Large-scale tree plantations are having grave social and environmental impacts in many countries of the world. While governments and international organizations promote this forestry model, more and more people rise in opposition against it. Its promoters' real aims (power, profits) are hidden under a "green" guise: the plantation of "forests" in a world facing deforestation and climate change. This environmental discourse, which has little or no influence on the people living in the plantation sites, is aimed at uninformed -mostly urban- audiences, which constitute the main potential support for the plantations industry.
Bulletin Issue 13 – July 1998
General Bulletin
WRM Bulletin
13
July 1998
LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS
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30 July 1998Forests cover about 30 million hectares in Chile while plantations occupy 2,1 million hectares. Chilean forests -with more than 100 native species- are one of the most biodiversity-rich temperate forests in the world. In marked contrast, 80% of the plantations are composed by radiata pine and 12% by eucalyptus monocultures. The Chilean forestry model -based upon plantations in spite of the vast and rich forests existing in the country- has been trumpeted as an example for developing countries and one of the factors of the Chilean economic boom. Such model is being promoted in different countries, from Uruguay to Mozambique. Albeit its negative side is not publicized.
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30 July 1998Indonesia’s forests occupy about 120 million hectares. Although at least 2-3 million families of indigenous peoples live in or around the forests and many of the 220 million inhabitants of the country depend directly or indirectly on forests for their livelihood, the government’s approach has been to consider forests as "empty" land. Logging and plantation companies are responsible for the high deforestation rates (1 million hectares a year according to the World Bank, but 2,4 million according to Indonesian NGOs). The depredatory activities of such companies are a token that Indonesia’s economic “miracle” has been driven by ruthless exploitation of natural resources and by the use of cheap labour.
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30 July 1998Up to the decade of the ‘50s the Brazilian government provided subsidies for the import of pulp. With the military government, beginning in 1964, a forestry policy was set up trying to promote tree plantations and large export-oriented pulp companies by means of subsidies and loans. Eucalyptus for pulp is grown in Brazil with rotation periods of only 7 or even 5 to 6 years.
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30 July 1998Timber plantations have been a part of the South African landscape for more than a century. Colonial settlement brought a wide range of exotic tree species. Not all were successful, but it soon became clear that Australian acacias and eucalyptus were well suited to conditions in the Eastern part of South Africa.
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30 July 1998The World Bank has been and still is an active and influential promoter of industrial scale tree monocrops using different mechanisms. The first one is providing technical advice for forestry planning. The Bank has carried out dozens of forest sector plans for various countries, which include models on how to zone land and how should land be allocated for different uses, including particularly for plantations. This was a process that the Bank tried to institutionalize -as a global response to deforestation- through the Tropical Forestry Action Plan in the 1980's, which received very strong criticism, particularly from the World Rainforest Movement, which was actually created during that struggle.
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30 July 1998In 1995, the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development established an Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) to address a wide range of forest-related issues. The IPF produced a final report in early 1997 containing a set of 135 proposals for action, that governments have agreed to implement. This package of proposals was formally endorsed at the June 1997 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the implementation of Agenda 21.
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30 July 1998Jaakko Poyry is one of the actors involved in creating the conditions for establishing plantations. This consulting company was born in Finland 40 years ago. It grew up together with the the boom of Scandinavian forestry after the war, when Finland, Sweden and Norway became one of the superpowers of industrial forestry. Jaakko Poyry was there, helping them to do it. It's role was to provide special expertise about planning pulp mills, paper mills, plantations, logging, how to plan industrial operations. At first its clients were Sweden, Finland, Norway and the rest of Europe. In the last couple of decades it started to expand globally and this has followed the pressures to expand plantations to the South, the pressures to exploit the forests of the South.
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30 July 1998Individuals and organizations interested in obtaining information on the issue of large-scale tree plantations can access it in the WRM web page: http://www.wrm.org.uy. Additionally, for those who wish more in-depth information and analysis, the WRM has produced a book (Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Global Paper Economy), which has been published by Zed Books. Orders can be requested by sending a message to Helen Salmon . The same book has been published in Spanish (El papel del Sur: plantaciones forestales en la estrategia papelera internacional) and can be obtained at RMALC (Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio).
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30 July 1998A call for action to defend forests and people against large-scale tree monocrops- In June 1998, citizens of 14 countries around the world gathered in Montevideo, Uruguay out of urgent concern at the recent and accelerating invasion of millions of hectares of land and forests by pulpwood, oil palm, rubber and other industrial tree plantations. Such plantations have little in common with forests. Consisting of thousands or even millions of trees of the same species, bred for rapid growth, uniformity and high yield of raw material and planted in even-aged stands, they require intensive preparation of the soil, fertilisation, planting with regular spacing, selection of seedlings, mechanical or chemical weeding, use of pesticides, thinning, and mechanized harvesting.