Tasmania is one of the constituent states of the Commonwealth of Australia. The island has an area of 67,897 km2 and a population of about 471,124. Tasmania is covered by some of Australia's most important tracts of temperate pristine forests. The island retains over 40% forest cover, including a large World Heritage Area and a number of other protected areas of great importance. Tasmania has some of the finest hardwood forests in the world. They contain a rich array of endemic and relict wildlife species from the time when the island was part of the ancient landmass know as Gondwanaland.

However, these forests are severely threatened. The timber industry is increasing its logging rate. Massive native forest clearance and replacement by tree plantations are well under way, with State Government targets of 10,000 hectares per annum. The remaining forests face threats from fire, disease, new roads, tourism impacts and introduced species.

A clear example is the Huntsman Valley, Great Western Tiers/Kooparoona Niara. Boral, North and Forestry Tasmania have intensively managed this area for eucalyptus pulp logs production for over twenty years. Over - clearing, especially on steep slopes (and insistence on planting up and down instead of along the contours) has produced over thirty major landslides. The largest landslide is still flushing sediment into the River Tamar, blocking the entire river at times. The Tamar flows through Launceston and is North Tasmania's largest river system. The Launceston City Council has to date spent over $70,000 on dredging the river as a result of the landslides caused by Huntsman Valley loggers. Legal advice indicates that both private landowners and statutory bodies could be prosecuted under state planning acts for damages as a result of these unsustainable operations.

The intensification of forestry operations in the north east of Tasmania has also caused increased clearcutting by private companies and replacement of forests by tree plantations of radiata pine. On a Government policy level, there is much to be concerned about in this respect. A number of schemes have been established to increase native clearance under the guise of plantation establishment, particularly the so-called "Plantation Vision 2020" program which seeks to double the number of hectares of plantations by 2020 with significant Federal Government support. The plans include the establishment of 650,000 hectares of plantations in Tasmania over the next twenty years. These plans form part of a proposed 2 million hectares of additional tree plantations in Australia. By the end of 2000, about US$ 5 billion will have been invested in the establishment of tree plantations in Australia. Foreign multinationals, mainly from the US, will be the major investors. Many of them are handed over public land with terms up to 70 years. The US multinational Weyerhaeuser, for example, has just bought into the State of Victoria 's recently privatized plantation estate and is looking at possibilities to invest in the establishment of tree plantations in Tasmania.

Meanwhile, the Australian mining giant North Ltd. has entered into a joint venture with Mitsubishi to alienate an additional 23,000 hectares over a 10-year period. North Ltd. already owns 150,000 hectares of land and is logging native forests to establish tree plantations on those areas. It plants Eucalyptus globulus, which is called Tasmanian Blue Gum. The tree is native to Tasmania, but these monoculture tree farms are genetically engineered and planted beyond the natural range of the tree.

The timber produced, woodchips, is destined for the Japanese market. Australia is exporting 7,000,000 tons of woodchips annually mainly through companies like Mitsubishi, Daishowa, and New Oji. This is about 40% of Japan's hardwood chips imports, all coming from a continent which is only 5% forested.

The rapid development of plantations also results from the Regional Forest Agreement process, which aimed to resolve serious forestry conflicts in Australia. This process has had the opposite effect, however, and deforestation has increased. The Tasmanian logging industry now has about 1,000 hectares more public native forest and 2-3% more public wood resource available to it than before the Agreement was signed. The loggers lost access to a mere 39,000 hectares of generally poor timber quality native forest while gaining access to 40,000 hectares of generally high quality timber.

Rapid tree plantation development has had a serious adverse impact on local communities. Nowadays, multinationals are buying good farmland from farmers who are in an economically vulnerable position. Some farmers, who have succeeded in surviving economically, have become isolated, surrounded by tree farms polluting their water and crops. The rapid development of labor-extensive tree plantations is also devastating their village life, with shops and services disappearing.

The loss of biodiversity caused by intensified logging and forest replacement by tree plantations is not ecologically sustainable, and even a large number of government officials in Australia are concerned by the mandatory target of 3 million hectares of tree plantations by 2020. There is evidence that threatened species on private land are being liquidated by this program, yet there are currently no monitoring/enforcement provisions to ensure this does not happen.

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions are growing rapidly. Energy-related emissions already exceed the target Australia was allowed in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (to restrict its emissions to 108% of their 1990 level by 2008-2012). If left unchecked, they will exceed 140% of 1990 levels in 2010. Current policies are wholly inadequate and without major policy development in the next two years, Australia has no chance of meeting its international commitment.

