Finland

TV Yle, Finland’s national public broadcasting channel, has produced a documentary about the participation of Stora Enso, a Swedish-Finnish pulp giant that is part of Veracel Celulose. Veracel Celulose is a company in Brazil accused of land grabbing, bribery and environmental and labor crimes. It is worrisome that the police have arrested people interviewed in the documentary, such as farmer Geraldo Pereira.

Finnish activists protest against Stora Enso and Veracel

 WRM information sheets on GE tree research First posted: 1 August 2008 Last update: August 2014 Tree species being manipulated: hybrid aspen (Populus) silver birch (Betula pendula) Aim of genetic manipulation

Last month I wrote an article about FSC certification of “village forestry” in Laos. The article was based on a leaked report from a World Bank and Finnish government project, the Sustainable Forestry and Rural Development Project (SUFORD). The SUFORD report documented serious problems with logging under the project, of which 39,000 hectares has been certified by SmartWood under the Forest Stewardship Council system.

Until recently, relatively little was know about the Nordic countries in the South. At the best, Finland, Norway and Sweden were known because of their progressive social legislation, their solidarity against the Southern dictatorships, their composers, such as Sibelius, the Nobel Prize or more popular facts such as famous tennis players and racing car drivers, the Helsinki Olympics or the World Football Cup in Sweden.

Is the dichotomy legal logging – illegal logging the one that should prevail in a forest conservation policy? It is understood that illegal logging takes places when timber – converted into a profitable business to be exploited – is harvested, transported, purchased or sold in violation of national laws. However, laws can vary widely from one country to another, so there is no way of distinguishing between legal and illegal logging on a world scale insofar as there are no international standards in this respect. Perhaps in each case the questions to be asked are: What is legal?

In June 2004, unknown activists attacked the last remaining trial of genetically modified trees in Finland. About 400 GM birch trees were felled. How should we react now? That was the first question for GM tree campaigners when we heard about the attack. Our campaign against GM trees in Finland started in 2000, when I was among a small group of concerned activists who formed the People's Biosafety Association (PBA) to monitor GMOs in Finland. Earlier the same year, the Finnish Forest Research Institute received permission for a trial of GM trees in Punkaharaj.

There is no smoke without fire, and in this case, the fire is in Spain, where the ENCE paper company has a pulp mill that for many years has contaminated the Pontevedra river mouth. Although the company was finally condemned and its executives ordered to pay fines and sentenced to prison, the environmental “inheritance” continues (see WRM bulletin 75). The local population is asking for the “factory to be closed” to enable them to “recover the shell-fishing areas” and “the fisheries.”

UPM-Kymmene Corporation --one of the world's largest forest products companies and paper producers, with industrial plants in 15 countries-- the APRIL Group (Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd.) and APRIL's majority shareholder have recently signed an agreement to sell APRIL's 51% interest in the Changshu paper mill to UPM-Kymmene. The value of the transaction is US$ 150 million. As a consequence of the agreement, the Finland-based UPM-Kymmene has now become the sole owner of the Changshu paper mill.