los Angeles Times. "We want to control our destiny and shape our future according to the cosmology of our people."

According to information available in FSC's web page, seven companies in Chile have certified "forests" covering a total area of 262,168 hectares. However, only one of these companies (Las Cruces S.A.) is actually managing a forest, covering an area of only 3,588 hectares. The rest (258,580 hectares) are monoculture tree plantations, which unfortunately continue to be considered as "forests" by FSC.