Obviously, the possibility of carbon sequestration credits under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is considered to be a very welcome way out by the Australian Government. This scheme could significantly affect the future of the Australian forests. Rules will need to be set to regulate how forests should be managed if they are to receive credits, and those rules may either threaten or benefit forests.

In Australia's first foray into the international carbon credit market, State Forests of New South Wales has signed a contract with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, selling the greenhouse gas credits from the planting of 40,000 hectares of forests. The first plantings of softwoods and hardwoods will start soon on the north and south coasts of NSW. The Tokyo Electric Power Company will then use the forests as a tradeoff when it is required to cut its net emissions of greenhouse gases.

Prof. Ian Noble of the Australian National University's Ecosystem Department notes that if greenhouse ‘sinks’ like these were really to reduce greenhouse emissions then proper accounting would be essential. "What happens when the forest is harvested, for example? The Kyoto Protocol is not explicit on this question and the upcoming COP6 meeting in The Hague will have to decide on whether this is factored into accounting". It is also unclear what the standing of the agreement with Japan would be if Australia failed to meet the project targets. "Would it be a case of buyer beware or seller beware? What we are essentially doing with carbon sinks is buying time. If we don't use this time to make a transition to more sustainable forms of energy then we're being naive," according to Noble.

On top of that, there is a real limit to the extent that planting trees could reduce greenhouse emissions, even in theory. "We would have to plant forests 1 million times the size of the Melbourne Cricket Ground to meet our international obligations. It's just not practical," says Van Rood of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

However, the Federal Government is actively trying to use the Kyoto Protocol as another means of supporting the timber industry by encouraging ‘carbon sequestration’ through plantation establishment. It is very likely that these tree plantations will be established in exchange for credits even when they are established at the expense of native forests.

The fact that environmentally perverse outcomes are likely under Federal Government policies is evident in the "Greenhouse Challenge" program. Under this scheme, increased destruction of the ecological integrity of remnant native forests in exchange for carbon sequestration "credits" is actively encouraged. The "Greenhouse Challenge Vegetation Sinks Workbook", for example, promotes techniques such as regrowth spacing utilizing stem injection enrichment planting and fertilizing and adoption of intense selection silviculture in native forests which could seriously threaten the ecological integrity of these forests.

The principal areas of concern about this program are:

• Monoculture tree farms are being promoted as an effective response to global warming;
• Native forests - a significant carbon store in themselves - will be lost for the establishment of tree farms, thus creating additional carbon pollution through clearing and burning;
• Current plantation establishment is rampant, unplanned, driven by market forces and not environmentally sustainable; and,
• Carbon ‘sequestration’ schemes have ignored the ecological impacts of intensive management on native forests.

Many investors may not be aware of the nature of current management practices in tree plantations. Government and forestry companies are likely to show external parties only the best aspects of tree plantations, while covering up the negative environmental consequences.

The Australian Government has been obviously influenced by the forest industry's view that carbon can be "sequestered" in tree plantations that will be logged for great corporate profit at a later stage. Both actors ignore the fact that there is a much greater value in conserving, in particular, remaining old growth native forests because the amount of carbon temporarily stored in those forests is higher than the amount temporarily sequestered and stored in plantations. Meanwhile, these very actors are responsible for large-scale deforestation in an ecologically and socially unsustainable manner.

There is still a raging international debate over the real value of carbon ‘sinks’ for sequestration. Many scientists believe that the best way to store carbon in biomass is to maintain existing forest cover across the landscape. Clearing such forests to make way for tree plantations is certainly NOT an efficient way to store carbon.

Cadman, T., 2000: Preliminary Submission on the Development of an Australian Forestry Standard.

A. Graham and Rod Knight, 1998: Regional Forest Agreements, Lessons from Tasmania. In: Wilderness News Issue No. 150, p. 6-8.

Maesen, L.vd. 1999: A Study in Forest Activities; Industrial Logging Companies and NGOs 2nd Draft.

Reynolds, A., 2000: "Buying time as gases climb." CANA - ABC Report: e-mail.

In less than half a century, the Eastern Region of Paraguay has lost of most of its forests. It has faced a reduction in its forest cover from approximately 8,000,000 hectares to less than 1,000,000 hectares. These forests originally consisted of dense humid, sub-tropical and semideciduous forests with trees up to 35 meters high. In the same period, 25% of the dryer forests of the Chaco (the Western Region of Paraguay), which originally covered some 17,000,000 hectares, was destroyed.

