FAO and WWF: birds
of a feather promote “planted forests” together
According to
the FAO, halting deforestation is neither a political nor a social
nor an environmental issue: it is just a matter of definitions.
As evidence of
the above, the FAO has just released a report (1) which proves
that we and many others have been absolutely wrong: deforestation
in Asia is not only not happening; forests have actually expanded
during the last decade! The report says: “Asia, which had
a net loss [in forest area] in the 1990s, reported a net gain
of forest in the period 2000–2010”. Hallelujah!
How did this
miracle happen? Well, in the first place it is not a miracle (it’s
a fraud) and in the second place it did not happen (it’s
a lie). As the FAO report adds, the “net gain of forest”
was “primarily due to the large-scale afforestation reported
by China”. That means that those plantations “reported
by China” -defined by FAO as “forests”- can
counter the “continued high rates of net loss in many countries
in South and Southeast Asia.”
As stated above,
it’s just a matter of definitions. According to FAO’s
“expertise”, any area covered by trees is a “forest”.
Which means that if forests are destroyed –as they certainly
have been- in Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, India, etc.-
the Asian forest area will not have changed if a similar area
has been planted with tree monocultures in another Asian country:
in this case China.
But the issue
is not restricted to Asia. FAO states that “Large-scale
planting of trees is significantly reducing the net loss of forest
area globally.” “The net change in forest area in
the period 2000–2010 is estimated at –5.2 million
hectares per year (an area about the size of Costa Rica), down
from –8.3 million hectares per year in the period 1990–2000.”
Under this fraudulent
approach, all the world’s forests can be destroyed and substituted
by monoculture tree plantations (eucalyptus, pines, acacias, oil
palm, rubber) and the “net forest area” will not have
changed. As a result, the FAO will eventually be able to announce
the good news that deforestation has been stopped!
Given the increasing
number of people and organizations challenging FAO’s unscientific
“forest” definition and the growing opposition to
large-scale monoculture tree plantations, another organization
has stepped in to provide support to both FAO and plantation companies:
the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
This move comes
as no surprise given the role played by WWF in corporate-friendly
processes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the
Roundtable on Responsible Soy, Sustainable Aquaculture and in
the certification of monoculture tree plantations under the Forest
Stewardship Council.
While it is difficult
to see how the wildlife that WWF is supposed to be protecting
– headed by the charismatic panda bear it uses as logo-
may benefit from monoculture tree plantations, the fact is that
WWF is leading and coordinating a process called the “New
Generation Plantations Project” (2, 3). Participants in
the project are well known plantation companies, including Forestal
Oriental (Finnish UPM/Kymmene subsidiary in Uruguay), Mondi (South
Africa), Portucel (Portugal), Smurfit Kappa Carton de Colombia
(Irish-Dutch company operating in Colombia), Stora Enso (Finnish-Swedish),
UPM Kymmene (Finland), as well as the Sabah Forest Department
(Malaysia), the State Forest Administration of China and the UK
Forestry Commission.
What WWF is actually
doing is to promote the expansion of tree monocultures and helping
to greenwash the long –and well documented- history of past
and present destructive activities of the companies and organizations
involved in this project. At the same time, it is assisting the
beleaguered FAO by continuing to define tree plantations as “planted
forests”, thereby weakening the growing civil society demand
for changing a definition that has so much served plantation companies
for obscuring the true and negative nature of these monocultures.
Legend has it
that the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo
Galilei muttered the phrase “Eppur si muove” meaning
“And yet it moves” after being forced to recant in
1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the Earth moves
around the Sun. In a similar vein, we hope that some serious FAO
officials and honest WWF activists will be heard muttering: “And
yet plantations are not forests”.
Sources:
(1) http://www.fao.org/forestry/static/data/fra2010/KeyFindings-en.pdf
(2) http://assets.panda.org/downloads/newgenerationplantationsreport2009.pdf
(3) http://www.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/forestry/sustainable_
plantations/newgenerationplantations/
