Large-Scale Tree Plantations

The corporate lies behind the ever-increasing expansion of industrial tree plantations.

On the eve of the International Day of Struggle against Tree Monocultures, we invite you to participate in the webinar “Tree Plantations, Carbon Markets and Resistances”. It will be on Friday 20th September.

This briefing provides an overview of the expansion of tree plantations aimed at carbon markets. Where are these plantations located, who is profiting from them, what have been the impacts for communities living on the lands these projects occupy, and what international initiatives are taking place to boost tree plantations for carbon offsetting.

This publication exposes the most common misleading statements currently used by plantation companies. It’s is based on the briefing "Ten Replies to Ten Lies" written by Ricardo Carrere in 1999.

This bulletin shows that the fight against monoculture tree plantations and the model they represent is very strong in the Global South, especially among women. Whether it is in Indonesia, Thailand, Liberia, Brazil or Colombia, communities continue to resist and make progress.

We are peasants from Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil. In recent decades, we have witnessed the spread of oil palm monocultures in our territory, an expansion driven by multinational companies with government support. False promises led us to accept plantation partnership schemes that put us at risk of losing our land. What was once forest and traditional crops have been replaced by monocultures that have left us with food shortages, debt, and the threat of floods. For this reason, we organized ourselves to end this exploitation and restore our traditional way of life. And here we share the story of our struggle.

This is the story of how we, a group of indigenous peoples and peasants in Colombia, have come together under the name Cajibío Interethnic and Intercultural Territory of Life (TEVIIC, by its Spanish acronym), to face one of the world's largest multinational paper and cardboard manufacturers: Smurfit Westrock. Our goal is to achieve Agrarian Reform through autonomy and concrete actions.

Ya sea en Brasil, en medio de los monocultivos de eucalipto, o en Tailandia, rodeadas de plantaciones de palma aceitera, las mujeres sufren impactos específicos y están en la primera línea de la resistencia a estos proyectos que explotan y devastan la tierra en busca de ganancias. Esto es lo que nos cuentan dos activistas campesinas que luchan en defensa de la tierra, cada una en uno de esos dos países (available in Spanish, French and Portuguese).

Two Joghban leaders who have been active in the fight against Equatorial Palm Oil's (EPO) invasion of their ancestral lands talk about their victorious resistance process. Their resistance culminated in 2018 with official state recognition of part of their territory. However, they stress that this long-term struggle is ongoing. “We are going to resist; we will always resist, because land matters to us and to our future generations”, says Isaac Banwon, one of the leaders.

The article we recommend shares the story of Uma Bai Netam, a woman from the Gond tribe in India. It helps us understand how women from traditional communities are particularly affected by commercial tree monocultures – which are allegedly used to offset the destruction of forest areas caused by extractive or infrastructure projects. Uma and other Indian women have won some partial victories, such as the legal right to the land where they have lived and worked for decades.

The new report from GRAIN shows how IT corporations like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are turning to carbon markets to hide their ballooning greenhouse gas emissions, caused in large part by the industry’s push for increasing use of energy-heavy AI and cloud computing. GRAIN’s research looks at how in particular Amazon and the USD 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund set up by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos don’t stop at just buying carbon credits. Both are involved in creating the infrastructure to produce carbon credits.

Since the Paris Agreement, tree plantations have proliferated as purported carbon sinks and generators of carbon credits. This is a lucrative business that is also used to clean up the image of large companies. A recent article by Climate Tracker reveals some of the dirty ways companies use tree plantations to ironically promote themselves as clean. The cases come from Paraguay and Colombia. In the former, Apple uses monocultures that it presents as “forests,” in which it uses agrochemicals that are banned or restricted in other countries.