These forests gave way to, amongst other things, extensive cattle ranging, monoculture export crops, subsistence farming, timber extraction, and urbanization. The advent of large-scale, monoculture, commercial tree plantations after World War II, led to a new form of agricultural land use, contributing to the further expansion of deforestation.

Already in the sixties, official Government agencies of Paraguay and bilateral development cooperation agencies had been promoting monoculture forestry and, in 1973, the first law which directly supported this type of tree plantations was adopted. This law initiated a sequence of subsidies and official incentives for the substitution of tree plantations for forests.

Despite these incentives, only about 10,000 hectares of monoculture tree plantations were planted under this scheme in the entire country. However, since the adoption of a law which promotes and subsidizes "reforestation and afforestation" (Law 536) in 1995, this area has more than doubled. The effectiveness of this law, which achieved in half a decade what other laws and incentives achieved in three decades, was the result of its offer of a direct subsidy of 75% of the establishment costs and 75% of the maintenance costs for the first three years of tree plantations.

An aura of crooked management and corruption surrounded the history of this law, applied during one of the periods of the greatest institutional corruption and administrative bad governance Paraguay has ever faced. For that reason, the majority of planters that embarked under the scheme of the 536/95 law have not yet seen a single penny of the subsidies promised by the Paraguayan government.

Some planters, however, did succeed in collecting their State subsidies. One of them was the Forestry Company Yguazu. This company is a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell --- the second largest Oil Company in the world and one of the richest companies on the planet. In 1999 it proudly announced to the press that it had succeeded in collecting part of the subsidies donated by the State of Paraguay -- one of the poorest governments in the world ---for its tree plantations. The operations of Shell in Paraguay take place on two properties in the Eastern Region of the country. The objective of the company is to plant a total of 20,000 hectares of mainly eucalyptus trees. The operations are taking place on lands originally covered by subtropical forests. Although the company did not have direct responsibility for the deforestation of these lands, which had already been deforested and converted to commercial agriculture, its operations do prevent the natural regeneration of the original vegetation. Native vegetation cover is a priority of national interest and, most of all, of local interest, considering the role of native vegetation in hydrological cycles, nutrient cycles, and the protection and management of soil fertility. Native vegetation also serves as habitat for native fauna and provider of medicines, food, wild foods and other products.

On one of Shell’s estates, a parcel of 5300 hectares of forests is being conserved as a nature reserve. Regrettably, however, the parcel is entirely surrounded by a sea of eucalyptus monocultures, which implies that is condemned, sooner or later, to ecological isolation and subsequent degradation.

In its brochures, Shell proudly announces that it has created nothing more and nothing less than 150 jobs with its activities. However, with 20,000 hectares planted and USD 20,000,000 invested, it can easily be calculated that each job required an investment of USD 133,333 in terms of costs directly associated with the plantation, while the average job in other agricultural activities in Paraguay requires an investment of USD 7,000 only. Likewise, it can be calculated that for each job created more than 133 hectares of land were occupied.

So there is little to be proud about, especially in a country in which more than 90% of the rural population has access to less than 9% of the available land and which faces an unemployment rate of more than 20%. A discreet silence from Shell about figures that demonstrate such a concentration of land and investment in the hands one TNC would have been more appropriate.

On top of this bluffing about its interaction with society, the company also frequently defends the system of monoculture by talking about in its "environmental education" programs, thus creating a major misunderstanding amongst new generations about the real significance of concepts like forest, reforestation, afforestation and even nature.

Tree plantation development does not only contribute directly to the destruction of forests and other natural ecosystems. It also contributes to increasing the pressure upon available arable land, which forms a major underlying cause of forest loss in Paraguay and other Latin American countries.

One of the plantations of Shell is located in the Department of Caazapá, a department which has often faced violence in the continuing social struggle of landless farmers against land concentration in the hands of large landholders. The farmers in this region have been trying to reclaim the lands that they and their ancestors possessed, but which were occupied by successive local elites that were encouraged by actors in the central government. Earlier this year, the public in Paraguay was unpleasantly surprised by acts of brutal repression by military forces, police and para-military forces (gunmen hired by large landholders), who attacked and removed farmers who had been occupying a number of lands they had reclaimed a few decades ago.

Although Shell did not have any direct involvement in these atrocities, its activities are contributing to a concentration of land and thus indirectly it is causing the farmers in the region to occupy new lands. In the majority of cases, these lands are covered with forests. The concentration of lands in hands of companies and individuals like Shell thus contributes to further destruction of natural areas, and not to the conservation of such areas. However, these linkages are difficult to establish and the companies themselves hide themselves behind "green curtains", which prevent the larger public from seeing the links between their gray interests and the real causes of forest loss.

