Ever since Western forestry science defined forests as predominantly wood-producing entities, efforts have concentrated on increasing productivity of one single product: wood. Diverse forests were simplified, by weeding out all the species that industry was not interested in, while promoting the absolute predominance of "valuable" trees in the forest.
Bulletin articles
Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I really thought that the World Bank would have a position on GM trees. The first field trial of GM trees was in 1988. Surely, I thought, 16 years is long enough for the Bank’s policy experts to come up with something. When the Bank’s shiny new forest policy came out two years ago, it did so after a “stakeholder consultative process” which was “supported by extensive analytical, technical and economic studies, some commissioned by the World Bank and others done by independent institutions and NGOs on a wide range of subjects,” according to the Bank.
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.
Over November 17-19, 2004 a major conference on genetically engineered trees technology took place at North Carolina’s Duke University in the US. Representatives were present from major biotechnology companies including Arborgen, Cellfor and others, as well as some of the leading institutions conducting research, such as the Institute of Forest Biotechnology, the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Initiative, the US Forest Service and the Canadian Forest Service, as well as many others simply interested in learning more about the technology of GE trees.
Potlatch Corporation’s 7000 hectares of poplar plantations in Boardman, Oregon are just about as high tech as a plantation can be. The trees are planted in the sandy desert soil and will only grow because of tens of thousands of kilometres of thin black hosepipe. Water, fertilizer and pesticides are pumped to the trees through the irrigation pipes. The water for the irrigation comes from the John Day Dam, constructed by the US Army Corps Engineers in 1971. The dam is one of the 19 dams that block the Columbia River and which have devastated salmon fisheries in the river.
Forestry scientists working on GM trees often point to the number of field trials of GM trees worldwide as evidence that the technology is increasingly accepted. In fact the reverse is true. As the number of experiments increases so does the strength of the resistance against GM trees.
GM trees are not a result of evolution. They are the result of decisions taken at institutional and corporate levels for their development and deployment. Companies, research institutions and universities work together closely on this. Companies fund university research departments, and influence what type of research is carried out.
In spite of the risks posed by genetic modification of trees, there is no international legislation specifically relating to GM trees. Instead, legislation has been produced with GM food crops and seeds in mind, and does not necessarily cover the problems presented by long-lived GM plants such as trees.
International law covering GMOs is at present focussed on issues relating to trade. There are two institutions which provide rulings covering international trade in GMOs: the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
On October 22, 2004 Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement created to begin addressing the problem of global warming. Russia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol now gives the agreement a high enough level of participation by the countries most responsible for the world’s carbon emissions for the agreement to go into effect, even without the United States’ 25% of worldwide annual global carbon emissions.
Plant pollination takes place in different ways. One way is done by bees, butterflies, humming birds and bats. Another type of pollination is caused by wind blowing through plants that have their reproductive cells in open flowers. This happens with coniferous trees (for example, pines). For fecundation to be effective, these trees have to produce an enormous amount of pollen that the wind blows away and distributes, passing it from plant to plant and covering great distances.
In a world characterized by information, there are issues that have been made so invisible that the great majority of people do not know that they exist. This is the case of the Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation. Most are not even aware that some of these peoples have not yet been contacted by the predominating society and in other cases, have resisted integrating it in spite – or as a result of – having been contacted.
The Mbya Guarani are an ancient forest people with their roots in the Amazon. In Misiones, a province in the northeast of Argentina, they have 74 communities and a total population of approximately 3,000 people. Their culture is as rich as the biodiversity of the Paranaense forest that they have always used and protected.