Problems arising from the social and environmental impacts caused by industrial timber and pulpwood plantations have been well documented over the past 20 years. Now there is ample evidence that the temporary financial benefits generated by monoculture plantation projects which mostly accrue to affluent consumers of their artificially cheap products, the corporate plantation owners and their banks, are heavily outweighed by the costs of their negative environmental and social effects, which are long-term or permanent.
Bulletin articles
Sappi Limited, South African producer of pulp and paper, plans the construction of a biomass combustion plant at Ngodwana Mill, Mpumalanga. It has a proposed capacity of about 50 megawatt, which will supply to the public grid. Misleadingly, this investment is called ‘Green Energy Power Project' (GEPP) – in reality, the power is as green as the inside of the Sappi boiler.
Liberia, a small West African country with a population of approximately 3.5 million people, has a predominantly agrarian economy, with high dependency on land and land based resources. The majority of the population lives in rural areas and is engaged in subsistence agriculture and forest-based trade for income generation. Healthcare facilities are poor and in some places non-existent, and the majority of children lack access to safe drinking water. They also lack decent education. The country ranked 182 out of 187 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index in 2011.
With an increasing global demand for natural rubber in the past few years, large-scale rubber plantations in Laos are expanding, causing conflicts with local communities in a country where, in early 1990s, it was widely accepted as well as referred by scholars and people who study about Laos that about 80% of the Laos people relied directly on the forest – including the river - for their physical, cultural and spiritual well-being.
Timber Plantation concessions are a model of forest exploitation conducted by corporations in Indonesia. More than 9 million hectares of timber plantation concessions have already been awarded by the Ministry of Forestry, though not all of these concessions are used for timber plantations. Up to 2011, less than half of the total area of timber plantation licenses was being managed by the license holder corporation.
The area planted with oil palm trees in Brazil used to be relatively small as compared to other countries producing this plant in Latin America. However, big transnational companies in Brazil like Vale and Petrobrás have revealed the rapid expansion of these plantations meant for the production of biofuels, in the Amazon region, mainly in the State of Pará.
The results of a research study carried out in different region, in 2010, by the Association of Forest Engineers for Native Forests were published last July. This Independent Forestry Monitoring led to a report on the environmental and social impacts caused by large scale tree plantations established by the company Anchile Ltda., and formal complaints were filed at the National Forestry Corporation (“Corporación Nacional Forestal” – CONAF), a body that is part of the Ministry of Agriculture.
The Quebrada de los Cuervos canyon, located in the mountains of the Treinta y Tres District, was the first area to be registered as one of Uruguay's National Protected Areas (2008) for its rich landscape, its biodiversity and because it is representative of native ecosystems. Made up of grasslands, canyon bottom forests, gallery forests and creeks, this area is a biological corridor for a variety of species of flora and fauna.
Today, speculative financial markets have gained increasing power over the economy and life, in a response to the capitalist crisis that began in the 1970s.
It was on August 16 last year that we lost Ricardo Carrere, the international coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) for 15 years.
Finan-what?
The term “financialization” may sound overly complex and academic, or perhaps even made up. It could lead some people to ask, finan-what? However, it is increasingly being used in civil society debates and reflections, particularly with regard to the growing financial speculation tied to the goods and components of nature, including forests, which are of fundamental importance not only for the lives of local communities, but for the entire planet.
During the Rio+20 summit, incidents related to the event itself, such as the expulsion of a Mozambican activist, and the daily reality faced by the local population, who suffer at the hands of the big corporations sponsoring the official conference, demonstrated that corporate power has no limits.