A Report by The CornerHouse. Chris Lang, Nick Hildyard, Kate Geary, Matthew Grainger. Published by The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.
European dam builders, suppliers and consultants continue to promote and export their technologies to the South. The industry projects itself as experts in benign development and providers of economic prosperity, implying that its work has been tested and perfected at home.
Other information
The World Bank is apparently willing to play a major role in the promotion of tree plantations. This can mean good or bad news, depending on the type of plantations it is willing to promote. The country studies provide useful -though incomplete- information on the issue, which we believe the Bank should use as a starting point for its own research on the positive and negative impacts of different types of plantations. It appears clearly that large-scale monoculture tree plantations should not be promoted, given their negative environmental impacts and their few positive social effects.
The social and environmental impacts of tree monocultures in the Andean Páramos of Ecuador in a project carried out by the Dutch consortium FACE are analyzed in a thesis work for a PhD in Environmental Sciences of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain. The author -Verónica Vidal- worked during several months in that grasslands region of Ecuador, inhabited by indigenous peasants, and which is capital for the maintenance of the hydrological cycle and as well as hosting high levels of biodiversity.
The WRM has just published a new Plantations Campaign briefing titled "The carbon shop: planting new problems" by Larry Lohmann. This is the third briefing in our series in relation to tree monocultures, and, as the previous ones, it aims at facilitating understanding of the plantations issue by a wider public and can be used to influence journalists and international fora, to organize public discussions, and to raise awareness within communities facing the hegemonic forestry model.
Impacts of tree monocultures are usually analysed under two broad headings: environmental and social. The former involves impacts on water, soil, biodiversity and landscape, while the latter includes social and economic impacts. Though useful as an analytical tool, such division can however hide the fact that all impacts are -in the short or in the long run- social, since it is local people who live nearby plantations or who are displaced by them who suffer the consequences.
Because of Aracruz Celulose's move to apply for FSC certification for its eucalyptus plantations in the state of Bahia -avoiding at the same time the polemic issue of the dispossesion of Guarani and Tupinikim's lands as a consequence of the company's plantations in the neighbouring state of Espirito Santo- a large number of concerned organizations and individuals held a seminar last October in Vitoria, Espirito Santo, to analyse this menacing scenario.
Last November we received a message from the Tasmania based NGO Native Forest Network-Southern Hemisphere (NFN), informing that the Australian giant North Ltd. was planning to invest in pulpwood plantations in Uruguay.
Multinational corporations, with support from some academic institutions and governments, are working hard to create and grow genetically engineered trees. Such development is causing great concern among informed sectors of the public, who reasonably fear that these artificially created organisms pose a threat to the environment, and could cause irreparable imbalances in the world's forest ecosystems. Critical reports, protests and even direct actions have been undertaken to curb this process (see WRM Bulletins 23 and 26).
Some of the conclusions and recommendations of the Latin American Workshop on the Impacts of an Eventual Millenium Road of the WTO, held on 6 and 7 November in Quito, Ecuador, are strongly related to the problems posed by the dominant tree plantation model.
The Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus, convened and sponsored by the Indigenous Environmental Network USA/CANADA, Seventh Generation Fund USA, International Indian Treaty Council, Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, the Abya Yala Fund, and TEBTEBBA (Indigenous Peoples’ Network for Policy Research and Education), issued a statement on 1 December 1999 in Seattle, on the occasion of the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization.
The news that giant bleached eucalyptus pulp producer Aracruz Celulose had applied for FSC certification had an enormous impact in the two Brazilian states -Bahia and Espirito Santo- where it operates. As a result, a large number of organizations and individuals concerned with the spread of extensive monoculture plantations in the region -which include those of Aracruz, Bahia Sul and Veracel- got together to prevent the company from receiving FSC approval.
One of the arguments used by large-scale tree plantation promoters (with the pulp and paper industry at the forefront) is that they contribute to the well being of the rural areas where they are set up, by increasing employment opportunities. This is a crucial issue: unemployment is one of the most negative consequences of the ongoing globalization process, so any activity that promises to increase jobs can be perceived as being attractive by local people.