International Day against Monoculture Tree Plantations is a good opportunity to expose the myths being spread around about the so-called “benefits” of these plantations. Such myths have not arisen on their own but are the result of a long process during which people and institutions related to the corporate-plantation sector have invented arguments to convince both the general public and governments and institutions of the advisability of mass tree plantation.
Issue 146 – September 2009
International Day Against Tree Monocultures.
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE
This WRM bulletin is a contribution to the activities to be carried out on September 21st, International Day Against Tree Monocultures. It is important to stress that the choice of this date is rooted in peoples’ struggles against plantations. The date was first chosen by local networks in Brazil, who in 2004 decided to establish this date as a day of struggle against tree monocultures. Following their lead, the date was immediately adopted by a large number of communities and organizations struggling against plantations in their own countries and internationally. Since then, more and more people have joined in by carrying different activities on this date, thereby helping to raise awareness about the social and environmental impacts of plantations.
We hope that this bulletin –as well as a number of other tools available in our web page- will help in strengthening local peoples’ struggles to stop the expansion of monoculture tree plantations.
WRM Bulletin
146
September 2009
OUR VIEWPOINT
THE MYTH BUSTERS
-
30 September 2009Plantations are forests in uniform. They look like soldiers all lined up in ranks, and that is what they are. Dressed in green, they march off to the world market. The hymns that sing their praises in the name of our Mother Earth are lies. Industrial forests are to natural forests what military music is to music, and what military justice is to justice. Eduardo Galeano, writer, Uruguay
-
30 September 2009Large-scale tree plantations do not generate jobs because they always involve as much mechanization as possible. For example, the Veracel Celulose Company in Brazil generates 1 direct job per 130 hectares of eucalyptus. On the other hand coffee plantations, very common in Brazil, are able to create up to one job per hectare.
-
30 September 2009Anyone that subscribes to this idea must be someone who has either never visited a forest area surrounded by communities, or is simply linked to the plantation business. Local people in the Mekong countries in Southeast Asia who live and rely on their native forests will totally disagree with such a statement. For them, conversion of their forests into plantations has started to be the worst nightmare they have ever suffered in real life.
-
30 September 2009Why is this statement simply not true? Monoculture tree plantations cannot ever improve on the natural environment that is eliminated when plantations are established.
-
30 September 2009A typical propaganda disseminated by business interests and governments in many tropical countries is to say that plantations will relieve pressure on native forests. They claim that with enough plantations, native forests would eventually be left alone, as the plantations would provide sufficient wood to avoid the need of extracting timber from native forests. This argument is a blunt lie. In the first place, because plantations and forests produce different qualities of wood, aimed at different markets. This means that demand for high quality wood will continue to rely on native forests while plantation timber will supply lower quality wood demand.
-
30 September 2009The need for paper is not growing. We should not confuse consumption levels with need. In rich countries, we already use far more paper than we need, and the vast bulk of it is wasted. The real need is to reduce demand for paper, to use this precious resource more efficiently and to encourage recycling systems that ensure paper fibres are reused over and over again. Of course, there are countries and communities where paper consumption is currently well below what is required for education and democratic engagement, and they have a right to use more. Schools need books, voters need ballot papers. No one is suggesting that paper does not have benefits. No one is suggesting that its use is all bad and must be eliminated.
-
30 September 2009The experience of Ecuador in areas where large-scale pine plantations have expanded shows that, far from providing women with opportunities, women have been adversely affected by them in various ways. The arrival of tree plantations to the Ecuadorian Andes has involved the destruction of local economic systems, strongly based on a subsistence economy. Smallholder farming for self-supply was the work of women and it provided them with a certain degree of food sovereignty in addition to leaving them a surplus for trading. Plantations have dismantled this system and forced the communities to integrate to a new economic system where money is the central element, leaving little room for women in a world dominated by men.
-
30 September 2009In the area of tree plantations, the FSC has become the main body responsible for granting a certificate to plantations assessed as “environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable.” The insurmountable problem of this “green seal” granted by the FSC is that it certifies what intrinsically can never be either socially beneficial or environmentally sustainable: large scale monoculture tree plantations.
-
30 September 2009The expansion of oil palm plantations usually takes place at the expense of transforming natural ecosystems, particularly tropical rainforests. This has disastrous consequences, firstly because these forests are the home of very traditional peoples who have learnt over thousands of years to understand the forest and to use it, respecting its natural dynamics. Secondly, the destruction of the forest implies the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) – one of the greenhouse effect gases, whose accumulation in the atmosphere is responsible for global warming and subsequently climate change.
-
30 September 2009For those readers of the WRM bulletin who do not know this by now, the Southern US is the largest paper producing region in the world. Over the last 50 years we have been the testing ground for every imaginable destructive forestry practice that once perfected here, is exported around the globe. For example, starting in the 1950’s and continuing to today, we have converted nearly 17 million hectares of forests and arable land to monoculture timber plantations making us number one in the world in that regard.
-
30 September 2009At a very fundamental level, dealing with climate change involves making a dramatic and immediate reduction in the amount of fossil fuels that we extract and burn. The idea of using tree plantations to neutralise these emissions is counterproductive as it effectively provides a false excuse to keep on combusting more coal, oil and gas. As long as there is room for more plantations (regardless of their impact on communities and ecosystems) then business interest want us to believe that we can keep on building more oil refineries and coal mines.
-
30 September 2009From a climate perspective, tree plantations not only are not a solution. They also add yet more problems. It is impossible to predict how much carbon any plantation could remove from the atmosphere, and for how long. Unlike subterranean oil or coal, carbon stored in trees is "fragile": it can quickly reenter the atmosphere at any time through wildfires, storms, insect infestation, disease and decay.
-
30 September 2009There is a particular arrogance associated with this rationale. It implies that scientists and corporations know more about improving trees than has been achieved by 3 billion years of evolution, and ignores the fact that some tree species being engineered have genomes many times longer than the human genome. But really what they are saying is "genetic modification of trees is useful and necessary for making more money." The first assumption one must make to agree with the assertion that "genetic modification is useful and necessary for improving trees," is that the consumption of trees can and should continue to increase infinitely, because we can modify trees to grow "more wood on less land" (which is ArborGen's motto).
-
30 September 2009This lie has its roots in the failure of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to differentiate between forests and plantations. "Forest" according to UNFCCC is an area larger than 500 square metres, at least 10 per cent of which covered in trees that can grow to more than two metres high. To UNFCCC, then, there is no difference between a monoculture eucalyptus plantation, a severely degraded forest and an intact old-growth native forest.
-
30 September 2009A coalition of start up companies, consultants and some soil scientists is promoting a new ‘solution’ for climate change: Large quantities of wood and other biomass are to be turned into fine-grained charcoal (euphemistically called biochar) and applied to agricultural soils. It's very worrying that advocates, who are organised in the International Biochar Initiative, claim that the carbon in the charcoal would remain in the soil for thousands of years and ‘offset’ fossil fuel burning, and that charcoal will make soils more fertile. They class all biomass as ‘carbon-neutral’, whether it comes from tree plantations or from stripping large areas of cropland and forests of residues. None of the claims are proven:
TOOLS FOR ACTION
-
30 September 2009The numerous arguments voiced, collected from the experience of those who directly suffer from the effects of monoculture tree plantations, must be turned into action.