Bulletin Issue 108 - July 2006

With regards to plantation certification, FSC has reached a crossroads where no less than its credibility is at stake. The internal process for the review of plantation certification is fairly advanced and in September this year the Working Group set up for this purpose will submit its recommendations.

In November 2002, Forest Stewardship Council's General Assembly passed a motion requiring FSC to revise its plantation policy. At the time, an area of 3.3 million hectares of plantations had been certified as well managed under the FSC system. Almost two years later, FSC launched a Plantations Review at a meeting in Bonn, Germany. By then, the area of FSC certified plantations had increased to 4.9 million hectares. The Plantations Review consists of two phases: a Policy Phase and a Technical Phase. The Policy Phase is currently drawing to a close. At its fourth meeting in April 2006, the Policy Working Group produced a set of "Draft Recommendations". The area of FSC certified plantations has now reached 7.4 million hectares.

As one of its Founder members, I am at least partly responsible for having allowed a fatal flaw to be built into the FSC system when it was established: quite simply put, the so-called ‘independent’ certification bodies that are accredited to the FSC are not, in fact, independent at all. Having been a close observer of the FSC since it was established, it now seems clear to me that this flaw underlies much of what has subsequently gone wrong – and why we now see so many utterly unjustified certificates being issued to logging and plantation companies that fail to comply with the majority of the FSC Principles and Criteria (P&C).

On June 1st, 2006, the Seminar on “The Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Advance of Agribusiness: issues and challenges” took place in the town of Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil. The Seminar gathered the Tupinikim and Guarani communities and also other communities affected by large-scale monoculture tree plantations, in addition to various sectors of civil society in the State of Espirito Santo, for a thorough reflection on the subject.

In March 2006, the WRM released the publication “Greenwash: Critical analysis of FSC certification of industrial tree monocultures in Uruguay” (see at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Uruguay/book.html). The report addressed the four main certified plantation companies and included a very detailed critique of the certifiers’ reports, complemented with interviews with workers and people from local communities in the vicinity of the plantation areas. The report concluded that none of those plantations comply with FSC’s mandate because they are not managed in an “environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial or economically viable” way.

Ecuador is a country with one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. In this process various actors are involved, not only the major timber companies that typically carry out both lawful and unlawful timber extraction activities, but also companies undertaking deforestation to install vast monoculture tree plantations, ranging from African palms to pine and eucalyptus.

The Alert against the Green Desert Movement is a broad network of opposition to the expansion of large scale eucalyptus tree plantations in the region which covers the States of Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul. Its existence and struggles arose from the proven social and environmental impacts of these plantations, some of which presently enjoy FSC certification.

In 1999, the FACE Forestación del Ecuador S.A. programme, known as PROFAFOR, hired the Swiss certification firm SGS-Société Générale de Surveillance to assess the forestry management of 20,000 hectares of its monoculture tree plantations in the Ecuadorian Andes. In 2000, SGS granted a certificate to PROFAFOR's plantations for absorbing carbon dioxide emissions (this was the first case in which storage and uptake of carbon dioxide were certified in tree plantations and not in real forests), and in December 2000 granted the Forestry Certification Seal accrediting that PROFAFOR fulfils “FSC Principles and Criteria.”

In South Africa, a thorough research carried out by John Blessing Karumbidza --“A Study of the Social and Economic Impacts of Industrial Tree Plantations in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa”, available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/SouthAfrica/book.pdf -- has identified a host of damaging economic, social and environmental impacts of monoculture tree plantations affecting local communities, water resources and ecosystems.

About 9% of Swaziland is now under timber plantations (eucalyptus, pine and acacia). In December 2004 Wally Menne, a member of the South African Timberwatch Coalition made public his research: “Timber Plantations in Swaziland: An investigation into the environmental and social impacts of large-scale timber plantations in Swaziland” (available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Swaziland/Plantations.pdf ). Menne’s study also covers the certified tree plantations of Mondi Forests (a subsidiary of the giant Anglo-American Corporation), which operates in Swaziland through its associated company Peak Timber Ltd, and its South African owned sister company Mondi Timber.

In 1987 legislation was adopted that implied the promotion – by means of tax exemptions and subsidies – of large-scale monoculture alien tree plantations (mainly eucalyptus and pine) for export. It is thus that the country up till then based on agriculture and stock raising, started to convert part of its fertile grasslands into “green deserts” which presently cover over 700,000 hectares.

Currently the main plantation companies operating in Australia certified by FSC are: Albany Plantation Forest Company Pty Ltd (23,509 ha), Timbercorp Forestry Pty Ltd. (97,000 ha), Integrated Tree Cropping Limited (166,536 ha), Hancock Victorian Plantations Pty. Limited (246,117 ha). Among the main impacts concerning certification of the newly planted blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) plantations in Australia is aerial spraying regimes of pesticides on tree plantations and subsequent pollution of drinking water. The problems related to aerial spraying of Hancock plantations in water catchments that provide thousands of Victorians with drinking water can be tracked at http://www.forest-network.org/Docs/amis_fsc_05-04.htm

In 2003, WRM paid a field visit to Colombia to acquaint itself with the communities affected by Smurfit plantations and to gather evidence. At that time, we published the following in an article: “…The local people told us that ‘the plantations have finished off the water,’ that “spraying has finished with everything there was in the soil,’ that ‘there is hardly any fauna left,’ that there used to be ‘clouds of birds’ and that now ‘only in the summer does some bird appear, but not in winter time,’ and that ‘there are no fish left either.’

In April 2006, the German certifying firm GFA Consulting Group granted the FSC seal to Endesa-Botrosa’s timber operations and to its tree plantations located in the Rio Pitzara plot covering 8,380 hectares on the Ecuadorian coast (GFA-FM/COC-1267). FSC certification of Endesa Botrosa, belonging to the Durini Timber Group, represents a severe setback to the hundreds of local peasant, indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities whose forests and livelihoods have been devastated for decades by this company.

In the last few centuries, there has been a massive deforestation of Irish land. What has been replaced, has been by and large replaced with foreign exotic near-monoculture conifer plantations, mainly by one company: Coillte, which owns 438,000ha of certified plantations. In 2002, Coillte Teoranta obtained Forest Stewardship Council certification from the Soil Association/Woodmark (they were formerly certified by SGS). However, certification of these plantations has been strongly criticised in Ireland for a number of reasons, among which because they:

For over a year now, Spanish organizations have been demanding the annulment of the certification of “sustainable forestry management” granted by FSC to a branch of the ENCE (Norfor) pulp/plantation company, but so far with no results. In June 2005, the “Asociación pola defensa da Ria”(Association for the defence of the Ria), a member of the Galician Ecologist Federation (FEG) submitted an urgent request for the annulment of such certification (http://www.wrm.org.uy/actores/FSC/cancelacionNORFOR.pdf) to FSC’s delegation in Spain, accompanied by a critical report on Norfor’s certification. (http://www.wrm.org.uy/actores/FSC/informeNORFOR.pdf).

Here below are the conclusions submitted in a travel report (available in Spanish, at:http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Venezuela/Gira2006.pdf) on the investigation carried out recently by 4 representatives of the Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations in the area where the so called "Uverito plantations" are located. These are some 600,000 hectares of pine plantations in the States of Monagas and Anzoategui. In 2003, SmartWood certified 12 plots covering a total of 139,650 hectares, owned by Terranova de Venezuela (TDV) and which form part of those plantations. TDV belongs to the Forestal Terranova Group, with headquarters in Chile and is linked to other Chilean companies and North American capital.