United States

The Sustainable Forestry Initiative - launched in 1995 by the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), the most powerful timber trade association in the world - covers an area over 40,485,830 ha in the United States and Canada. It is, in essence, a certification scheme by the forestry industry for the forestry industry. AF&PA member companies, including the largest loggers in the United States and Canada and the largest wholesale distributors of global wood products, account for 82% of the funds of SFI.

In 1729, Jonathan Swift –who devoted much of his writing to the struggle for Ireland against English rule- published his satire “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Public” (he suggested that they should be well fed and then eaten). Had he been alive today, he would have probably had something satirical to say about the US government and Earth Day (April 22).

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports outdoor field trials of GM trees worldwide in 16 countries. While the majority are located in the United States, there are also GE tree test plots in France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Chile and Brazil. China is the only country known to have developed commercial plantations of GM trees, with well over one million trees planted throughout ten provinces.

Development can provide --indeed, it does-- great opportunities for corporations eager to profit from business in so-called “developing” countries. International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have proved to be extremely good instruments for achieving that, and extremely bad for improving southern peoples’ livelihoods or protecting the environment.

The American based Rainforest Alliance is undermining the efforts of local conservation groups in Papua New Guinea struggling to combat widespread illegal and unsustainable logging.

Over November 17-19, 2004 a major conference on genetically engineered trees technology took place at North Carolina’s Duke University in the US. Representatives were present from major biotechnology companies including Arborgen, Cellfor and others, as well as some of the leading institutions conducting research, such as the Institute of Forest Biotechnology, the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Initiative, the US Forest Service and the Canadian Forest Service, as well as many others simply interested in learning more about the technology of GE trees.

Potlatch Corporation’s 7000 hectares of poplar plantations in Boardman, Oregon are just about as high tech as a plantation can be. The trees are planted in the sandy desert soil and will only grow because of tens of thousands of kilometres of thin black hosepipe. Water, fertilizer and pesticides are pumped to the trees through the irrigation pipes. The water for the irrigation comes from the John Day Dam, constructed by the US Army Corps Engineers in 1971. The dam is one of the 19 dams that block the Columbia River and which have devastated salmon fisheries in the river.

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.

In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the introduction of a series of technologies in Mexican agricultural production. This gave rise to an agricultural production model known as the “Green Revolution” with a central concept of “high yielding varieties” developed in the framework of monoculture crops supported by a technological package including mechanization, irrigation, chemical fertilization and the use of toxic chemicals to control pests.

Making clean white paper from trees is a dirty business. To make bleached kraft pulp, trees are chipped, cooked under pressure, washed and then bleached. Toxic chemicals are used in the cooking process to remove lignin, a glue-like substance that holds wood cells together and makes trees strong. As lignin causes yellowing of paper, any lignin remaining has to be bleached.

April will mark the 60th anniversary of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and activists throughout the world are already organizing activities to expose those institutions' role in the socially and environmentally destructive economic model being imposed on the world to favour Northern-based corporate interests (see http://www.50years.org for more information).

Tracing back the background of United States pressure on Ecuadorian politics could take us very far back in time and consume many pages.