Large-Scale Tree Plantations

The struggle between two agricultural projects has stepped up in Brazil. On the one hand, the agro-business project based on the concentration of vast stretches of land, on production for export, on large-scale production and on monoculture plantations, mainly of soybean, eucalyptus, and sugar cane.

On April 26, the Swedish Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry organized in Stockholm the seminar “Tilting forest industries from North to South”, aimed at discussing the growing tendency of the Swedish tree plantations and pulp industry to invest in Southern Countries such as Brazil, Uruguay and Indonesia.

Botnia is currently building the world's most controversial pulp mill at Fray Bentos in Uruguay. It is doing so with hundreds of millions of tax payers' dollars funnelled through the World Bank, the Finnish export credit agency and the Nordic Investment Bank. The profits produced, along with the pulp, will be exported.

At the end of April this year, the Brazilian Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) was host at its Florestan Fernandes National School (Guararema, Sao Paulo) to almost 80 members of social movements and organizations from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe attending the International Meeting on Monoculture Eucalyptus Plantations. The aim of this meeting was to define an agenda for joint action against the advance of monoculture tree plantations and pulp mills at global Southern level.

The Thai government has set its policy on producing palm oil-based biodiesel as energy. At present, the country’s large-scale oil palm harvest areas account to around 400,000 hectares, but since 2006, a discourse on oil palm has emerged to promote its plantation as a “renewable source of energy”, a “country savior”, a “reforestation scheme”, a “wind-protection zone”, and a “transformation of deserted rice fields into palm fields”.

The promotion of large-scale fast-growing monoculture tree plantations started in Uruguay in 1987, with forestry law Nº 15939 of December 1987. Today these plantations occupy over one million hectares of land and not only lands in the “forestry priority” category.

The US South Carolina-based company ArborGen is a partnership between the timber corporations International Paper and Mead Westvaco, and the New Zealand-based Genesis Research and Development. ArborGen has been growing GE Eucalyptus hybrid trees and testing them for cold tolerance on a secret 1-acre plot in Baldwin County, Alabama, close to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The place was found to be home to a number of experimental, genetically modified crops, many of which appear to be growing on a Loxley farm owned by agricultural giant Monsanto Co.

WRM has created a new video section in its website. You can find it in the page’s left column or going directly to http://www.wrm.org.uy/Videos/index.html.

The hegemony of the G8 in international forums such as the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change means that global climate policy is been chosen for its compatibility with the existing economic system rather than its effectiveness in reducing emissions.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has the task of carrying out periodic assessments on the state of the world’s forests. In order to do this, it has developed a number of definitions one of which –obviously- is about what can be considered to be a forest. This should have been a relatively easy mission … were it not for the fact that the FAO decided to define plantations –included those of alien species- as “planted forests”.

As it does every two years, FAO has published its report “State of the World’s Forests 2007” (http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0773e/a0773e00.htm), where “progress towards sustainable forest management” is examined. Although it admits, “Deforestation continues at an alarming rate of about 13 million hectares a year,” the report’s overall conclusion is that “progress is being made” and it adds: “but it is very uneven.”

The huge Aracruz Celulose high-tech pulp and paper complex located in Barra do Riacho in the Southeast region of Brazil has led to major conflicts since the company’s encroachment upon land belonging to the Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous peoples. However, not only land but also water is being taken over by the company’s mill and large-scale monoculture tree plantations which spread along more than 175,000 hectares in the north of the State of Espirito Santo and the Southernmost part of the Bahia State.