China:
The vicious circle of tree plantations, GM trees, pulp-mills and
wasteful paper consumption
China’s growing pulp and paper market is being the world's fastest.
Although per capita paper consumption is less than ten per cent
of the amount consumed in the US, China accounts for 14 per cent
of global paper consumption. Jaakko Pöyry has estimated that paper
consumption in China would increase at 4.4 per cent a year between
2000 and 2015. Much of that “consumption” is used in packaging of
goods for export, which means that real per capita paper consumption
in China is actually much lower.
Such growth has its toll: under the advice and the money of the
World Bank, a large-scale pulp and paper polluting industry that
consumes vast amounts of water, employs few people and relies on
vast areas of monoculture plantations to supply its raw materials
has developed. The modern industry is replacing the old pulp and
paper industry which -though polluting- had a number of positive
aspects: it operated on a small-scale, used non-wood raw material
like residues from rice and wheat crops, employed large numbers
of people and supported millions of farmers for whom the sale of
wheat straw to local paper mills was an important source of income.
(See WRM Bulletin Nº 83).
Bad news for the weak, good profits for consulting firms, machinery
suppliers and paper companies that make up the global pulp and paper
industry: Finnish-Swedish paper giant Stora Enso announced that
it would increase the capacity of its Suzhou mill from 160,000 to
240,000 tons a year; Stora Enso has eucalyptus plantations in Guangxi
province in south China; Finland's UPM Kymmene's Changshu mill started
operations in 1999 and today produces 800,000 tons of paper a year,
with pulp imported from Indonesia; Indonesia's Asia Pulp and Paper
has plans to build a 600,000 tons pulp and paper mill in Qinzhou,
Guangxi province, fed on the company's eucalyptus plantations in
south China; APP aims to establish 600,000 hectares of plantations
in China; Japan's largest paper company, Oji Paper, plans to establish
a total of 200,000 hectares of fast-growing tree plantations in
China.
The increase in pulp and paper capacity leads to more industrial
scale tree plantations that result in a large number of documented
environmental and social impacts. Their aim is consumption and for
the industry to be profitable, artificial consumption needs are
created for “vital” paper stuff such as bags, brochures, business
cards, catalogues, cellulose sponges, cigarette inner liner, cigarette
wrappers, clothing tags, cosmetic and luxury packaging, facial tissue,
fast food bags, giftwrap, hand towels, kitchen towels, lottery tickets,
menus, pet-food bags … (as can be seen in a long list of end-use
products of the pulp and paper Sappi company at Corporate info,
http://www.sappi.com/SappiWeb/Home+Page).
The Chinese government aims at occupying between 2001 and 2015 some
6 million hectares with industrial tree plantations, apparently
to reverse decades of deforestation that have left China facing
serious environmental problems, including droughts and deadly floods.
However, the so called “reforestation plan” implies indeed monoculture
tree planting including plantations of GM trees. Chris Lang quoted
Wang Lida, Han Yifan and Hu Jianjun of the Chinese Academy of Forestry
(see WRM Bulletin Nº 35) writing: "The first step is to raise
plantations using fast-growing species such as poplar and larch".
Though initially poplar trees might be aimed at soil erosion protection
they eventually may well serve as a raw material for the pulp and
paper industry.
China
has received the help from Western funds either to plant trees and
do research on GM tress. Since 1980, the World
Bank has lent China more than US$600 million to establish tree plantations.
According to a 2006 FAO Executive summary by Nicholas Wheeler,
“Worldwide, more than 210 field trials of genetically modified
(GM) trees exist in 16 countries” but “only China has reported the
commercial release of GM trees (ca 1.4 million plants on 300–500
ha in 2002).”(1)
In the late 1990s, the first field trials for GM trees were carried
out on the headwaters of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers and Xinjiang
province in the arid north-west. In 2002, China's State Forestry
Administration authorised the first Bt poplars for commercial cultivation.
Two GM poplar clones –Populus nigra and Populus hybrid– have been
developed and named Poplar-12 and Poplar-741. According to officials
from the Chinese Academy of Forestry, “both commercialized species
are female poplars with altered fertility”. Genetic transformations
were aimed at giving resistance to leaf-eating insects (Bt) and
modified wood properties.
According to an article of Katie Shafley, “Trees with increased
levels of BT result in the 'natural' selection of insects that are
more resistant to the BT pesticide. This, in turn, necessitates
higher pesticide levels, which can inadvertently kill non-target
species."(2) With GM trees the risk of contamination is a real
major threat, warn chief scientists from the Chinese Academy of
Forestry: Huoran Wang clearly stated in a 2004 report for the UN
Food and Agriculture Organisation that “(P)oplar trees are so widely
planted in northern China that pollen and seed dispersal can not
be prevented”, and that maintaining “isolation distances” between
GM and non-GM poplars is “almost impossible.”(3) The Nanjing Institute
of Environmental Science has already found genes from the GE poplars
in Xinjiang appearing in natural varieties.(4)
There has been quite a lot of interest in Western countries to help
China develop GM trees: the United Nations Development Project handed
out 1.8 million US dollars for a FAO-run project on GM poplar trees
which provided capacity building, technology transfer and laboratory
support; the German Federal Research Centre for Forestry and Forest
Products at Waldsieversdorf has maintained close contact with Chinese
forestry scientists working on GM trees, even hosting Chinese scientist
Hu Jianjun. The Chinese Academy of Forestry and the Hebei University
at Baoding are playing a crucial role in the development of the
Bt poplars and have carried out the research.(5)
Regulation of genetically
modified organisms in China is covered by the Biosafety Act for
GMOs in Agriculture, adopted by the State Council in May 2001. However,
no regulations specifically cover GM trees and the decision on whether
to approve the GM trees for release relies on an expert panel organised
by the State Forestry Administration. According to declarations
of Xue Dayuan of the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science,
the GMO Safety Administration Office of China's Ministry of Agriculture
has no control over GM trees because they are not classified as
crops. But the State Forestry Bureau, which oversees tree plantations,
does not have a licensing system like the one run by the ministry.(6)
"The accurate area of GM plantations cannot be assessed because
of the ease of propagation and marketing of GM trees and the difficulty
of morphologically distinguishing GM from non-GM trees," wrote
Huoran Wang in the FAO report. "A lot of materials are moved
from one nursery to another and it is difficult to trace them."
Growing wasteful paper consumption results in the huge expansion
of industrial pulpwood plantations. The rapid growth of the plantation
trees is achieved at the expense of soil, water, biodiversity and
local communities’ livelihoods. The need to increase profitability
makes higher productivity necessary, which itself leads to the release
of dangerous GM trees for feeding ever bigger pulp mills. A vicious
circle which can only end in destruction.
(1) Executive summary, Nicholas Wheeler, FAO document,
http://www.fao.org/docrep/008/ae574e/AE574E03.htm
(2) “The New Chainsaw. Genetically engineered trees are the new
threat to Canada's forests”, by Katie Shafley,
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/author/katie_shafley
(3) “The state
of genetically modified forest trees in China”, Huoran Wang - Chinese
Academy of Forestry, Beijing, FAO report,
http://www.fao.org/docrep/008/ae574e/AE574E08.htm
(4) “China's GM trees
get lost in bureaucracy”, Fred Pearce, New Scientist,
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6402-chinas-gm-trees-get-lost-in-bureaucracy.html
(5) “Cultivation of
Bt poplars in China”, GMO Safety,
http://www.gmo-safety.eu/en/wood/poplar/325.docu.html
(6) Op cit 4
