Indonesia’s forests occupy about 120 million hectares. Although at least 2-3 million families of indigenous peoples live in or around the forests and many of the 220 million inhabitants of the country depend directly or indirectly on forests for their livelihood, the government’s approach has been to consider forests as "empty" land. Logging and plantation companies are responsible for the high deforestation rates (1 million hectares a year according to the World Bank, but 2,4 million according to Indonesian NGOs).
Bulletin articles
Up to the decade of the ‘50s the Brazilian government provided subsidies for the import of pulp. With the military government, beginning in 1964, a forestry policy was set up trying to promote tree plantations and large export-oriented pulp companies by means of subsidies and loans. Eucalyptus for pulp is grown in Brazil with rotation periods of only 7 or even 5 to 6 years.
Timber plantations have been a part of the South African landscape for more than a century. Colonial settlement brought a wide range of exotic tree species. Not all were successful, but it soon became clear that Australian acacias and eucalyptus were well suited to conditions in the Eastern part of South Africa.
The World Bank has been and still is an active and influential promoter of industrial scale tree monocrops using different mechanisms. The first one is providing technical advice for forestry planning. The Bank has carried out dozens of forest sector plans for various countries, which include models on how to zone land and how should land be allocated for different uses, including particularly for plantations.
In 1995, the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development established an Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) to address a wide range of forest-related issues. The IPF produced a final report in early 1997 containing a set of 135 proposals for action, that governments have agreed to implement. This package of proposals was formally endorsed at the June 1997 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the implementation of Agenda 21.
Jaakko Poyry is one of the actors involved in creating the conditions for establishing plantations. This consulting company was born in Finland 40 years ago. It grew up together with the the boom of Scandinavian forestry after the war, when Finland, Sweden and Norway became one of the superpowers of industrial forestry. Jaakko Poyry was there, helping them to do it. It's role was to provide special expertise about planning pulp mills, paper mills, plantations, logging, how to plan industrial operations. At first its clients were Sweden, Finland, Norway and the rest of Europe.
Individuals and organizations interested in obtaining information on the issue of large-scale tree plantations can access it in the WRM web page: http://www.wrm.org.uy. Additionally, for those who wish more in-depth information and analysis, the WRM has produced a book (Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Global Paper Economy), which has been published by Zed Books. Orders can be requested by sending a message to Helen Salmon .
A call for action to defend forests and people against large-scale tree monocrops-
In June 1998, citizens of 14 countries around the world gathered in Montevideo, Uruguay out of urgent concern at the recent and accelerating invasion of millions of hectares of land and forests by pulpwood, oil palm, rubber and other industrial tree plantations.
On May 12th we addressed the President of ENARGAS -the Argentinian national authority on gas energy- to express our concern regarding a pipeline projected by the company Norgas, that is expected to produce a negative environmental impact on the “yungas” ecosystem in the northern region of San Andres in the province of Salta. The yungas are a mountain ecosystem, holding high levels of endemism and biodiversity, and inhabited by the Kolla indigenous peoples. They strongly oppose the project.
The fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity took place in Bratislava from 4-15 May. Among its many decisions, we wish to highlight one related to forest biological diversity which "Notes the potential impact of afforestation, reforestation, forest degradation and deforestation on forest biological diversity and on other ecosystems, and, accordingly, requests the Executive Secretary to liaise and cooperate with the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change .
The Rufiji Delta in South Eastern Tanzania is one of the largest blocks of mangrove forests in East and Southern Africa. It covers an area of about 53,255 hectares of unspoiled mangrove forest, that support a large number of people, and is rich in aquatic as well as terrestrial biodiversity. The delta is linked to the interior of the river system by an extensive flood plain covering about 130 km long and up to 20 km wide.
The Sophie Foundation, an organization based in Norway, has nominated the Nigerian NGO Environmental Rights Action, for the Sophie Prize 1998. The main purpose of the Sophie Foundation, is to award an annual international environment and development prize of US $ 100,000. This is an initiative of the Norwegian author and philosopher Mr. Jostein Gaarder -worldwide known by his book "Sophie's world", one of the world's best-selling novels- who donated a large sum of his private fortune, earned by selling his books, to this goal.