Bulletin Issue 123 - October 2007

Whenever the expression “planted forests” is used, the concept can be traced back to the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The more the concept is challenged by local peoples and NGOs struggling against plantations, the more the FAO builds up support to maintain it. The reason is simple: the FAO has chosen to be at the service of northern corporations that benefit from tree plantations – articularly from the pulp and paper sector. Presenting monoculture tree plantations under the guise of “planted forests”, has proved to be a good marketing tool which serves to hide the social and environmental disaster that large-scale, fast wood, monoculture tree plantations imply.

During the first fortnight of July, a wave of very cold weather crossed Argentina. In the warm lands of the Chaco Province, where the mean annual temperature is around 20ºC, temperatures fell below freezing. This abrupt drop highlighted by deaths the full dimension of the health and food emergency affecting Toba, Mocovi and Wichi indigenous peoples in that north-eastern district of the country, where health is undermined by malnutrition, tuberculosis and Chagas’ disease. In a matter of days 10 people had died, by 2 October the toll went up to 16, mainly from the Toba people.

I visited Cameroon in December 2006 and again in September 2007. In both trips I was shocked by the sheer number of trucks loaded with huge logs of tropical trees that could be seen on almost any road. Most of them were on their way to the ports from where they would be exported –unprocessed- to mostly northern countries. Seeing those “ancient forests on wheels” traveling along the roads reminded me of Eduardo Galeano’s book “The open veins of Latin America”. In this case, these are Central Africa’s open veins (Cameroon, Congo, DR, Congo, R., Gabon) and the logs represent the life of Africa’s forests and peoples being mined for northern consumption.

Intag, the subtropical anti-mining area in the northwest of Ecuador will not find 26 September 2007 an easy day to forget.  After months of waiting for a resolution on the issue, the Ministry of Mines and Oil announced suspension of mining activities of Ascendant Copper, the Canadian mining company owner of the concessions in the area.  The legal base for Minister Galo Chiriboga’s decision is that the company breached the law when it launched its work, because it had not requested the corresponding authorization and reports from the Municipality of Cotacachi.

In Honduras, every year between 80,000 and 120,000 hectares are deforested. Our forests are multi-diverse: pine forests, with a variety of seven species; broad-leafed forests, with 200 species of trees and rich biodiversity, particularly in the lowlands; broad-leafed cloud forests: pine or mixed forests in the highlands; broad-leafed in dry climatic areas; and mangroves. Forestry policy in Honduras is not formulated by civil society or by citizen power but by the dictates of multinational capital through the World Bank and the Free Trade Agreements linked with the local oligarchy who, through their representatives in Congress and in other State powers, adopt laws and policies aimed at forest exploitation on the basis of imperial and globalizing capital.

A series of large dams are currently proposed for the Sekong River Basin in southern Laos. In addition to the tens of thousands of people in Laos who would be affected by these projects, the livelihoods of 30,000 people living along the Sekong River downstream in Cambodia are also under threat. Yet the dams are being planned with no consideration of the impact on people and the environment in Cambodia.

In March 2007 a national and international appeal was launched against the imminent clearance and total destruction by the company UMBU S.A. of 24,000 hectares (240 Km²) of untouched pristine forest in the heart of the area known as “Amotocodie” in the North of the Paraguayan Chaco. Amotocodie is part of the ancestral territory of the Indigenous Ayoreo People and continues to be inhabited permanently by two Ayoreo groups living in voluntary isolation. They are groups that have never had contact with modern society and live in their traditional way, in a close relationship of interdependency and mutual support with nature and the forest.

Between 8 and 13 October, fisher-folk organizations, artisanal gatherers, environmentalists and academics from 10 Latin American counties organized in Redmanglar International, met in the locality of Cuyutlan, State of Colima, Mexico. During a whole week of work, it was reported that a policy for appropriation and use of coastal and marine spaces is being reaffirmed and strengthened worldwide, placing the economic interests of a few before ecosystem conservation sustaining the life and fundamental rights of local communities.

The invasion of local peoples’ territories by Aracruz Celulose S.A.’s agro-industrial project, established in the sixties and seventies in Espirito Santo, caused enormous material and symbolic losses to the indigenous and quilombola peoples. Some are irrecoverable.  “They are my cousins. When Aracruz came here and evicted them... it arrived by invading. When it arrived, they were afraid and abandoned their lands and left. It arrived with a lot of tractors and rode over their little houses. The houses were made of mud and straw, where they lived. So, they are my cousins who would like to come back to the village again.” (Maria Loureiro, from the Tupinikim village of Irajá).

Between 2001 and 2005, plywood panels manufactured by Pizano S.A., one of the largest timber companies in Colombia, could be purchased in the U.S. The panel was manufactured in part using timber from one of the plantations certified by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and in part from the natural forests in northeast Colombia, forests in which guerrilla organizations, paramilitary groups and the army fight for control of the territory and its natural resources. Consequently, these plywood panels were stained with blood.

Earlier this year, in an attempt to discourage the use of plastic bags, the Kenyan government slapped a 120 per cent tax on plastic. While the tax may look like an environmentally friendly decision, it could result in severe impacts on the environment. One of the beneficiaries of the decision will be the partly government-owned Pan African Paper Mills. Pan Paper has reported huge losses in recent years and has debts estimated at US$100 million, according to The East African. Much of the debt will mature in the next two years. In April 2007, the company appointed a new management team after the company's lenders hired consultants McKinsey to suggest ways of reviving the company's fortunes. The plastic tax could provide a lifeline to Pan Paper.

For years now WRM has been documenting the social and environmental impacts of monoculture tree plantations. However, so far we had no information on the starting point in this chain: the nurseries where millions of plants intended for plantation are produced. Recently research has just been concluded on the labour conditions and use of agrochemicals in the nurseries of the two main forestry companies in Uruguay certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC): Eufores (Ence-Spain) and FOSA (Metsa Botnia-Finland). (1)

In August 2007, ArborGen signed an agreement which brings the company's aim of being "the pre-eminent player in the global development and marketing of bio-engineered trees to the forestry industry" another dangerous step closer to reality.

The European Forest Institute recently announced a statement in favour of research into genetically modified trees. Several of EFI's 131 member organisations (consisting of research institutes, universities and companies) are involved in research into GM trees. EFI's chairman from 2004 to 2006 was François Houllier, a scientific director at theFrench National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) which is carrying out research into GM trees. Other EFI members involved in GM tree research include the Finnish Forest Research Institute (METLA) and the Federal Research Centre for Forestry and Forest Products (BFH) in Germany.