All and all, a country like Paraguay which is making all sorts of efforts to attract foreign investment in its impoverished economy can expect very little benefit from the kind of tree planting business Shell and other northern multinationals are offering.

Of course, it should also be noted that the state subsidy of 75% of direct costs, which normally equals 60% of the total costs, has to be deducted from Shell's original investment of 20 million, which implies that the real investment of Shell is only 11 million USD. Moreover, we can already expect that whatever amount the company will declare in the future in terms of profits, it will undoubtedly be exempted from taxes, at least from income tax, which is the only really significant tax that could apply.

The neighboring communities, small as they are, are also likely to receive the "benefit" of a free spray of pesticides from the airplanes of Shell. In this respect it is noteworthy that a number of affected persons have recently called upon the authorities of the Institute for Public Welfare to investigate the origin of the fish mortality which occurred in the Tebicuary river in the first months of 2000. The precise origin of a number of pesticides or herbicides like glysophate in the waters of most of the main watercourses in the East of Paraguay cannot be identified. This is due to the fact that the infrastructure for environmental monitoring and research of the Paraguayan authorities is precarious. But a number of accusations point at the plantations of Shell.

This phrase is one of Shell’s favorite expressions, but the company seems to refer to its very own future in this respect. Despite the fact that it is one of the largest oil companies in the world, despite the fact that it has been one of the main actors responsible for environmental degradation processes and especially the emission of greenhouse gasses, the company is now stating shamelessly that it wants to lead the market in the generation of energy through biomass. It is particularly interested in the provision of fuelwood for the commercial generation of electricity – only, of course, insofar as far as clients are able to pay for this electricity.

Here again, the main business for a country like Paraguay will consist in generously lending its territories for the sake of a handful of jobs and a few tax dollars. These brilliant business deals have turned Paraguay, and a great part of the Third World, into an exporter -- and in the majority of cases donor -- of its least renewable form of capital: its lands.

The proposal of Shell is even more extravagant if one takes into account that Paraguay has a surplus of electric energy produced through its share in the largest hydro-electric dam in the world, Itaipú, and another mega-dam, the Yacyretá dam. It makes little sense for the country to participate in a process that generates more greenhouse gases, like wood combustion for energy production. It makes even less sense for the country to compete with itself in the generation and sale of electricity by developing alternative generative capacity.

Of course, it should be emphasized that destructive mega-dams like Itaipú and Yacyretá, which have impacted negatively upon thousands of people and precious ecosystems, should not be seen as an example of sustainable development projects to be financed through activities implemented jointly. However, now that they exist, it makes much more sense for Paraguay to capitalize on the electricity which it generates through these hydroelectric dams.

Like the governments of many other Latin American countries, the government of Paraguay has swallowed its original opposition to joint implementation. Now that joint implementation through the Clean Development Mechanism is considered to be a fact, the country has taken the position that it should prepare itself as fully as possible to participate effectively in the expected carbon business. For that reason, it established a National Joint Implementation Office earlier this year. Considering the unique position of Paraguay as a country with one of the greatest potentials for hydro-electric energy in the world, most of it unused, this office should focus upon capitalizing as much as possible upon the already-installed hydroelectric capacity. Regrettably, the efforts of the government of Paraguay are entirely directed towards the promotion of forest protection and tree plantation development, both of which have doubtful effect as mitigators of climate change.

Much of Paraguay’s tremendous installed hydroelectric capacity cannot be used for Paraguayan industrial and commercial activities and transport, as the country lacks the proper infrastructure and technology. Broadening access to and use of electric energy for domestic use and for use in the industrial sector alone would allow the country to reduce up to 30% its internal consumption of wood. Large-scale monoculture tree plantations for biomass production will only achieve that the most active emitters of greenhouse gases, like Shell, will be allowed to continue with their polluting routine and irreversibly affect the global climate.

Sobrevivencia – Informe del Taller Nacional sobre las Causas Subyacentes de la Deforestación y la degradación de los Bosques – Sobrevivencia, Dirección de Parques Nacionales y Vida Silvestre, Programa de la Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente, 2.000.

ENAPRENA - PROAGRO, Diagnostico del Sector Forestal Paraguayo - - Estrategia Nacional para la Protección de los Recursos Naturales, 1995.

Forestal Yguazu, Trabajar con la Naturaleza Produce Beneficios – Forestal Yguazu S.A. Shell Renewables Inc., 1.999.

Idem ant.