The
Confederation of European Paper Industries'
Looking-Glass World
"When I use a word," said
Humpty Dumpty to Alice, "it means just what I choose it to
mean - neither more nor less." Welcome to the Looking-Glass
World. Not that of Lewis Carroll's "Through
the Looking-Glass", but that of the Confederation of European
Paper Industries. CEPI represents 800 pulp and paper companies
in 18 European countries, producing more than one-quarter of world
paper production. CEPI is, in its own words, "the voice and
public face of the pulp and paper industry in Europe, representing
its interests towards the European Institutions." Based in
Brussels, CEPI lobbies at EU level aiming to create industry friendly
legislation.
In CEPI's Looking-Glass World, plantations
are forests, monocultures improve biodiversity and logging is
good for the forests.
In May 2008, CEPI held a side event
during the Convention on Biodiversity meeting in Bonn. Titled
"Biodiversity protection, not just words on paper but real
best practices by the paper industry!" it promised to show
"how through best practices the European Pulp and Paper industry
supports forest biodiversity protection."
The presentations, of course, had little
to do with biodiversity protection. The first presentation came
from Hans Verkerk, of the European Forest Institute (EFI). Verkerk
looked at how much wood might be removed from Europe's 29.2 million
hectares of protected forests if there were no restrictions on
logging. His presentation was based on an EFI study that he had
co-authored. The study found that forest protection in Europe
resulted in a total of 68 million cubic metres of wood being "unavailable"
to the industry. "Forest protection has a clear impact on
the availability of wood," Verkerk noted. Conversely, if
the forest is less well protected, the industry would have a lot
more wood available. Wisely, given that his study was funded by
CEPI, Verkerk did not tell us what the impact of this might be
on the biodiversity of the forests.
Paula Guimaraes of Grupo Portucel Soporcel
followed with a presentation about "Intensive Forestry".
She explained that her company creates a mosaic at the landscape
level. She illustrated this with a slide of a scruffy landscape
of clearcuts and monocultures. She told us that eucalyptus do
no harm to soils and they do not damage water supplies. This may
be true in the Looking-Glass World, but has little to do with
the reality faced by farmers living near to the pulp industry's
eucalyptus plantations.
Papierholz Austria's Wolfgang Schopfhauser
told us about logging mountain forests in Austria to produce bioenergy,
mainly for the pulp and paper industry. "Biomass is widely
available in the form of standing wood," Schopfhauser said,
presumably referring to the trees that grow on Austria's mountains.
One way of reducing the pulp industry's
impact on the world's forests is to reduce the consumption (and
therefore the production) of paper. This is the aim of the Shrink
campaign (see the other articles in this issue of the WRM Bulletin).
CEPI responded to the launch of the Shrink campaign by claiming
that the pulp and paper industry is "a unique example of
how an industry can avoid producing waste and one that recycles
at all stages." Obviously, all that unnecessary packaging
and junk mail, all those telephone books that no one uses any
more, the mountains of office paper and advertising don't exist
in CEPI's Looking-Glass World.
"By targeting the paper industry
these NGOs are promoting other materials that do not have the
same environmental credentials," says Teresa Presas, CEPI's
Managing Director, in CEPI's response. But the Shrink campaign
is not promoting any other materials. It is advocating using less
paper in the North, not replacing paper with something else.
Presas says that NGOs are "contributing
to the relocation of paper production to other areas of the world
where environmental standards are less of a concern." She
seems to have forgotten that the pulp and paper industry has been
expanding in the global South for many years. Stora Enso is a
member of CEPI. "Were it not for labour unions at home, we
would be moving all of production capacity to countries like Brazil,"
a Stora Enso official told the Financial Times in 2005. Last year
Stora Enso sold its North American operations
to a private equity company called NewPage, which is now closing
down mills as fast as it can. Stora Enso is closing two mills
in Finland. Meanwhile, the company is expanding its operations
in Brazil, Uruguay, China and Laos. In March 2008, 900 women from
Via Campesina occupied an area of Stora Enso's eucalyptus plantations
in Brazil, in protest against the expansion of the green desert.
The Shrink campaign aims to support this and many other struggles
against industrial tree plantations in the South.
Presas says that the Shrink campaign
would become "responsible for the loss of thousands of jobs
in Europe in particular in rural areas." As CEPI's own data
shows, the pulp and paper industry is responsible for the loss
of thousands of jobs in Europe. In 1991, CEPI member countries
employed 389,300 people in the pulp and paper sector. By 2006,
this figure had shrunk by about a third, to 259,100 people. During
the same period, pulp and paper production in Europe has increased.
After talking to Humpty Dumpty for a
while, Alice quietly walked away. When Humpty Dumpty fell off
the wall, as he inevitably had to, "a heavy crash shook the
forest from end to end."
By
Chris Lang, http://chrislang.org
