The FAO holds major responsibility regarding monoculture tree plantations, having been the first international organization to actively promote -since the 1950s- the present plantation model. In spite of all the already known negative social and environmental impacts resulting from the Green Revolution in general and from its application in the forestry area in particular, the FAO continues being the main international body promoting such model and providing it with the necessary "expert" support.
Bulletin articles
The World Bank is one of the major actors directly and indirectly promoting industrial tree monocrops in many countries, especially in the tropical region. The Bank directly promotes plantations through:
Forestry consultancy firms are crucial actors behind the scenes in the implementation of pulpwood plantations. They are in charge of promoting, investigating, planning, designing and setting up pulp and paper mills and plantation activities. Additionally, they play the important role of establishing links between executives, technology and machine providers, and local officials and authorities to make sure the establishment and the continuity of such projects.
There is a variety of bilateral aid agencies. The work of some of them may actually contribute to improve the quality of life of the population of Southern countries and there are people working in those organization who devote their efforts to that goal. However, it is equally important to stress that there is also an important number of such agencies -specifically in the forestry-related sector- whose work results in negative impacts to local peoples and their environments.
The increasing paper and wood demand at the global level, together with the need to preserve the remaining forests, are used to justify the expansion of tree plantations for the production of paper and wood. At the same time, the threat of global warming is used to promote plantations as carbon sinks. But the issue of overconsumption of paper, wood and fossil fuels -which are at the basis of the current crisis- are not included in the equation.
Southern governments are ultimately responsible for the adoption of the plantation model and for its implementation at the national and local levels. Even when the idea for the promotion of plantations may originate in external actors (World Bank, consulting firms, aid agencies, etc.), it is the Southern governments which need to pave the way to make their implementation possible. The first step usually consists in carrying out viability studies -with funds provided by international funding or bilateral aid agencies- to justify such development.
Modern forestry science -silviculture- arose in the North as a result of the Industrial Revolution: forest management was separated from agriculture and cattle breeding and focused exclusively on the production of timber, considering other vital forest goods as "minor products". Plantations constitute the ultimate step in that direction, achieving the total simplification of nature with the aim of producing only one product for industrial purposes.
Ongoing certification programmes are the result of successful consumer awareness campaigns against the unsustainable exploitation of forests. The public reacted by demanding the possibility of being able to know which products they could buy which had been extracted under socially and environmentally sustainable forest management. Independent certification was therefore required. At the public level, one of the certification schemes which has wider credibility is the FSC, given the direct participation of an important number of NGOs in this process.
In August 1997 we received bad news from Hawaii: Oji Paper/Marubeni -Japan's largest paper supplier- was about to receive a lease for 4,150 hectares of public land at Hamakua County to set up eucalyptus pulpwood plantations. Oji/Marubeni was also seeking some10,000 hectares of private land leases on the Big Island and elsewhere to produce eucalyptus for chips that would be later exported to Japan for paper production.
Even if natural forests in South Africa do not occupy more than 300,000 hectares, this country is an important exporter of wood products. They come from pine and eucalyptus plantations that quickly expanded during the last decades. Large corporations -as SAPPI and MONDI- and the South African State itself -through SAFCOL- have been responsible for the expansion of tree monocultures in grasslands. Nowadays plantations have reached 1.5 million hectares and the powerful pulp industry intends to increase the area by 600,000 hectares more.
Smurfit Carton in Venezuela, a subsidiary of giant Jefferson Smurfit, is a good (bad) example of how depredatory the activity of a company can be, and of how local people can successfully resist it.
Nowadays pulp plantations in Chile cover more than 2.1 million hectares, 75% of a single species - radiata pine- and the rest mainly composed of eucalyptus.