Large-Scale Tree Plantations

In April 2006, the German certifying firm GFA Consulting Group granted the FSC seal to Endesa-Botrosa’s timber operations and to its tree plantations located in the Rio Pitzara plot covering 8,380 hectares on the Ecuadorian coast (GFA-FM/COC-1267). FSC certification of Endesa Botrosa, belonging to the Durini Timber Group, represents a severe setback to the hundreds of local peasant, indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities whose forests and livelihoods have been devastated for decades by this company.

In the last few centuries, there has been a massive deforestation of Irish land. What has been replaced, has been by and large replaced with foreign exotic near-monoculture conifer plantations, mainly by one company: Coillte, which owns 438,000ha of certified plantations. In 2002, Coillte Teoranta obtained Forest Stewardship Council certification from the Soil Association/Woodmark (they were formerly certified by SGS). However, certification of these plantations has been strongly criticised in Ireland for a number of reasons, among which because they:

For over a year now, Spanish organizations have been demanding the annulment of the certification of “sustainable forestry management” granted by FSC to a branch of the ENCE (Norfor) pulp/plantation company, but so far with no results. In June 2005, the “Asociación pola defensa da Ria”(Association for the defence of the Ria), a member of the Galician Ecologist Federation (FEG) submitted an urgent request for the annulment of such certification (http://www.wrm.org.uy/actores/FSC/cancelacionNORFOR.pdf) to FSC’s delegation in Spain, accompanied by a critical report on Norfor’s certification.

Here below are the conclusions submitted in a travel report (available in Spanish, at:http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Venezuela/Gira2006.pdf) on the investigation carried out recently by 4 representatives of the Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations in the area where the so called "Uverito plantations" are located. These are some 600,000 hectares of pine plantations in the States of Monagas and Anzoategui. In 2003, SmartWood certified 12 plots covering a total of 139,650 hectares, owned by Terranova de Venezuela (TDV) and which form part of those plantations.

In South Africa, a thorough research carried out by John Blessing Karumbidza --“A Study of the Social and Economic Impacts of Industrial Tree Plantations in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa”, available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/SouthAfrica/book.pdf -- has identified a host of damaging economic, social and environmental impacts of monoculture tree plantations affecting local communities, water resources and ecosystems.

About 9% of Swaziland is now under timber plantations (eucalyptus, pine and acacia). In December 2004 Wally Menne, a member of the South African Timberwatch Coalition made public his research: “Timber Plantations in Swaziland: An investigation into the environmental and social impacts of large-scale timber plantations in Swaziland” (available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Swaziland/Plantations.pdf ).

In 1987 legislation was adopted that implied the promotion – by means of tax exemptions and subsidies – of large-scale monoculture alien tree plantations (mainly eucalyptus and pine) for export. It is thus that the country up till then based on agriculture and stock raising, started to convert part of its fertile grasslands into “green deserts” which presently cover over 700,000 hectares.

As one of its Founder members, I am at least partly responsible for having allowed a fatal flaw to be built into the FSC system when it was established: quite simply put, the so-called ‘independent’ certification bodies that are accredited to the FSC are not, in fact, independent at all.

On June 1st, 2006, the Seminar on “The Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Advance of Agribusiness: issues and challenges” took place in the town of Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil. The Seminar gathered the Tupinikim and Guarani communities and also other communities affected by large-scale monoculture tree plantations, in addition to various sectors of civil society in the State of Espirito Santo, for a thorough reflection on the subject.

In March 2006, the WRM released the publication “Greenwash: Critical analysis of FSC certification of industrial tree monocultures in Uruguay” (see at http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Uruguay/book.html). The report addressed the four main certified plantation companies and included a very detailed critique of the certifiers’ reports, complemented with interviews with workers and people from local communities in the vicinity of the plantation areas.

Ecuador is a country with one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. In this process various actors are involved, not only the major timber companies that typically carry out both lawful and unlawful timber extraction activities, but also companies undertaking deforestation to install vast monoculture tree plantations, ranging from African palms to pine and eucalyptus.

By the Alert Against The Green Desert Movement/Brazil The harshness of capital against life but Aracruz Celulose lost the FSC-certificate!