A typical propaganda disseminated by business interests and governments in many tropical countries is to say that plantations will relieve pressure on native forests. They claim that with enough plantations, native forests would eventually be left alone, as the plantations would provide sufficient wood to avoid the need of extracting timber from native forests.
Bulletin articles
The need for paper is not growing. We should not confuse consumption levels with need. In rich countries, we already use far more paper than we need, and the vast bulk of it is wasted. The real need is to reduce demand for paper, to use this precious resource more efficiently and to encourage recycling systems that ensure paper fibres are reused over and over again. Of course, there are countries and communities where paper consumption is currently well below what is required for education and democratic engagement, and they have a right to use more.
The experience of Ecuador in areas where large-scale pine plantations have expanded shows that, far from providing women with opportunities, women have been adversely affected by them in various ways.
In the area of tree plantations, the FSC has become the main body responsible for granting a certificate to plantations assessed as “environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable.”
The insurmountable problem of this “green seal” granted by the FSC is that it certifies what intrinsically can never be either socially beneficial or environmentally sustainable: large scale monoculture tree plantations.
The expansion of oil palm plantations usually takes place at the expense of transforming natural ecosystems, particularly tropical rainforests. This has disastrous consequences, firstly because these forests are the home of very traditional peoples who have learnt over thousands of years to understand the forest and to use it, respecting its natural dynamics.
For those readers of the WRM bulletin who do not know this by now, the Southern US is the largest paper producing region in the world. Over the last 50 years we have been the testing ground for every imaginable destructive forestry practice that once perfected here, is exported around the globe. For example, starting in the 1950’s and continuing to today, we have converted nearly 17 million hectares of forests and arable land to monoculture timber plantations making us number one in the world in that regard.
At a very fundamental level, dealing with climate change involves making a dramatic and immediate reduction in the amount of fossil fuels that we extract and burn. The idea of using tree plantations to neutralise these emissions is counterproductive as it effectively provides a false excuse to keep on combusting more coal, oil and gas. As long as there is room for more plantations (regardless of their impact on communities and ecosystems) then business interest want us to believe that we can keep on building more oil refineries and coal mines.
From a climate perspective, tree plantations not only are not a solution. They also add yet more problems. It is impossible to predict how much carbon any plantation could remove from the atmosphere, and for how long. Unlike subterranean oil or coal, carbon stored in trees is "fragile": it can quickly reenter the atmosphere at any time through wildfires, storms, insect infestation, disease and decay.
There is a particular arrogance associated with this rationale. It implies that scientists and corporations know more about improving trees than has been achieved by 3 billion years of evolution, and ignores the fact that some tree species being engineered have genomes many times longer than the human genome. But really what they are saying is "genetic modification of trees is useful and necessary for making more money."
This lie has its roots in the failure of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to differentiate between forests and plantations. "Forest" according to UNFCCC is an area larger than 500 square metres, at least 10 per cent of which covered in trees that can grow to more than two metres high. To UNFCCC, then, there is no difference between a monoculture eucalyptus plantation, a severely degraded forest and an intact old-growth native forest.
A coalition of start up companies, consultants and some soil scientists is promoting a new ‘solution’ for climate change: Large quantities of wood and other biomass are to be turned into fine-grained charcoal (euphemistically called biochar) and applied to agricultural soils. It's very worrying that advocates, who are organised in the International Biochar Initiative, claim that the carbon in the charcoal would remain in the soil for thousands of years and ‘offset’ fossil fuel burning, and that charcoal will make soils more fertile.
While for the majority of humanity climate change spells disaster, a few corporate-minded people perceive it as a good business opportunity. The way they see it, climate change is about carbon emissions and carbon can be traded as a commodity in the global market. This market – so they say – can be worth billions or even trillions of dollars and they expect it to bring them huge profits.