Bulletin Issue 131 - June 2008

An analysis of environmental destruction processes usually leads to the identification of a series of causes, which can be classified as either direct or underlying causes. For example, one of the direct causes of the destruction of forests is their conversion to monoculture plantations of soybeans (Brazil, Paraguay), oil palm trees (Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Colombia), pine trees (Chile) or eucalyptus trees (Brazil, Ecuador). Yet behind this easily identifiable cause there are others – the underlying causes – that ultimately determined and enabled this conversion.

We have produced a 10 minute video (in English) on the impacts of the paper industry. We hope that the video will be a useful tool for campaigning against excessive paper consumption and for linking those campaigns with the struggles of local communities confronting the expansion of pulpwood plantations and pulp mills in the South. The video can be accessed at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/Videos/Paper_Consumption.html

“Paper is a wonderful material, which for centuries has served for a fertile exchange of ideas among human beings. For us all who use it as an essential vehicle to share what we think, imagine, dream, know or believe we know, paper is a wonderful tool that we want to be able to continue using ... but not at the expense of people and the environment. As people who live in this reality, we are aware of the serious injustices and inequalities - social and environmental – arising from the world production and consumption of paper.

Paper is a material many people in industrialised countries take entirely for granted. Millions of trees are felled, pulped, made into paper, printed on, then binned without even being read. Why is it that we treat cotton, linen and other fabrics made from plant fibres with great respect – laundering them carefully, even mending them when they tear – yet we toss barely used sheets of paper into the rubbish bin that are pulped from trees, the oldest living organisms on the planet?

Since the early 1960s, world consumption of paper and paperboard has increased by almost seven times. Every year, each person in the UK gets through an average of more than 200 kilogrammes of paper. In the US the figure is almost 300 kilogrammes. Global paper consumption is massively inequitable. In Laos, for example, people use on average less than one kilogramme of paper a year. Yet rural communities in Laos are currently faced with the rapid expansion of eucalyptus plantations to meet the global paper industry's demands for raw material.

"When I use a word," said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." Welcome to the Looking-Glass World. Not that of Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass", but that of the Confederation of European Paper Industries. CEPI represents 800 pulp and paper companies in 18 European countries, producing more than one-quarter of world paper production. CEPI is, in its own words, "the voice and public face of the pulp and paper industry in Europe, representing its interests towards the European Institutions." Based in Brussels, CEPI lobbies at EU level aiming to create industry friendly legislation. In CEPI's Looking-Glass World, plantations are forests, monocultures improve biodiversity and logging is good for the forests.

The Gates and Rockefeller Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative has landed on Africa announcing that it will help small-scale farmers go commercial. What does this mean? Behind the millionaire funding projects lies the promotion of biotechnology in agriculture. African agriculture will be more dependent on chemicals, monocultures of hybrid seeds, and genetically modified crops.

Buxa was one of those forests which the British foresters boasted of. Originally grassland and Sal forests in stony highlands, the area was irreversibly altered when the colonial foresters moved in around 1865 and banished the indigenous swidden agriculturists like the Rava, the Mech, the Dukpa and the Garo. Evergreen trees colonised the empty spaces rapidly as the forest fires got "controlled", and the foresters came to realize that they could not have new Sal plantations unless the fire motif was re-introduced.

In 1989, WRM and Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth) produced the publication “The Battle for Sarawak’s Forests”, which documented not only the destruction of forests and forest peoples’ livelihoods in Sarawak, but also the local resistance process, which included major road blockades established as from 1987 by local communities for stopping the entry of logging trucks into their territories. The aim of that publication was to serve as a tool for the worldwide campaign that had been launched two years before by a large number of Northern and Southern organizations against the social and environmental destruction resulting from industrial logging in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

In late May, aerial photos taken during a fly-over piloted by the coordinator of the Ethno-Environmental Front of FUNAI (the National Indigenous Foundation of Brazil) confirmed the existence of indigenous people living in voluntary isolation on the border between the Brazilian state of Acre and Peru. They are members of one of four indigenous ethnic groups living in isolation in this area.

The rural-urban migratory process in Chile is the result of internal conflicts in the agrarian structure and, in the case of the VIII Region – the Bio-Bio Region – it is linked to a productive restructuring which is in fact forestry restructuring. The forestry sector is advertised in Chile as a key economic sector, representing the second largest export after copper mining. However, comparatively the territories where plantations and forest industries are installed show adverse effects rather than the benefits that could have been obtained if the land had been turned over to alternative economic activities.

The state-owned company Perhutani boasts of having “one of the highest percentages of forest plantation in the world” (http://perhutaniproducts.com/) with a land area of 2,426,206 Ha in Java and Madura Island of Indonesia. It has also the gloomy record of having severely damaged or destroyed well over half the 'state forest' of Wonosobo in Central Java (see WRM Bulletin Nº 96). On top of that, it has recently added notoriousness for killing villagers from the forest fringe of teak plantations in Perhutani's Madiun and Bojonegoro sectors. Lidah Tani, a local NGO based in Blora, East Java, Indonesia, which supports forest farmers, issued a letter of protest denouncing that:

The Tanoé Swamps Forest, in the department of Adiaké, is the very last remaining forest block in the south-eastern corner of Côte d’Ivoire and extends in an area that has been classified by conservation experts as being, among other things, of high importance for the conservation of mammals and birds, and of very high importance for the conservation of fresh water ecosystems. It is considered a High Value Forest and a major refuge for primates like the threatened Miss Waldron red colobus (Piliocolobus badius waldronae), the diana roloway (Cercopithecus diana roloway) and the white-napped mangabey (Cercocebus atys lunulatus).

In February 2008, the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda People's Defense Forces evicted more than 4,000 people from the Benet and Ndorobo communities living in Mount Elgon National Park in East Uganda. People's houses and crops were destroyed, cattle were confiscated and the people were left homeless. They found shelter where they could: in caves and under trees. The luckier ones stayed in a primary school or moved in with their relatives.