Large-Scale Tree Plantations

The struggle in Geragai District Up to 2011, a total of 18 companies had licenses over forest areas for a total of 663,809 ha distributed over 8 Regencies in Jambi Province, Sumatra, nearly 50% of which - 293,812 ha - is being controlled by one large corporation, PT. WiraKaryaSakti (PT. WKS), a subsidiary of Sinar Mas Group. The concession land of PT. WKS is divided in 5 Regencies, namely Tebo Regency, Batanghari Regency, Muaro Jambi Regency, TanjungJabung Barat Regency, and TanjungJabungTimur Regency.

The trend of voluntary certification is a FAO-supported phenomenon that came up in the 1990s, presented by corporations and governments as a solution to deforestation; according to a set of principles and criteria, certification schemes aim to assure consumers that products are coming from areas with a “sustainable forest management”. In some schemes this also includes management of industrial tree monocultures, declaring these activities socially and ecologically benign.

  This past September 21, to mark the International Day Against Monoculture Tree Plantations, the Portuguese environmental organizations Liga para a Protecção da Natureza (League for the Protection of Nature) and Quercus launched a petition against a proposed new regime for tree planting and replanting presented by the government.

  “Sustainable on Paper”, a documentary film by journalists An-Katrien Lecluyse and Leopold Broers released in Belgium in 2011, is now available on the internet. The film broadly denounces the FSC certification of plantations owned by one of the biggest eucalyptus and pulp companies in Brazil, Veracel Celulosa, a joint venture of Brazilian-based Fibria and Swedish-Finnish transnational Stora Enso.

This September we pay tribute once again to the men and women around the world who have taken up different struggles against monoculture tree plantations in defense of their territories, their forests and their way of life, as opposed to the greed of big corporations and investors who seek to exploit the same land for their own benefit.

Baby food scandals in Africa, tropical forest destruction for candy bars: There are companies like Nestle that attract scandals like light the flies.

The traditional communities known as geraizeiras at the Vale do Guará Settlement, in the town of Rio Pardo de Minas, north of Minas Gerais, denounce that an airplane spraying poison on a major eucalyptus plantation has hit the community, intoxicating 30 people, including children, elderly, youth and adults. They felt nausea, fever, vomit and itching skin. Airplane spraying is increasingly common in Brazil – the world's champion in pesticide use.

Sappi Limited, South African producer of pulp and paper, plans the construction of a biomass combustion plant at Ngodwana Mill, Mpumalanga. It has a proposed capacity of about 50 megawatt, which will supply to the public grid. Misleadingly, this investment is called ‘Green Energy Power Project' (GEPP) – in reality, the power is as green as the inside of the Sappi boiler.

Liberia, a small West African country with a population of approximately 3.5 million people, has a predominantly agrarian economy, with high dependency on land and land based resources. The majority of the population lives in rural areas and is engaged in subsistence agriculture and forest-based trade for income generation. Healthcare facilities are poor and in some places non-existent, and the majority of children lack access to safe drinking water. They also lack decent education. The country ranked 182 out of 187 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index in 2011.

With an increasing global demand for natural rubber in the past few years, large-scale rubber plantations in Laos are expanding, causing conflicts with local communities in a country where, in early 1990s, it was widely accepted as well as referred by scholars and people who study about Laos that about 80% of the Laos people relied directly on the forest – including the river - for their physical, cultural and spiritual well-being.

Timber Plantation concessions are a model of forest exploitation conducted by corporations in Indonesia. More than 9 million hectares of timber plantation concessions have already been awarded by the Ministry of Forestry, though not all of these concessions are used for timber plantations. Up to 2011, less than half of the total area of timber plantation licenses was being managed by the license holder corporation.

The area planted with oil palm trees in Brazil used to be relatively small as compared to other countries producing this plant in Latin America. However, big transnational companies in Brazil like Vale and Petrobrás have revealed the rapid expansion of these plantations meant for the production of biofuels, in the Amazon region, mainly in the State of Pará.