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.
Bulletin articles
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.
Indonesia is undergoing an accelerated process of plantation of oil palm. In a process promoted by the government -that wants the country to become the first palm oil producer in the world- and led by a reduced group of powerful companies, the present area of 3.2 million hectares is expected to increase at a rate of 330,000 hectares a year.
The Ogiek people are a hunter-gatherer people, famed as harvesters of honey, which they consume themselves and exchange with their neighbours, and who have lived from time immemorial in the forests of the Mau escarpment in Kenya.
Malawi, a country with a total land area of 118.484 sq.kms, is located in Southeast Africa. Its lowlands, which receive heavy rainfall, are covered by grasslands, temperate forests and rainforests, but the country has suffered deforestation at a annual rate of 1.3% (1981/90).
The preservationist approach to forest protection tends to consider people as a threat to nature protection and frequently results in the violation of the human rights of rural communities and indigenous peoples living in the forests. This view not only supports the unrealistic idea of a nature void of people, but also ignores the benefits that the traditional management of natural resources brings to nature conservation itself. Over the last few years, conflicts related to this issue have arisen in several places and the following case is yet another sad result of such approach.
What follows is the editorial comment ("Zambia's forests") of the 30 June edition of The Post (Zambia) which sheds light on the real problems which Zambian forests are confronting:
"The deteriorating state of affairs in our forestry sector should be a matter of serious concern to all Zambians.
The concerns raised by environment and natural resources minister William Harrington about Zambia's ecological and environmental degradation resulting from cutting down of trees for firewood and charcoal deserve the government's urgent attention.